Making The Most of The Worst Gyms
Why I use every hotel gym I can.
Hotel gyms suck. I've only been to one hotel where the gym downstairs wasn't a disappointment. It just happened to be a hotel that had an actual commercial gym on its first floor. Other than that, hotel gyms are small, hot, lacking in useful gear, poorly maintained, featuring one too many ellipticals, humid, and poorly laid out.
Add to this, that the very act of sleeping in a hotel usually means that you are off your schedule, probably tired, and wanting to do something besides spend time in this room. Which is exactly why I force myself to use them every single time.
Constraints are gifts. In my day-to-day dealings with athletes, one of the number one complaints is that they don't have the proper gear or clothing or equipment or set up to have an ideal workout. I've talked about our shrinking comfort zones before. How if the temperature is wrong or the people around you are not the ones you want or if you are not perfectly comfortable in a dozen other ways, you are unable to act.
And this is why the hotel gym is so great. It forces me out of my comfort zone. I have to build sessions based on less than ideal conditions and tools. And even though I will take pictures of the room and send them to Charlie Manganiello with some snide comment, I still value the workouts.
The standard hotel gym has several pieces of cardio equipment. These are largely useless for our purposes, but can be integrated into some pretty fun sessions, but I'll get to that in a second. Almost every hotel gym has a dumbbell rack. They tend to have weights starting at the very light end and if you're lucky you'll end up with a pair of 50 pound dumbbells. You might have a bench, and you might have some kind of cable column. Once in a while, there is a random Physio ball or a medicine ball. And thus we begin building with the tools we've got.
For hotel gym workouts, I tend to go on a clock. Thinking of recommending these same sessions to others, I want to make them a manageable, duration, and to have something that keeps you from thinking about how shitty the gym is. There are three primary formats that work well:
Exercises on the minute.
Rounds for time.
Complexes.
There’s no way you’re going to do your normal session here, so it’s fun to do some novel stuff. I sometimes even find my way to doing something that I’ll take home and implement in my normal sessions.
The key for me is to get in and out in under 30 minutes, so I build the sections to go quick.
Exercises On The Minute
I think this is a great format in any gym, but for the hotel gym it is especially useful. In this one I pick one upper body exercise and one lower body exercise. I do each for 10 minutes, doing a fixed number of reps (3-5) each minute for the ten minutes. I don’t alternate. I just do all ten sets of the lower body followed by all ten sets of the upper. ~22 minutes total. Good combos can include:
Walking Lunges x3+3 | Decline Push-Ups (feet on a bench or chair) x5
Step-Ups x3+3 | Pull-Ups x3
DB Front Squat x5 | Overhead Press x5
The dumbbell availability is always an issue, and if necessary you can do offset loads (a 40# in one hand, a 30# in the other, for example). The main thing here is to make sure the loads are high enough that you can’t do more than about 10-15 seconds worth of work. If it’s too light, this session feels a bit silly.
Rounds For Time
In this session, I’ll usually stick to the same 10 minute clock and do two rounds, or go for 20 minutes and just do one long circuit. The idea here is to do 3-4 exercises at 5-10 rep intensity as a circuit. I’m not trying to “leave it all” on the hotel gym floor here, so I rest as needed and try to hold my focus on keeping the individual exercises hard. In these, I’ll usually go LEG - UPPER BODY - LEG - UPPER BODY. If I do a fifth exercise, it’s usually a core exercise.
Ten minute rounds go pretty quick, so three exercises feel more manageable. And, God forbid there is someone else in the tiny room with you, sticking to three will make you seem less of a crazy person.
10 minutes of:
Back Lunge x8+8 | Offset Push-Up x4+4 | Step-Up x8+8
10 minutes of:
Pull-Up x8 | Long Push Press x8 | Hanging Leg Raises x8
A longer circuit might look like this:
20 minutes of:
Pull-Up x8 | Back Lunge x8+8 | DB Bench Press x8 | Step-Up x8+8 | DB Floor Wiper x8+8
Complexes
The two dumbbell complex is an elegant short workout or warm-up, and yet I get a ton of resistance from athletes on implementing them. The issue is load—in a complex the idea is to do several exercises in a row with the same tool/tools, usually the same reps, without stopping. My athletes take issue with deadlifting such light weights, or trying hard on overhead presses with a weight that feels good for the other exercises. Just do the work and don’t judge the load.
For these complexes, we do a fixed number of reps to keep the brain out of it, and aim for a less-than-20-minute session. It goes something like this:
5 rounds of:
Renegade Row x5+5 | Push-Up on DBs x5 | Romanian Deadlift x5 | Curl and Press x 5 | Front Squat x5 | Rest 45 seconds
Each exercise ends in the start position for the subsequent one, and there is a bit of “flow” between them. You might not get the load right the first time, so be sure to target your weakest one and aim to load that one to a “hard but executable” weight.
I also like a progressive complex with a time limit. For example, you could do the session above, starting at one rep per exercise, rest 30 seconds, then do two, and repeat the sequence on up until you reach a 20 minute cap. You can also go up to the point you reach technical failure on any exercise.
If I haven’t been climbing or have a few days between chances to do so, I will do an old workout my friend Ken Driese and I used to do in the weight room at the University of Wyoming. I’ll do a “rack run” of 15 wrist curls per set (each hand) starting at the 5# weight, and going up the rack’s dumbbells until I get to a weight I can’t hit for 15. I’ll then switch to reverse wrist curls (palm down), and do the same. With these, I fail sooner. If I am still psyched, I’ll then go back down the rack from the weight I worked up to doing wrist curls, but this time, going to failure on each set. I finish with the reverse wrist curls again.
The goal here is not to progress in my normal training plan, but instead to keep kicking the ball down the field. I am still questing for a great hotel gym, but until the Comfort Inn starts to put TB2s in that room, I don’t think I’ll find one.