Stay Fit While Traveling With These Travel Workouts

If you exercise regularly, you know that it reduces stress, increases productivity, helps you sleep and does wonders for your sense of well-being. If you travel, particularly on business, these benefits are much too valuable to give up.

Sure, your routine has been disrupted and circumstances seem to be stacked against you. The branch of your local gym is across town. The hotel gym, if it exists, is either overcrowded or closed when you need it. Or perhaps you prefer sweating in solitude, particularly after a day of dealing with people. And you’re not comfortable with running in strange streets or tackling the hotel’s dark stairwells, a substitute StairMaster under the best of circumstances.

What’s left? Your hotel room, which has everything you need for a complete workout - a padded floor, a VCR and you. Your traveling fitness program can be as simple as your favorite workout video or the latest regimen in your fitness magazine. Or, with a little planning, you can create an individual routine that complements what you do at home. If you must have props, there are plenty of packable ones - plastic barbells that gain weight when filled with water, a jump rope that folds easily and can burn 150 calories in 15 minutes, a chin-up bar that fits in a doorjamb or resistance bands that provide the resistance of a full home gym so you can do ab exercises with resistance bands and other resistance band exercises.

Recently hotels have begun to offer in-room exercise equipment such as treadmills, StairMasters and recumbent bikes. Ask about this when making your next reservation. Or take the purist’s approach, using just your arms, legs and body weight. Push-ups provide a good upper-body workout, even if you do the modified, from-the-knees version. But do them right - hands at chest height, a shoulder width apart. Point your elbows either to the side or the back, and don’t let your head or stomach sag.

For a lower-body workout, one-or-two-legged squats go a long way. To continue your quest for a flat stomach, throw in a few sets of abdominal crunches. Lie on the floor with knees bent, feet flat on the floor, navel pressed toward your spine. With one hand behind your head and the other on your stomach, press your lower back against the floor, exhale, tighten your abs and curl your head, shoulders and chest off the floor. Hold this position for a few beats, then relax and repeat.

When you’ve fine-tuned the details of your personal workout, print them out on paper, laminate the paper and place it in your suitcase on top of your clothes. When you unpack at the hotel, prop it in front of the TV.

Plan a 15-minute warm-up before you set off for a day of meetings, just to get the juices flowing. At day’s end, try for a more complete regimen in your room, followed by a swim in the hotel pool or a soak in the hot tub, your in-room Jacuzzi or a plain old bath. Sleep will come easy.

If you exercise while traveling, not only will you feel better on the road, you’ll be better prepared to pick up your regular routine when you return home.