The Travel Week
Four sessions that need nothing but a floor and a doorway — two short hotel-room sessions, one full bodyweight session, one mobility day.
- GOAL
- General Fitness
- LEVEL
- Beginner
- LENGTH
- 1 week
- SESSIONS
- 4 per week
Four sessions designed for a hotel room, run entirely on bodyweight. Nothing here needs a gym, a booking or more than a two-metre square of floor. Two short hotel-room sessions bracket a longer full-body bodyweight session, and Saturday's mobility work undoes what sitting on planes and in meetings does to hips and shoulders. Walking days are built in because walking is the most reliable training you get while travelling. This is a maintenance week, not a progress week — the aim is to arrive home with your routine intact rather than to add anything.
- →Travelling for work or otherwise away from a usual gym
- →Wants to keep a routine going for a week or two without equipment
- →Has 25–40 minutes and a hotel room floor
- →Would otherwise skip the week entirely
- →Can perform push-ups with hands on the floor or elevated on a bed or chair
- →Can get down to the floor and back up unassisted
- →Has a mat or a towel, and shoes suitable for walking
Hold onto strength and routine with four equipment-free sessions, using walking to carry the aerobic load.
- MondayHotel Room SessionTwenty-five minutes. Elevate hands on the bed or desk if floor push-ups are too hard.
- TuesdayWalk 45 min — cover the ground on foot rather than by taxi
- WednesdayBodyweight Full Body — Travel SessionThe longest session of the week. Rest fully between rounds.
- ThursdayRest, or an easy walk if the day allows
- FridayHotel Room SessionSame session as Monday. Add one rep per set if Monday felt easy.
- SaturdayFull Body MobilityThirty minutes for hips, spine and shoulders. Useful the day before or after a flight.
- SundayRest, or a long easy walk
PROGRESSIONEvery session is scaled by changing leverage, not load: hands elevated for easier push-ups, feet elevated for harder. Stop each set two reps short of failure.
- →Run this same week again for as long as the travel lasts. It is a holding pattern, not a build.
- →Progress within the week by adding one repetition per set before making any movement harder.
- →Once every set reaches the top of its rep range, change leverage rather than reps: raise the feet on push-ups, move to a single-leg squat progression.
- →If a day disappears to travel or meetings, do Monday's hotel-room session whenever you next get 25 minutes. Never do two sessions on the same day.
- →Keep the walking. If everything else falls apart in a given week, 45 minutes of walking a day is the version of this plan that still works.
- →On returning to a gym, start back at 80 percent of your pre-travel loads for one week before resuming normal progression.
- →Maximum clean push-ups in one set, hands on the floor
- →Bodyweight squats completed in 60 seconds
- →Plank hold to the point where the hips drop
- →Daily step count, averaged over the week