HOTEL ROOM CONDITIONING INSANITY

 

 

Once again, dear readers, I found myself stuck in a hotel room for a week.  I’ve previously documented my experiences with living out of a hotel room as far as nutrition goes (which, in that regard, I’ve continued to refine the process, relying on a 4” electric skillet to cook up full meals, meaning no microwave required and I can pack everything I need, AND have grassfed beef and organic free range eggs every morning for breakfast, which gives me ZERO sympathy for those of you that “don’t have time for breakfast”…but already I digress), but THIS time I found myself in an even MORE precarious position: the fitness center at this establishment opened at 0600, and I needed to be on the road BEFORE that time each day.  In addition, I was in between weeks 5 and 6 of the Deep Water Beginner program, so this was NOT a time to let myself grow soft with a week off (be on the lookout for that program review as well, wherein I detail having to run the program back to back with no rest days in order to fit this sorta stuff into my schedule).  I needed to keep my edge without access to any external resistance: what was I to do?  Go absolutely insane of course, and I’m here to share that insanity with you.  Over 7 days I came up with 7 different workouts to do each morning before heading out, all of them done fasted, first thing upon waking up (typically within 5 minutes of my alarm going off), and all of them done for 50 minutes total, some of them better than others, but all of them should have SOME sort of training effect for you. 

 

It should be noted that burpees feature VERY regularly in these workouts.  Try not to be an a-hole.  If you can’t jump and land softly, maybe cut out the jump.

Maybe leave these shoes at home for this one

 

Without further ado…

 

 

WORKOUT 1: 500 BURPEE EMOM workout

Here's the first chapter

ChongLordUno over at t-nation put the idea in my head to do 500 burpees, and I typically like to start a “week off” with a really stupid intense workout so I can spend the rest of my week healing, so this seemed like a great idea.  Stupidly simple: do 10 burpees, every minute, on the minute, for 50 minutes.  You may recognize this same strategy from my “1000 push ups” workout.  I’ll say the burpees have a MUCH more significant training effect compared to the push ups, and I definitely prefer this for a total buttkicker of a workout.  10 burpees averaged about 30 seconds of work on my end, so this was a standard 30 on/30 off workout.  Great interval.  The fatigue sneaks up on you.  You’ll think it’s a poor choice for crushing yourself early in, but once I hit the 40 minute mark I knew this was a “good bad idea”.

 

Overall, I rate this on an 8/10.  I wasn’t obliterated at the end, but solidly fatigued and spent the day feeling quite accomplished.

 

WORKOUT 2: Cumulative Upkeep

Crap: "Infernal Darkness" is a MUCH cooler name

Why yes, I AM naming this one after something from Magic the Gathering, and you’ll appreciate it just as much when you’re done.  Start out with 1 push-up, 2 burpees, and 3 squats (I did prisoner squats, with my hands behind my head, but you may prefer air squats or hindu squats: just squat).  Once that is done, add a rep to all sets (so 2 push-ups, 3 burpees, 4 squats).  Keep going for 50 minutes.

 

The “dirty tricky” to this workout is that you get up from the push-up just to get back down again for the burpee, so it’s like adding an extra burpee to everything.  Otherwise, this was genuinely something I came up with more to have a bit of a break for the previous burpee workout.  Because it’s not set to a specific interval, you can pace yourself a bit, and, in turn, there are opportunities to dog it.  This feels a bit more like LISS than high intensity work, and it just an old fashioned circuit workout with a numbering gimmick to make it a LITTLE more interesting than just doing sets on top of sets.  I find I need gimmicks, hooks, tricks and the like when it comes to bodyweight WODs.  I can’t stand the ones that are just “do sets of 10 until time runs out”.  If you’re like me, you may prefer this approach.

 

I rate this one a 5/10.  When it was over, I knew I worked out, but felt like I coulda used the time doing something else instead.  My quads were getting tender toward the end, and I got up to 21 push ups, which meant something to the effect of 230+ push ups, 250+ burpees and 270+ squats performed in 50 minutes, so that’s something at least.

 

WORKOUT 3: Tabata Everything

Oh get ready...

I know I’m going to upset a lot of purists out there that need it to be known that Tabata refers to a VERY specific protocol involving hitting a certain percentage heart rate and typically can only be done on an indoor cycle, so allow me to say I don’t care and you can bite me.  For the adults in the room, we get that “Tabata” is just how we say 20 seconds on/10 seconds off for 8 rounds.  I made this a 50 minute workout by doing 11 Tabata workouts with 30ish seconds rest in between.  5 different movements and cycled through them twice, and then on the 11^th I did a “greatest hits” workout where 4 of those 5 were repeated twice over the span of 8 rounds.

 

If that’s confusing, this is exactly what I did.

 

Tabata workout 1: Prisoner squats
Tabata workout 2: Burpees
Tabata workout 3: Thrusters with an end table in my room (gotta get creative)
Tabata workout 4: Mountain climbers
Tabata workout 5: Jumping jacks
Repeat whole circuit

Tabata workout 11:
Round 1: Squats
Round 2: Burpees
Round 3: Thrusters
Round 4: Mountain climbers
Repeat

 

A properly done Tabata workout will redline you quick, so there’s a bit of play here in choosing movements that don’t overlap significantly.  I biffed it putting the thrusters after burpees, because my shoulders felt like they were going to fall off, but otherwise there was enough recovery programmed in to be able to keep coasting through this.

 

I rate this one a 6/10.  It’s hard to get a real solid training effect doing tabata bodyweight stuff compared to adding an external load, and those thrusters proved it, as just adding that table made them the hardest part of the circuit, but I appreciated being on the clock more than just going it on my own as I did with the upkeep workout.  This kept me a bit more honest.  Still, you need to make sure you’re REALLY pushing on those 20 seconds on to get your most out of this.

 

WORKOUT 4: (r)Evolution of Man

There was a lip above the door of my bathroom in my hotel room that I could do pull-ups off of.  I used this to do my daily 50 chins, but for THIS particular workout, I started from the bathroom, bear crawled to the far corner of my room, bear crawled back, did a pull ups, and repeated.  This ended up being 62 rounds of work in 50 minutes.  Were I not in a hotel room, I’d consider more aggressive animal crawls, jumps, bounds, etc, but in order to not be a jerk I kept it at bear crawls.

 

Around the 46th round, my shoulders were toast, and my whole upper body was pretty lit up.  It’s an interesting training effect though, because I’d get to the pull up spot and FEEL awful, but as soon as the pull up was done I didn’t really feel like I had done any actual work.  Then I’d repeat, and same thing: I’d be exhausted getting to the bar, and then “too refreshed” when it was over.

 

This is a high 6/low 7, and it ultimately depends on what you want from your workouts.  This was great for just pure suffering, and it absolutely lit up my whole upperbody, but my cardiovascular system didn’t really seem to care too much about it.  A bizarre combination of LISS for the heart and lungs and high intensity for the muscles.  Also, it involves walking on your hands on hotel room carpet, which is skeezy and tore up my hands pretty decent after 62 rounds.  But hey, it was certainly different.

 

WORKOUT 5: 400 thrusters isn’t enough

However...

This one runs for 51 minutes, but whatever.  It’s an EMOM workout.  First 17 minutes, do a burpee and then 8 thrusters.  Next 17, 2 burpees and 8 thrusters.  Next 17, 3 burpees and 8 thrusters.

 

I like the skeleton of this.  I much prefer workouts where they get HARDER as time goes on rather than easier.  Far better to train the ability to come through during the tough times vs teaching the body to ease up in times of stress.  At the same time, when you start out too tough, you blow out too early, and with these intending to be 50 minute long workouts, it’s good to have those early buffers.  I realize not everyone will have something they do can thrusters with in their hotel room, but you can still steal this idea of having one unchanging movement and one gradually increasing movement.  For the first 17 minutes, I was averaging 30 seconds of work, for the next 17 it was about 38 seconds, and the final 17 was about 45 seconds.  Those short rest times at the end make themselves known.

 

This one is a high 7/10.  If I had to do it over, I’d start with 2 burpees and finish with 4.

 

 

WORKOUT 6: Boxing Match

Yeah, it feels like this

3 minute rounds of burpees with 1 minute rest, done for 12 rounds total.  At the end, do a “sudden death” round of 1 minute of unbroken burpees.

 

I did this because I wanted to recreate my wrestling/martial arts days and remember what it was like to go all out, get a short rest, and do it all over again.  It’s a fantastic training effect and hits close to home for the over the hill ex-combat sports athlete.  You’ll feel those middle rounds just like you would a fight, and when the 12^th round hits you go for a knockout, only to come back and REALLY drill it home in sudden death.

 

Comes in at an 8/10 again.  Big fan of those one and will be a regular feature in my bodyweight training. 

 

WORKOUT 7: Eat Your Vegetables

They're good for you

Do 50 burpees, rest 90 seconds, repeat for 10 total rounds.  Do as many unbroken burpees as you can each round.  I’ve named it “Eat Your Vegetables” in honor of parents that make their kids stay at the table until the vegetables get eaten, because this is SIMILAR to boxing match in that you are doing rounds of burpees with a set rest, but different enough in that you do NOT get that rest until you hit your 50 burpees.  With boxing match, it’s too easy to just dog it until the round is over, but here, the only chance you get your rest is by hitting your rep total.  And if you want this done in 50 minutes, you gotta move fast.  The first round took me right around 3:00, which is how I settled in on 90 second rests: half as long as it took to get it done.  Final round took 4:11, so this ran a LITTLE longer than 50 minutes, but with it being my last day I was willing to let that happen.

 

9/10 on this one.  Definitely the “gold” of the group.  I got to redline every round, but recovered enough that I could do it all over again.  Unbroken burpees are just a different animal vs leisurely paced ones, and going for a high number just works magic with the heart and lungs.  Another way to get to 500, and between this and the EMOM, this worked me over way more.

 

 

 

So there you have it folks: 7 unique hotel room workouts you can run if you find yourself trapped.  Some are going to floor you and some are going to let you recover from those workouts.  Use them, rotate them, steal, chop them up, or throw them away: either way, I came back stronger than I left.