[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

Staying Fit on the Road When the Hotel 'Gym' Is Two Dumbbells and a Sad Bike

How to stay fit while traveling when the hotel gym is a closet with two mismatched dumbbells. Bodyweight circuits, walking everywhere, and bands that pack flat.

Let me tell you about the worst hotel gym I have ever seen, because it taught me everything I know about how to stay fit while traveling. It was in a perfectly nice place in Lisbon. The “fitness center” was a converted broom closet. Two dumbbells — a 4kg and a 9kg, so not even a matched pair — one stationary bike with a seat that tilted forward like it wanted you dead, and a yoga mat that smelled of every guest since 2019.

I stood in the doorway. I laughed. And then I went back to my room and did the thing I should’ve done in the first place, which is the whole point of this article: you don’t need the gym. You barely needed it at home.

Here’s my hot take after years of this. Most hotel gyms exist for the brochure photo, not for you. Even the good ones — and a handful are genuinely good — close at weird hours, get hogged by one guy doing curls in the mirror for forty minutes, or sit a fifteen-minute elevator-shuffle from your room so you never actually go.

So I stopped trying. The floor of your room is the best gym in the building and it’s open 24 hours. Bodyweight stuff carries you further than you’d think, and you can do it in the gap between checkout and your meeting, or before the breakfast buffet shuts.

My standby is a fifteen-minute circuit I can do half-asleep. Push-ups. Air squats. A plank til my arms shake. Reverse lunges, alternating, until my legs file a complaint. Then I repeat the whole thing three times with about thirty seconds of breathing in between, and honestly? That’s plenty. You’re not training for the Olympics in a Holiday Inn. You’re keeping the engine warm.

The thing nobody tells you is that consistency on the road beats intensity. Twenty decent minutes every morning of a ten-day trip will keep you, while one heroic hotel-gym session on day two followed by a week of croissants will not. Show up small. Show up daily.

This is the big one. The single highest-return habit I have, and it costs nothing, is a stupidly simple default: walk it if it’s under about two miles.

I started doing this to save money, not for my health, I’ll be honest. Cabs and rideshares abroad add up fast, and half the time you’re sat in traffic anyway watching the meter climb. So I made a rule. Anything roughly a 30-40 minute walk, I walk. And a funny thing happened — I started seeing the actual city. The bakery on the corner you’d never spot from a car window. A square where old men play chess. The first time I did this in Mexico City I “accidentally” found my favourite taco stall of the whole trip, a guy named Tito who ran a cart near Parque México and charged 18 pesos for al pastor that ruined every other taco for me forever.

You’ll hit 12,000 steps without trying. That’s a workout most people pay a class for, and you got a city tour and a snack out of it.

But — be smart. Check the area first, walk in daylight if you don’t know the place, and keep your phone in a front pocket. Not every neighbourhood rewards wandering, and “free workout” is a bad trade for a stolen wallet.

I resisted bands for ages. They felt like the fitness equivalent of those tiny travel toothbrushes — a compromise, not a real thing. I was wrong.

A set of flat loop bands weighs maybe 150 grams and packs down to the size of a rolled pair of socks. They slide into the side pocket of your bag and you forget they’re there. And they fix the one real gap in bodyweight training, which is pulling. You can push all day with push-ups, but there’s no good way to row or pull without something to pull against. Loop a band around a door handle, or stand on it and curl, and suddenly you’ve got a back workout in a room with no equipment.

The flat ones beat the tube-and-handle kind for travel, definately — no plastic handles to snap, nothing to take up space. I bought a set of three resistance levels for about twelve quid two years ago and they’ve been to four continents. Best bit of gear-per-gram I own.

A small confession though: I lost a band once. It pinged off a door handle in Bangkok and disappeared under a wardrobe I could not move, and I spent a genuinely embarrassing ten minutes on the floor with my phone torch. So anchor them properly. Bands store a lot of energy and they do not care about your face.

You can do every circuit in the world and it won’t matter if dinner is a bin fire every night. I’m not going to tell you to skip the local food — that’s the whole reason you travel, and a trip where you eat sad salads is a trip wasted. Eat the pasta. Eat the dumplings.

My only rule is one big honest meal a day, not three. I’ll go light at breakfast (fruit, eggs, coffee), keep lunch small and walkable, and then properly enjoy dinner like a human being. And water. Carry a bottle and actually drink it, because a lot of what you read as “tired and puffy on day four” is just plain dehydration wearing a costume.

Movement most days. Walk the city. Pack the bands. Eat the good thing once a day. That’s the entire system, and it has kept me feeling like myself in maybe forty countries now, broom-closet gyms and all.

Forget the sad bike. Your trip is the workout — just say yes to the long way round.

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