We often have to work out by ourselves at hotel gyms, but are we doing it correctly and safely? Ravi Mantha and Reggie Ho consult the experts for precautions to take and safe exercises to do alone
Keeping your workout regimen while on the road is important: it helps you combat jet lag, and it helps your work performance.
“Showing energy and confidence in business meetings can really make an impression and give you an edge,” says Wong Meng Weng, managing director of a technology incubator firm based in Singapore. “The main benefit of exercise is that it gives you that extra energy that often makes the difference between an outstanding meeting and a merely good one.”
All very well, but that also means a lot of time exercising by oneself in the hotel gym. Without supervision, you might be doing things wrong with the equipment and hurt yourself. According to Marc Rimmer, a NASM-certified personal fitness trainer from Fiji Fitness (www.fijifitness.com.hk), the most common part of the body that people tend to injure when exercising is the lower back. “It happens when people perform some exercises and they bend their back or don’t have very good posture. It can mess you up for a very long time,” he says.
When using machines, he continues, poor technique can cause injuries to joints and muscles. “I see many people, old and young, using the lat pulldown, and often they arch their back far too much and do it too quick.” The most dangerous thing is that there may be no warning signs physically until you have finished – you will start feeling the pain after the exercise, but by then the damage is already done.
Some fitness centres in hotels offer personal training upon request, but available slots might be limited and you don’t always necessarily know when you are free for a quick workout. However, there are many exercises one can engage in safely without supervision.
Pushups
Pushups are a safe exercise for most people, take very little time, build great upper body strength, and best of all, all you need for equipment is the floor of your hotel room! A good safety tip is to keep the correct form and a slow tempo when doing pushups. It is important to focus on these first, and not so much on the number of pushups you can do.
Start in a prone position lying on your stomach. Spread your hands shoulder-width apart, pull your shoulders back and down to avoid shrugging, and keep your back straight. Push the ground as you come up, making sure you engage the large lat muscles under your armpits. To make the exercise easier, you can keep your knees on the ground. For tempo, just make sure you lower your body slowly over 3-4 seconds at an even pace. Most people who do pushups tend to lower their bodies too fast. Slowing this down to 3-4 seconds makes the pushup harder, but your muscle strength and tone will increase all over your upper body.
Swimming
If your hotel has a pool, use it. “When you are talking about a workout that involves the whole body, that is least prone to injury, and is also a terrific antidote to jet lag, it’s hard to think of anything that comes close to swimming,” says Chetan Singh, a Singapore-based investment banker and frequent traveller.
The reason why swimming is a jet lag antidote? It’s simple: when the body gets ready for sleep, your core temperature drops significantly. Having a cold swim or a cold-water bath makes your core temperature drop and signals to the body to prepare for sleep. Even if you feel alert immediately after a swim due to your increased heart rate, a swim followed by a meal will get you to sleep quickly, and get you fresh and ready for your meeting the next day.
Swimming does not give you big muscle mass, but it is good for maintenance. “It’s general exercise for most of your body. When you’re travelling what you are looking at is maintenance, or weight management, and swimming is perfect,” says Rimmer.
The elliptical trainer
For a top-notch cardio workout, try the elliptical trainer in the gym instead of the treadmill. The elliptical trainer is probably the safest machine in the gym, because unlike running on the treadmill, it does not have the potential to cause any impact-related injuries. You can get your heart rate up either by moving faster, or simply by increasing the level of difficulty.
But here is a tip that will make your elliptical workout far more efficient. Most people in the gym simply set a comfortable pace on the trainer or the treadmill and do it for 20-45 minutes. While this is certainly better than not working out, it is very inefficient, according to the American College of Sports Medicine (www.acsm.org). Whenever your body is involved in exercise that maintains a constant heart rate, it quickly adapts to the exercise, and you stop gaining any additional improvement in your fitness. The better alternative? Interval training. This involves short bursts of high-intensity training followed by a more leisurely pace. A typical interval training workout involves moving as fast as you can on the elliptical trainer for a minute, then going easy for two minutes. Repeating this cycle 10-15 times for 30 to 45 minutes will greatly improve your endurance and cardio fitness. As you get fitter, you can reduce the rest time to a minute and a half, and then to a minute.
More expert tips
Weight-bearing exercises are an extremely important part of fitness, and many of us don’t pay enough attention to strength training. Coach Jonathan Wong at Genesis Performance Center in Singapore (www.genesisgym.com.sg) is a certified trainer in Poliquin, a method recognised globally as being among the very best in fitness training. He stresses the importance of short but challenging workouts. “Focus on individual muscle groups, and do 3-4 sets of each individual exercise with between six and eight repetitions,” says coach Jon. “The most important parts of any exercise are form and tempo. The number of repetitions you achieve is secondary.”
Coach Jon has two sets of exercises he recommends while travelling, to do on alternate days:
Day 1 – Legs
Split squats + body squats
With a dumbbell in each hand, stand up in a staggered stance, keep your chest up and take a long stride. Set up as if you are on a set of railroad tracks 20cm apart, with a foot on each rail.
Now let your hips drop down and forward, letting your knee go as far forward as possible. Make sure that your front leg “closes” completely. Your back leg should bend, and your back foot should point straight ahead rather than outwards. To return to the start position move your head and shoulders back rather than lifting your buttocks and hips up.
The tempo should be four seconds lowering and two seconds raising. Do 10-12 repetitions on each leg, then rest for 45 seconds.
Set up for a body squat with your feet shoulder-width apart and arms folded across your chest. Come down to a squatting position, then stand up. The tempo should be four seconds lowering and one second standing. Do 16 repetitions and rest for 45 seconds. To increase difficulty, hold a dumbbell with both hands keeping it close to your chest.
Day 2 – Lats and whole body
Pullups
You will need a parallel bar in the gym for the pull up. Place your palms facing away from you on the parallel bar shoulder width apart. Pull your shoulders down, and lift yourself up using your lat muscles (which are below and behind your armpits) until your chin is above the bar. Lower yourself slowly over four seconds. Try and get to 6-8 repetitions. With a one-minute rest, do three sets.
Burpies
Stand up with your arms by your side and feet 20-25cm apart. Squat down, place your arms on the floor palms down in front of you, and kick your feet back until your body is in a pushup position, then immediately kick your feet forward to their original position. Stand up to complete one burpie. The objective is to do as many burpies as you can in five minutes.
Workout safety tips
Probably the most important safety tip is to warm up properly before exercising. Warming up is all about preparing the body for exercise by engaging muscle fibres and improving blood circulation, before taking on any strenuous workout in the gym.
Many injuries are caused by a lack of awareness of the proper exercise form. For example, sit-ups can damage your lower back, and in fact these days sit-ups are not recommended at all as an exercise. Instead, do the plank, which works out the same muscles without putting excessive pressure on your lower back. To do the plank, lie on your stomach and raise yourself up on your forearms while keeping your back straight. Tighten your abs and hold the position for a minute or longer.
Whatever you do, it’s important not to overreach yourself. Treat workouts on the road more as maintenance, and recognise that you don’t want to be pushing yourself beyond a certain point without proper supervision.
Another tip from Rimmer is to make use of cyberspace. “When my clients are going away, I tend to give them some examples for advice and also tell them to use multimedia devices. There are some very good apps and videos on YouTube that give you basic knowledge.”
One of the apps you might consider is Ludusfit, which consists of 60 exercises on 10 levels, with optional video demonstrations that you can download. Once you have managed a routine within a certain time limit, you can then progress to the next one. The first three levels are free, but if you want the whole app, it costs US$1.99. With the full app, and once you have completed all the levels, you can make use of an open feature to allow the app to design new routines for you.
For a great way to get motivated, http://hundredpushups.com is a website that gives you a six-week goal to be able to do 100 consecutive pushups in a single set.
