My passion for this concept started in 2016 when I started seeing myself on the road more often than any time in my life. This timing was also converging on me approaching my 30’s. The luxury of my 20’s ability to bounce back after sloppy stretches of lack of exercise and nutrition was closing at an alarmingly accelerated pace!
My comfort zone of the local gym or home setup was now being replaced by hotel gyms. And every gym was different, for better or for worse. The most frustrating part? I had no idea what I was walking into. The pictures of the gym on the hotel website were either generic or a picture of a treadmill. Were there any free weights… maybe I see the corner of a rack, but maybe that’s just the other treadmill? A pullup bar? Any space to do some agility moves, or even good ole fashioned burpees… without making the elliptical person uncomfortable as I dripped my sweat on the back of their machine?
That’s what made me start thinking of ways that I could better introduce these nuances to fitness travelers (AKA Hotel Athletes) like me, so that they came in better prepared to make the most of their precious free time on the road.
Let me please note that I was not the business traveler going to stay a week in downtown Chicago, where all the hotels are likely to have a state of the art fitness set up. I was the dude that headed out to the middle of nowhere Iowa or Wyoming and would catch my night’s sleep at the Hampton or Holiday Inn 45 minutes down the road from my clients (miners, steel mills, paper mills, AKA the sexy stuff!). I was in a new hotel like this each of the 3-4 nights of my trip, with limited free time because of the spread out nature of my visits. So that was me, the extreme version of the problem that I wanted to solve. And even when I was attending a trade show and located in a city hotel, I still came in unprepared for the gym scene.
With that said, I’d be coming up with workouts on the fly, which aren’t always as efficient as ones that are planned out. Lucky for me, I loved that time crunch and pressure of creating an effective workout in my limited time or with my limited resources (ex. 1 treadmill gyms + 10 square feet of floor space). I wanted to share what my creativity gave me to others who may not have the same passion to create workouts on the fly in new territory. Plus, I wanted to learn from others. I didn’t want to always be forcing myself to come up with these workouts that kept up with my fitness goals. I wanted to relax sometimes at 3AM and follow someone else’s insane routine.
There are surely others that can benefit from such a community and I want to help create the means to look out for my fellow Hotel Athletes!
