Bodyweight exercise for the business traveler

The typical business traveler is slightly to significantly overweight, bloated from overeating at the restaurant, puffy-eyed from jet lag, and shaped like a chair from spending too much time in meetings and on airplanes. The remedy for this—small, archaic hotel gyms and the mind-numbing boredom of treadmills—requires an incredible tolerance for repetitiveness. It’s a pretty bleak view, but it’s not the whole story. The business traveler has an ace in the deck: the bodyweight exercise.

We tend to overlook bodyweight exercise because it costs nothing. You don’t need a gym membership or fancy equipment to do it. You don’t even need a dedicated area; most hotel rooms have enough floor space to do a solid bodyweight workout. All you need is a little knowledge, and you take it with you.

Bodyweight exercise alters time

The other thing about modern business travel is that there is never enough time. We are constantly forced to eliminate the superfluous and achieve more with less. Who can afford a trip to the gym, time to change and shower, and then having to spend the better part of an hour session waiting for the equipment to release?

For an exercise program to realistically fit into a business traveler’s schedule, it must be able to get the job done in a very small amount of time. Bodyweight exercise can do this. At least, you can if you train in the Circular Strength Training way.

CST meets this requirement by moving the body through all 6 degrees of freedom in a single session. Most exercise systems are linear, taking the body through only two degrees of freedom. This is inefficient and can lead to overconditioning of those particular motion chains. Even “functional” fitness approaches only take the body through 3 degrees of freedom. It’s better, but it’s not enough.

CST, on the other hand, moves you through all 6 degrees of freedom in a balanced fashion:

• hectic: moving up and down
• Swinging: moving right and left
• Surgical: moving forward and backward
• Pitching: leaning back and forth
• winking: turning left and right
• Lamination: turning to the right and to the left

How does that affect your training time? It will kick your butt faster than any other bodyweight exercise method, period! You’ll finish training in a fraction of the time (usually 12-20 minutes) and the results you’ll see are far superior to any other form of exercise. That’s training the CST way.

What the heck is CST?

CST is circular strength training. Created by world-renowned flow coach Scott Sonnon and further developed by his elite coaching staff, CST is the ultimate in health, fitness and sports performance enhancement. It is unique among fitness systems in offering a complete “health first” approach to exercise.

This approach is based on the belief that health is the most important goal of training. Other systems put Function (attributes like strength, stamina, or speed) first, valuing those things above and often at the expense of health. Many people value physique first and are willing to do anything, including injecting steroids or going on crash diets, for the instant reward of a magazine cover physique.

Everything at CST is based on and leads to this health first approach. As a result, CST will get you to the Function and Physique you seek faster and keep you there longer, without compromising your health and longevity.

Beyond the burpees

Let’s take a look at a simple bodyweight exercise, one that’s a bit more sophisticated than the norm.

The traditional burpee is a linear movement: a squat, a two-legged push back, followed by a return to a standing position. Let’s take this to the side so that we can achieve a range of motion that is not normally trained. We’ll just refer to it as “Leg to Side.”

Each complete movement is punctuated by a squat. So the correct sequence (standing) is:

1) Begin by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart.

2) Squat down by sitting back and down while keeping your spine straight. Sit all the way back, as far back as you can.

3) Place your right hand on the floor in front of you for balance and slightly shift your weight to that side.

4) This will free up your left leg. Extend your left leg across your body to your right. Open your hips as wide as you can when you do this. The movement should feel buoyant, like you’re pulling and releasing a rubber band.

5) Re-center by pulling the leg back into the flat-footed squat.

6) Repeat on the opposite side.

7) Come back to your feet pressing the ground with your feet.

That’s a repeat. But I don’t want you to count the repetitions, I want you to repeat the movement for a certain amount of time.

Try doing this simple “leg to the side” exercise for 8 sets of 20/10 (20 seconds of activity followed by short 10 second rests, repeated 8 times). At first you will feel like you want to glide through the movements, to spread out your reps. don’t. Your strategy should be to keep the fastest pace you can manage while maintaining good technique. You want this to be intense.

Congratulations, you have just completed a quarter of a CST bodyweight workout.

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There’s a whole world of bodyweight exercises waiting for you to explore, and they’ve come a long way since the jumping jacks and push-ups of your grandfather’s day. You can keep fit on a business trip. You can have fun while you do it. And you can do it in much less time than you imagine.

I know this from experience: as a travel writer, I am also a business traveler.