#038 Bodyweight Program - Travel Edition

Welcome back to the 38th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

The travel season is right ahead of us, which leaves many people wondering how they can stay fit while traveling. The truth is, that you don’t need to train at all. You can also use your vacation as an opportunity to get your body some rest, and that’s totally fine and won’t “kill your gains”. But training during your vacation has one really big upside, and I’m not talking about making gains:

You are staying in your routine. Many people have a hard time getting back into their gym routine once they stop it (e.g. for vacation) and need multiple weeks to get back into it.

By keeping your routine or simply training during your vacation, you can minimize that risk.

But how to train when traveling? Sure, some hotels have good gyms or you can get a day-/week-pass at a local gym but not everybody has access to those.

Therefore, we will provide you today with a blueprint on how you can setup a bodyweight program to stay fit and in your routine when traveling.

But before we start, here is a quick outlook on the content you can expect to be delivered to your mailbox for free in the next weeks:

• July 28th: Creatine Guide

• August 4th: July Q&A

• August 11th: Building muscle - The busy professional guide

I hope you enjoy this newsletter.

The Boats & Logs Approach to Bodyweight Exercises

Bodyweight workouts are a point of many discussions. Some say that they are all you need to build muscle, while others consider them useless unless you are a beginner in the gym.

And to be fair, the answer is somewhere in the middle, but I’d tend slightly towards the “bodyweight exercises are all you need” group if I had to.

We need to put enough stress on our muscle that it creates an adaptive response to grow in order to handle the stress better the next time.

How we do that doesn’t really matter. We can use free weights, we can use machines, and we can also use bodyweight exercises.

Yes, bodyweight exercises are enough to build muscle.

Especially if you find a way to do pull-ups and use resistance bands, backpacks, or other weights, you can get way further than you could probably imagine.

But today, we try to do it with even less. Only your body weight and some minimal equipment you are guaranteed to have while traveling.

The Exercises

1. Chest/Shoulders/Triceps: 

   • Dips (between two chairs, on the edge of a bed, …)

   • Push-ups (incline, decline, wide, narrow/diamond, one leg elevated, …)

2. Back/Biceps: 

   • Superman

   • Towel Pull-ups

   • Towel Curls

3. Legs: 

   • Bulgarian Split Squats, Pistol Squats, Squats

   • Lunges

   • Glute Bridge

   • Single Leg Deadlift

4. Abs: 

   • (Reverse) crunches

   • Leg raises

   • Planks

The Program

Setting up a standardized program only using bodyweight exercises is nearly impossible. People prefer and/or need different exercises based on their experience and anatomy. Therefore, we would need to make a lot of individual plans. But instead, we created a framework that allows you to pick the exercises you like. That’s also why we have started presenting the different exercises first.

Programm structure:

• 3 sets Chest/Shoulder/Triceps exercise 1

• 3 sets Back/Biceps exercise 1

• 3 sets Legs exercise 1

• 3 sets Chest/Shoulder/Triceps exercise 2

• 3 sets Back/Biceps exercise 2

• 3 sets Legs exercise 2

• 4 sets Abs exercise

I used 3 sets per exercise as a starting point, but feel free to increase/decrease the amount of sets to fit your needs.

Take all sets to failure. If you can do any of these exercises for more than 40-50 reps per set, switch to a more challenging variation or slow down the eccentric phase of the movement. If all of this doesn’t help, check out the next section, “Going beyond”.

Going beyond

As I mentioned in the beginning, the goal of this newsletter was to provide you with a blueprint on how to train without any additional equipment (besides the towel) to prove that it is possible to stay fit while traveling.

However, with only a bit of additional equipment, we can make the workouts way more efficient. Here are a few ideas:

1. Get resistance bands. They are cheap, easily fit in your bag, and allow you to do countless exercises.

2. Find any bar to do pull-ups. If you can do pull-ups, you have an awesome way to train back and biceps.

3. Get creative: Use a backpack for squats or push-ups, a bag, or a water crate for rows. You simply need to find a way to work and exhaust your muscles.

Thank you for reading today's newsletter. If you have further questions, simply DM me on Instagram.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.