 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
|
Fitness For Travelers
By Suzanne Schlosberg with the American Council on Exercise
Your Ticket To First-Class ShapeWhat are the best exercises to do in a motel room? What are the key remedies for jet lag? How many calories are in airplane meals? Which hotel chains have the best gyms? How can you muster the motivation to work out when you'd rather crash in your room and watch HBO? Staying fit on the road can take ingenuity, resourcefulness, and an extra dose of motivation - even a new set of skills and a whole new mindset. That's where Fitness for Travelers, published by Houghton Mifflin, comes to the rescue. Written by Suzanne Schlosberg with expertise from the American Council on Exercise - America's "workout watchdog" - the book is for everyone who ever takes a trip: business travelers and vacationers, fitness novices and veterans, tourists going the four-star route or venturing around on the cheap. You'll find more than 25 workouts for any location or situation, whether you have access to a first-class hotel gym or just a staircase at Motel 6. The book offers guidance for creating your own travel workouts - cardio, strength and yoga. Plus: stretches for those times when you've been squeezed into an airline seat or stuffed in a tour bus for hours on end. Suzanne also recommends nifty gadgets to pack in your suitcase and resources for finding gyms, running routes and pools around the world. Staying fit on the road is all about improvising and infusing your workout with energy, adventure and fun. Fitness for Travelers shows you just how to do this. It is truly the ultimate traveling companion! From Chapter 12The Last Resort: Strength Training Without Equipment
The workouts in this chapter were designed by Los Angeles trainer Ken Alan, who is well acquainted with the benefits - and potential hazards - of strength training in a hotel room. Once, while on business in Cleveland, Alan was performing an isometric leg press in his hotel closet, with his back firmly against one wall and his feet pressed up against the other. When he pushed forward, his feet flew right through the drywall and his back left a dent in the wall behind him. "I thought the whole room was caving in," recalls Alan, who placed a trash bin against the hole and quietly checked out of the hotel. Rest assured that the exercises shown here won't cause any property damage. They'll simply strengthen your muscles, provided that you pay close attention to your technique and perform them very slowly. When you have no equipment, shift your focus from quantity - how much weight you can squat or how many push-ups you can do - to the quality of your movements. This workout emphasizes your postural muscles: your abdominals, lower back muscles, and glutes. These muscles are particularly important for travelers but often get neglected when there are hunks of steel to throw around. From Chapter 14Yoga You Can Take AnywhereDelayed flights, overcrowded airports, lost luggage, maniac taxi drivers, misplaced hotel reservations - travel poses no shortage of stressful situations. Throw in high-pressure business meetings and after-hours schmoozing with clients, and by the end of the day, you may be downright frazzled. You could always wind down with a martini in the lounge, but 15 minutes of yoga will probably do you even more good. Plus, you'll save the calories and the seven bucks. The six exercises in this chapter are a blend of yoga and tai chi. You may find it most relaxing to perform the exercises in the quiet of your hotel room, although you could also do this routine at your hotel fitness center. Palm Springs trainer Scott Cole, who designed this workout, has even done some of these moves on the airplane. "Other passengers ask what I'm doing, and usually I'll get someone else to do the moves with me," Cole says. "But then the flight attendant comes by with the cart and says, 'Excuse me, we're having meal service now.'" Deep breathing - from your diaphragm, not your chest - is fundamental to feeling at ease during this workout. "The term 'getting centered' means just that: Put your energy back into your core or the center of your body," Cole says. "People naturally get red-faced, feel heart palpitations, and accumulate tension in their neck and shoulders when their energy has been out of center for too long." Relaxation is just a matter of letting your energy settle down. This workout will help you relax and rejuvenate for the next meeting, the next day, a good night's sleep, a night on the town, or the plane ride home. Reviews Of Fitness For TravelersFitness for Travelers has been featured in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including USA Today, Men's Health, Money, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and U.S. News & World Report. Here is a sampling of the reviews and articles about the book. Money: Combating the negative health effects of the business traveler's sedentary, restaurant-packed lifestyle is hard enough without spending time looking for gyms and running routes in unfamiliar cities. So Suzanne Schlosberg has done the advance work in Fitness for Tavelers: The Ultimate Workout Guide for the Road, a comprehensive guide to exercising in locations around the world.The book recommends useful gadgets for hotel-room workouts, strategies for fitting exercise into a tight schedule and nutrition advice for airport eating. Ever wonder which has fewer calories, a Dunkin' Donuts jelly-filled donut or a Starbucks low-fat cranberry peach muffin? Schlosberg has the answer. (The doughnut, believe it or not.) Delta Sky: Are you a gym rat with a travel itinerary that's cramping your style? Then leave that copy of Who Moved My Cheese? at home and pack Fitness for Travelers: The Ultimate Workout Guide for the Road. Suzanne Schlosberg and the American Council on Exercise team up to cover the basics and then some, including 25 ways to work out anywhere, a list of gyms within 20 minutes of most major airports and aquatic exercise routines for those teeny-tiny hotel pools. If time is short: Read "Roadblocks: Overcoming the Top Five Travel Workout Obstacles," pages 7-18. Orlando Sentinel: If constant travel is turning your rock-hard abs to midriff mush, a new book by Shape magazine contributing editor Suzanne Schlosberg can help you battle the flab. The Ultimate Workout Guide for the Road provides frequent travelers with tips for maintaining their fitness, even when access to a gym, jogging trail or pool isn't available. It contains instructions for staying motivated, destressing and strength training without equipment. The book also features a workout log so you can keep track of your progress. Los Angeles Times: Schlosberg writes that she was inspired to develop her book after handing over her credit card to the gym at a hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, and then finding out it consisted of "a small, stuffy room with a collection of America's most disgraced infomercial exercise gadgets," including a "treadmill with a belt that did not move unless you propelled it yourself, a very scary piece of machinery that would have collapsed under the weight of Kate Moss." Although Schlosberg says that hotel gyms have improved, she confessed to me that she doesn't use them during the six weeks or more that she typically spends on the road each year. "I travel really cheap," she said. "I tend to stay at a Motel 6 and find a gym nearby." Such clubs are apt to have more extensive facilities than even well-equipped hotel gyms, which often favor machines over free weights to avoid liability issues. Some hotels may have deals that let guests use a nearby gym at no or low cost. But for Schlosberg, "it's part of the fun of the trip to see where I can find the best workout." A case in point was a cross-country bike trip she took with a group a few years back. In the wide-open spaces of west Texas, "we went for days without seeing a gym," she recalled. "So we stopped at the local high schools and worked out with the football players." On a camping trip in Alaska last year, she did pull-ups hanging off the Alaska pipeline. A Conversation With Suzanne Schlosberg, Author Of Fitness For TravelersQ: How did you get the idea to write Fitness for Travelers? A: The idea struck me while I was traveling in Morocco with a girlfriend. I'd been there for almost two weeks and had found it really tough to get in a workout. It was deathly hot, and women were expected to dress in long skirts and long sleeves - not exactly conducive to going for a jog. Plus my friend and I had been followed and harassed by local men, so outdoor exercise wasn't an inviting option. Pretty much the only time I got my heart rate near the aerobic zone was when I got into an argument with a lunatic rug salesman. Anyway, one day we walked by a hotel in Marrakesh that advertised its fitness center! I was so thrilled that I handed over my credit card without even bothering to check out the so-called gym. It turned out to be a repository for disgraced American infomercial gadgets - the ThighMaster, one of those non-motorized treadmills, and an abdominal gizmo that looked like the starship Enterprise. But there were also a couple of dumbbells and a barbell. I actually managed to get in a really satisfying workout and felt so much better afterward. It occurred to me that there are probably a lot of travelers who can use some guidance to overcome the usual workout obstacles on the road - lousy equipment, lack of motivation, time constraints, jet lag and so on. I outlined the book on the flight home to L.A. Q: Why did you collaborate with the American Council on Exercise? A: ACE was a natural. It's the world's largest organization of fitness professionals, and so many of the trainers have vast travel experience. I knew they'd come up with really creative, innovative workouts for the book. They also turned out to have some great stories. One of the trainers was interrogated by Brazilian customs agents who thought he was carrying cocaine in the rubber exercise tubes in his suitcase. Q: Fitness for Travelers is more than just a workout book - it includes entertaining tales from veteran travelers. Where did you find these sources? A: I wanted to get advice and inspiration from a wide variety of fit travelers, so first I came up with a list of professions that entailed a ton of travel: airline pilot, politician, road musician, business executive, newspaper correspondent, and so on. Then I started asking around, calling friends of friends of friends, and before long I had more material than I could use. I got some amusing stories from Al Gore's former traveling press secretary and the Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer. Probably the hardest source to find was a long-haul trucker who exercises on the road. I figured there had to be at least one fit trucker in the country, and I did find him, but only after a lot of legwork. He hauls onions out of Cleveland and does squats in the cab of his truck. Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned from researching the book? A: That the Starbucks Classic Coffee Cake contains 629 calories and 18 grams of saturated fat - an entire day's worth! Researching the nutrition chapter was very eye-opening. I think a lot of people would order differently at airport restaurants and fast-food joints if the calorie and fat information were posted at the counter. I've changed some of my own eating habits since writing the book. I was also surprised to learn how tough jumping rope can be! I got really wiped out when testing the various jump-rope workouts in the book, which were designed by a great ACE trainer. The stair-climbing workouts were a killer, too. Q: What have been your most interesting workout experiences while traveling? A: Definitely the Russian Far East. Once I got stranded there for nine days because the fog wouldn't lift. I was in this tiny town that had fallen into ruin after the collapse of the Soviet Union - there were no stores or restaurants, not even hot running water. You couldn't go for a good walk around town because you had to watch each step so carefully - there were manholes with no covers and piles of rubble everywhere. Our Russian guide - a real vodka and cigarettes guy - thought I was nuts when I asked if I could work out at the town's "rec center." It was basically a room with an arm-wrestling table, a deflated basketball, a couple of jump ropes and some really weird free weights shaped like bowling balls with handles. I had a blast. A bunch of Russian Inuit girls were also stuck there, and they kept begging me to teach them weightlifting exercises. I showed them everything I could possibly think of, until I ran out of ideas and had them doing wrist exercises. |
||||
There isn't a dumbbell or weight machine in the vicinity, and you didn't pack an exercise tube. What now? No, we do not recommend heading to the hotel bar for a set of biceps curls with a bottle of Amstel Light. You can actually get a decent strength workout right in your hotel room, by using your own body weight as resistance and working slowly against gravity. | Home | About Suzanne | Books | Articles | Copywriting | What's New | Contact |