The typical business traveler is mildly to significantly overweight, puffy from overeating at the restaurant, has puffy eyes from jet lag, and is chair-shaped 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 repetition. It’s a pretty grim view, but it’s not the whole story. The business traveler has an ace in the deck: 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 have to spend the better part of an hour-long session waiting for the gear 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 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 is better, but it is not enough.
CST, on the other hand, moves you through all 6 degrees of freedom in a balanced way:
- hectic: moving up and down
- Swinging: moving left and right
- Surgical: moving forward and backward
- Pitching: leaning back and forth
- winking: turning left and right
- Lamination: turning left and right
How does that affect your training time? It will kick your butt faster than any other bodyweight exercise method, period! You’ll be done training in a fraction of the time (typically 12-20 minutes) and the results you’ll see will be far superior to any other exercise modality. That’s training CST-style.
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 athletic 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 things like 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 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 double-leg push back, followed by coming back to standing. Let’s take this to the side so we can achieve a range of motion that is not normally trained. We will simply refer to it as “Leg to the side”.
Each full movement is punctuated by a squat. So the correct (standing) sequence is:
1) Start 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 down, 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 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 your leg back into the flat-footed squat.
6) Repeat on the opposite side.
7) Get back on your feet pressing the ground with your feet.
That is a repetition. But I don’t want you to count reps, I want you to repeat the movement for a set amount of time.
Try doing this simple “leg to 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 slide through the movements, to extend your reps. don’t. Your strategy should be to maintain 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.
Find more information
There’s a whole world of bodyweight exercises waiting for you to explore, and they’ve come a long way from the jumping jacks and push-ups of your grandfather’s day. You can keep fit on a business trip. You can have fun while doing it. And you can do it in much less time than you imagine.
I know from experience: As a travel writer, I am also a business traveler.