Episode Details

Hotel training is filler training. Its job is to keep the practice intact when the conditions won't support progressive overload — not to break records, not to test anything, and not to run the program you'd run at home.

Last week in Punta Mita the resort had a genuinely good gym — squat racks, barbells, a cable machine, dumbbells into the hundreds. On the second day they closed it and moved a few pieces of kit into a carpeted, windowless boardroom. This is the framework I've used across fifteen years of training while traveling, and then the five sessions I actually ran that week, including a beach ladder with no equipment at all.

THE FIVE RULES

1. Don't plan anything until you're standing in the room. The warm-up is reconnaissance — the inventory takes ninety seconds.

2. Never plan on going hard. Plan on showing up, then let the room and the body vote.

3. Three days max in a typical hotel gym. Then find a local gym or get outside.

4. Keep a short list of structures in your head so the only thing you invent on the spot is the movement and the time domain.

5. Constraint is a creative tool, not a restriction. Fewer options force better workarounds.

THE STRUCTURES

Ladders · Intervals · EMOM · AMRAPs · Complexes · Chippers · Rounds for time with a cardio anchor

THE SESSIONS

1. Landing session — 10-20-30-40-50: row cals, run cals, lunges, air squats. ~32 min.

2. Pull day — heavy lat pulldown to a max set of 10, 10-8-6-4-2, single-arm cable row, ENG off an incline bench, landmine press.

3. 60-minute alternating EMOM — rower, step-ups, run, lunges, KB swings, burpees.

4. Beach ladder — 3 to 30 by threes: lunges, squats, push-ups, with 400/300/200/100m runs in sand. ~100°F.

5. IWT — 3 rounds of 10 DB snatches @ 24kg into a 2-min run; 3 rounds of 10 DB deadlifts @ 2x90lb into a 2-min row. Finished on death by burpee broad jump.

Five sessions out of six days. Two in a real gym, one in a room that used to be a gym, one on a beach. The numbers were down. That's the correct outcome.

COMPANION ARTICLE

[Hotel Training — the full written framework] → https://www.weareheavymeta.com/articles/hotel-training

THE SPACE PROGRAM

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