Need short travel workouts (or short bodyweight workouts for anytime you’re not in your regular gym routine), but need to make them more intense so that you can get more bang for your buck? Knowing how to dial in more challenge for bodyweight moves lets you keep workouts shorter and more efficient – and thus, more realistic that you will actually do them when you’re staying at your parents’ house or in a hotel room.

These suggestions also focus on workouts that don’t include a lot of jumping. Sure, it makes a workout more intense to add in hundreds of squat jumps. But adding plyometrics (aka jumping) doesn’t automatically make a workout more effective for fat loss or strength improvements. You can get your heart rate up and your muscles burning without venturing into the kind of effort that leaves you burned out.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share with you 5 tips for increasing the intensity of bodyweight exercises, as well as giving you 3 short workouts that travel with you!

Tip #1: Slow Things Down (or Even Freeze)

We know we can change the speed of an exercise to make it faster and more powerful – i.e., by adding jumps – but did you know that you can also make an exercise more challenging by slowing it down?

Purposefully slowing down moments (i.e., doing squats in slow motion) increases the time under tension for each rep, and also gives you more control over your form and often more range of motion. It’s a smart way to add intensity without speeding things up into non-stop plyometric HIIT (which is what most workouts do, which can be silly for sustainability, and is sometimes unmotivating to do a in a hotel room).

Furthermore, instead of just slowing things down, you can freeze. Hold the bottom of a squat position or the bottom of a split squat position, or the bottom of a push-up.

This can be incredibly challenging – especially when you strategically use an isometric hold as a chaser after fast bodyweight work. For example, do 30 fast squats and then hold a squat for 30 seconds – it’s tough!

Tip #2: Focus on Single-Limb Work

Instead of doing one million squats, which use both legs, switch things up and focus more on single-leg or single-arm work. Split squats, lunges, side lunges, single leg squats, archer push-ups, bear crawls, side planks, and many other exercises put the majority of your bodyweight on one limb at a time, maximizing the challenge on balance, strength, and recovery time.

If you have done coaching with me, you know that unilateral exercises (single-limb) are more than twice as hard as bilateral exercises (both limbs). This can make a workout pack a punch in a very short amount of time.

Tip #3: Increase Range of Motion

When you don’t have weights, a smart way to make exercises more challenging is to increase the range of motion. When you deepen/increase the range of motion of an exercise, you’re using the muscles differently, and your strength improves more than if you used a smaller range of motion. Bodyweight exercises that test a large range of motion include:

• Skater squats
• Pistol squats (or very controlled step-ups/step-downs on a high surface)
• Deep push-ups

Tip #4: Take Shorter Rest Breaks

When you’re repeating sets, you can automatically make a set of exercises more challenging by reducing or eliminating rest. Use this tip mindfully, though – if you’re really doing HIIT (i.e., you’re going all-out on certain sets), you need the rest! Don’t skip it. This tip only applies if the workout is only moderately challenging and you need to add intensity.

Tip #5: Pair Up Similar Exercises

Instead of doing full-body workouts, consider really focusing workouts on one muscle group, like the quads, and really fatigue them. This means that you’ll pair up similar exercises into a circuit, so that the muscle group doesn’t get a lot of rest/recovery. For example, do squats and then split squats immediately afterward. This increases the intensity without doing the same exercise over and over and over.

Example Short Travel Workouts

To demonstrate a short workout (20 minutes or less) that uses all the tips above, here are three examples that you can try yourself:

Short Travel Workout 1 – Easier

Repeat this circuit 3x with 60-90 seconds of rest between each round.

• Slow mountain climbers – 10/side
• Split squat hold (hover knee above the ground) – 20-30 sec/side
• Side plank – 30 sec/side
• Wall sit – 45 sec

Short Travel Workout 2 – Harder

Repeat this circuit 3x with 60-90 seconds of rest between each round.

• Side plank over-arches – 10/side
• Bulgarian split squat (knee touches ground) – 10/side
• Low push-up hold – 5-10 sec
• Bodyweight squats – 30
• Squat hold (immediately after previous round of squats – 30 second hold

Short Travel Workout 3 – Extra Hard!

Repeat this circuit 3x with 60-90 seconds of rest between each round.

• Skater squats – 10/side
• Deep push-ups (chest touches ground) – 10
• Protracted plank (on hands) – 30 second hold
• Alternating Cossack squats (as low as possible) – 10/side
• Single leg wall sit – 30 sec/side

Final words

Keep your eye on the prize when you’re traveling. What is your goal for working out? To improve your strength? To improve your fitness? To lose weight? Tailor the way you plan your workouts to fit the actual goal.

For example, if your goal is weight loss, I would certainly recommend making time for workouts, but I would also suggest focusing on simply staying active – make sure you are going for walks, bike rides, hikes, etc. Maybe if you’re traveling you can’t be as attentive to nutrition as you normally would be, but any structure/effort helps with weight loss.

If your goal is improving your strength (in terms of actual exercise performance), pick a few calisthenics exercises you’d like to keep working on, like push-ups or pull-ups or handstands, and mainly focus on those. That way, if you can only exercise a few times while you’re without a gym, you’re maintaining or building your skills with specific calisthenics exercises.

Need help focusing on your true goals? Schedule a consult call, for free.