Set a Floor

Hey {{first name | reader}},

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week 43.

I got back from three days in Cambridge on Friday. On Wednesday I leave for mandolin camp in New Mexico. Then I’m home for three days, in New York for my twin nieces’ birthday, home for ten days, back to Cambridge, and back to New York for Thanksgiving.

I’m also still recovering from a sprained ankle, and I came back from music camp only two weeks ago.

My autumn workout routine is a shambles.

The first step was accepting that I am not going to train the way I do at home.

The second was deciding what I can do.

In Cambridge, I’ve started staying at a hotel that’s a longer walk from my meetings but has a real gym. In New Mexico, there are excellent hikes, provided I get up a little earlier and treat the ankle with respect. In New York, I can train as a guest at my sister’s gym and take long walks with my nephew and nieces.

None of that is a program.

It’s a floor.

When I know a stretch of travel is coming, I stop worrying about everything I’m going to miss and decide what I refuse to give up.

For me, that means two full-body strength sessions a week.

That number isn’t entirely arbitrary.

In 2021, researchers including a team from the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine reviewed what happens when people dramatically reduce their training.¹

The results were surprisingly encouraging.

In younger adults, strength and muscle size could be maintained for as long as 32 weeks with just one strength session a week and one set per exercise. Endurance held for up to 15 weeks with two sessions a week—or with workouts shortened to as little as 13 to 26 minutes.

The evidence in older adults was thinner, but maintaining muscle appeared to require a bit more: as many as two sessions a week and two or three sets per exercise.

There was one important catch.

Intensity had to stay up.

You could cut how often you trained. You could cut how long you trained. You could slash the number of sets.

But the work you kept doing still had to count.

As a woman of a certain age, I am not claiming that science has pinpointed precisely two sessions a week as the magic number for me. It has not. I’m simply old enough—and invested enough in keeping my muscle—that I would rather build my floor a little higher.

So: two.

The Cambridge hotel gym had a squat rack. Readers with long memories will understand the significance of this.²

I got in one proper full-body session: squats, presses, rows, enough weight that the sets required my attention.

That session was worth far more to me than a week of dutiful but half-hearted hotel-room flailing.

Everything else was movement already built into the trip.

I take the hotel with the longer walk. I take the stairs. I get to the airport early and walk laps of the terminal instead of immediately installing myself in the lounge.³

None of it replaces lifting.

None of it has to.

Running and burpees used to be my default travel workouts. I loved exploring a new city—or rediscovering an old one—on an early-morning run, then knocking out a few sets of burpees back at the hotel.

For the next few trips, those are off the menu.

My mandate is to protect the ankle: no improvised jumping, no running, and absolutely no “making up” a missed workout by doubling the next one.

That last rule may be the hardest.

Missing a workout costs very little.

Turning a healing ankle into another three months of injury because I got ambitious in a Marriott costs quite a lot.

Question: What if the hotel gym is terrible?

Answer: Lower your standards for the gym, not for the effort.

You do not need your usual equipment to maintain strength for a week or two. You need a handful of movements you can make challenging.

If the dumbbells only go to 40 pounds, do Bulgarian split squats instead of regular squats. Do single-leg Romanian deadlifts instead of deadlifts. Slow the lowering portion of the lift. Add a pause. Use one arm or one leg at a time.

For upper body, dumbbell presses, push-ups, rows and pull-ups will cover quite a lot of territory.

The goal is not to recreate your home program in miniature.

It is to find four or five things that are hard enough to count, do them, and go enjoy wherever you are.

And if the hotel gym contains nothing but a treadmill and two pink dumbbells?

Take a walk.

One lousy gym will not erase your strength.

Myth: If I can’t follow my full program, it isn’t worth training.

Reality: Your body does not require administrative consistency.

A musician once told me that every day you practice, you get a little better, so even a short practice is worth doing.⁴

Exercise isn’t exactly the same—the physiological adaptations are different—but the underlying lesson is useful: short does not mean pointless.

A recent systematic review and meta-analysis looked at “exercise snacks”: structured bouts of exercise lasting five minutes or less, performed multiple times a day. In previously inactive adults, those tiny bouts improved cardiorespiratory fitness. In older adults, there was also some evidence of improved muscular endurance, although the evidence there was much less certain.

They did not reliably improve muscular strength.

Which is actually useful to know.

A brisk ten-minute walk and five minutes of bodyweight work are not substitutes for heavy squats if your goal is to keep your squat.

But they are also not nothing.

This is where fitness culture gets strangely binary. Either you completed the scheduled 57-minute workout with the correct accessories and rest periods, or apparently the day is a wash.

Nonsense.

Use the tool that fits the job.

Lift enough to maintain strength.

Walk because walking is good for you.

Do five minutes when five minutes is what you have.

And stop asking every small workout to impersonate a large one.

A short workout isn’t a broken long workout. It’s a different tool.

Airport food comes in two varieties: a nineteen-dollar wrap and a pastry the size of a throw pillow.

So on travel days, I bring lunch.

The important logistical detail: do not assemble this six hours in advance unless you enjoy damp crispbread.

Pack the crispbread separately. Put the turkey, cheese and pickles in a small container or reusable bag, with mustard in another tiny container. Keep the perishables cold with an ice pack until you eat them.

Assemble at the gate.

It takes thirty seconds and produces an actual lunch rather than whatever $19 object is being sold beside Gate 42.

Macadamias are for the inevitable delay.⁵

Alex Hutchinson, Outside: “What’s the Minimum Dose of Training to Stay Fit?”

Hutchinson writes clearly about the 2021 review cited above, and—more importantly—he’s honest about its limitations.

Much of the endurance evidence comes from a small number of older studies. Maintaining VO2 max is not the same thing as maintaining the ability to race a marathon. And these studies are about finding the minimum, not the optimal amount of exercise.

Those distinctions matter.

His own rule during patchy stretches is to preserve one hard tempo run a week.

Mine is two strength sessions.

Yours may be something else entirely.

That’s the useful question the article leaves you with:

What is the smallest amount of training you can reliably protect?

Five-minute read. Worth it.

Write down your floor.

Before your next disrupted week—travel, a work crunch, Thanksgiving, somebody getting sick, life being life—decide in advance what the minimum looks like.

Not your ideal week.

Not your “if everything goes perfectly and nobody needs anything from me” week.

The floor.

Mine for this autumn:

Two full-body strength sessions a week.

Each gets a squat or split squat, a push, a pull and a hinge, with two or three challenging sets.

Then I walk wherever the trip lets me.

That’s it.

And here’s the important part: try your floor once before you need it.

Do one stripped-down session this week, even if everything is perfectly normal. Figure out which exercises work, how long it takes and what you can eliminate without turning the whole thing into interpretive dance.

Because a floor is only useful if it’s already there when you fall.

Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}

P.S. Five Cambridge hotels in, I have located one squat rack. December bookings remain under review.