Some of you may have noticed an increase in The Fitness Camp's relative intensity this month. Some of you may have also noticed there be kettlebells about. These are not mutually exclusive events. The Fitness Camp is evolving. For three years The Fitness Camp has operated with a general (though fairly demanding) warm-up followed by a few minutes of blissful relaxation before the workout fun begins. For those of you who enjoy the current format, fear not. My goal is to evolve.

As time has passed I've learned more about the capabilities of those in camp, as well as my own. I think many of us, myself included, hit plateaus despite the variety offered at The Fitness Camp. And I think, based on a lot of research coming out regarding kettlebells and interval training and the bang for the buck factor of each, that there is a "sweet spot" somewhere in there with the combination of things such as high intensity interval training, the Tabata protocol (20/10) and kettlebells. At the moment, I'm searching for that sweet spot.

Throughout the course of a year, nearly every client at The Fitness Camp goes on vacation or travels for business, sometimes for a week or more. Too often, it’s in the midst of an eight-week workout cycle. Facilities at the destination are unknown or nonexistent, and time is minimal. Under these conditions, how can a traveler be assured of maintaining fitness or, in some cases, actually improving fitness during a vacation with no equipment and little time?

High Intensity Interval Training

Theories and applications of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) can be found across the web and in fitness literature. The Fitness Camp’s application of HIIT is frequent, varied and progressive. In a future article I will cover HIIT theory and how it is implemented at The Fitness Camp. For now, I will focus on the advantage of HIIT in a travel setting: HIIT facilitates maximum results over minimal time.

The Fitness Camp’s favored HIIT protocol for a brief 1-2 week period is the Tabata interval. This interval calls for 20 seconds of maximal effort on the prescribed exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest. The 20/10 interval is repeated  until the exercise sequence is completed. Click here to read about the research behind Izumi Tabata’s interval protocol. In the case of The Fitness Camp’s hotel room workouts, sessions will last a minimum of four minutes to a maximum of 20 minutes.

The following one-week hotel room workout sequence takes advantage of Tabata’s research and the results it delivers, as well as a few other intervals, building one upon the other. Workout frequency is four days per week. All exercises can be done with no equipment.

When Nike—or one of the other shoe companies—first invented the “cross trainer” shoe, it sparked awareness in most of us that there were types of exercise beyond lifting weights and running. There was a sudden rush of weightlifters to the exercise bikes and aerobics classes, and a dramatic surge of beyond-aerobics group fitness classes offered at gyms around the country. In general, this increase in variety was good. Like many things, there is a trickle-down effect when it comes to exercise. Someone comes up with something new, it finds a small following among elite trainers and athletes, and gradually—if it’s effective (or appears to be)—it works its way down to the rest of us, until we’re all attending a fitness kickboxing class. With fitness, the cream falls.

Cross training is a necessity for most competitive athletes. Without a solid fitness base, it is impossible to effectively specialize for a sport. For example, let’s say you want to play soccer, but you’ve never seen a game. All you know is that you have to be able to dribble the ball with your foot, and kick it into a goal. You become the greatest dribbler and shooter who has ever dribbled and shot, and you get a spot on the team. It’s time for your first game, and suddenly it’s time to run. Defend. Cut. You need to be agile. You need to be quick. You need superior muscular endurance and cardiovascular fitness. You need powerful bursts of speed to break from defenders. Yet you possess none of these things, and within minutes your exceptional dribbling and shooting skills are worthless in the face of physical fatigue. You collapse on the bench and, as you watch the game from the sidelines, the necessity of a fitness base hits you with the force of a corner kick to the forehead.

As true as this is for soccer, it’s just as true for basketball, football, baseball, softball and tennis. Any sport. And for life. So what’s the best way to achieve this fitness base?

Ask ten people the best way to get in shape, and you’ll get ten different answers. Sometimes, this is because the research is unclear or misunderstood, or perhaps your fitness professional is intent upon applying a poorly-developed one-size-fits-all mentality. However, despite the best or worst of intentions, there are four elements of fitness necessary and beneficial to the vast majority of exercisers. These four elements are:

1. Intensity

2. Variety

3. Consistency

4. Maintainability

Before I address these four elements and how they apply to someone wanting to get fit or maintain fitness, I’ll describe fitness the way I see it:

Fitness is a combination of strength, speed, agility, reactive capability, endurance, coordination, flexibility and adaptability, and the ability to effectively apply these individual elements in concert to efficiently perform daily tasks, simple and complex, athletic and non-athletic. True fitness is achieved by subjecting the body to physical stresses (i.e. exercise) of the same magnitude faced by our distant ancestors, when survival was an everyday challenge. Fitness requires proper nutrition—which is far simpler than most believe—and adequate rest. By forcing the body to adapt to physical stress, and guiding the adaptive results through nutrition and exercise variety, it is possible for nearly everyone to achieve a balance of strength, speed, agility, reactive capability, endurance, coordination, flexibility and adaptability. With this balance, attained through a training program based on regular, whole-body movements analogous to everyday outside-the-gym activities, comes the ability to apply the resulting overall fitness to the rigors of daily life.