A few months ago I was on vacation in Italy and stayed at a lovely, peaceful and remotely located Hotel near Lake Garda. The Hotel didn’t have a gym but did have a lovely garden with beautiful, golf-course quality lawns. Before heading out for the day to visit the lovely surroundings of Lake Garda, I used to spend 45 minutes in the morning performing a combination of bodyweight training and elastic band exercises for a challenging but fun workout in the garden.

Your ultimate piece of portable fitness equipment is your own body. Strangely enough, people only associate weight training or resistance training when they’re holding a barbell or dumbbell in their hand. Exercises like chin-ups that require the pulling of practically one’s own bodyweight don’t seem to qualify as weight training in their mind.

Likewise, a person performing a push-up is in fact pushing the equivalent of about 60% of his own bodyweight.

A woman weighing 60kg would be pushing around 36kg, which is a considerable weight. If the same woman had to be encouraged to perform a bench press with a 20kg barbell, high chances are that she would complain about the excessive load she is being subjected to, even though should would only be pushing slightly more than half the load she was doing during the push-up.

Gymnasts are the classical example of how you can achieve a world-class body by simply using bodyweight exercises. Gymnasts sport tremendous strength in their torso, arms, shoulders and core from intensive workouts performed on the floor or hanging from the bar or gymnastic rings. Lower body strength is developed from jumping, lunging and isometric lower body exercises performed during their floor routine.

About 80% of the muscles in the body can be trained effectively with bodyweight training exercises using no equipment or props whatsoever. To reach the remaining 20% of musculature you will need some kind of an anchor point from where you can suspend yourself to perform a variation of a pulling exercise which will work your upper back muscles and elbow flexors, popularly known as biceps.

Chinning and rowing type exercises are the best options to develop these muscles. If you’re stuck in a hotel room and do not have access to any kind of anchor point from which to suspend yourself , you can use a very versatile and cost-effective piece of exercise equipment that is no bigger than your wallet.

It’s an elastic resistance band. These bands are available for just a few Euros and are available in different tensions, usually colour-coded for distinction. Simple bands come in plain band format, while more sophisticated models have purposely built grips to which multiple bands can be attached for varying degrees of tension.

Why spend hundreds, if not thousands of euros on big and bulky home gym equipment that takes up the entire space of a room, when you can perform literally hundreds of exercises using merely your bodyweight and a resistance band to achieve far superior results due to the functional fitness benefit of performing exercise in a multiplanar fashion?

1 Push-up (use a variation that is suitable for your strength level)

2 Squat (you can use

single-leg variations for added resistance)

3 Abdominal curl-up

4 Prone back extension

5 Lateral lunge

6 Burpee (you can use a step or chair to make this exercise easier, especially if you lack flexibility in your hamstrings)

7 Jumping jacks

8 Tricep dips

(you can use a step or a chair for this)

9 Elastic band row

10 Elastic band shoulder press

11 Elastic band arm curl

Richard Geres is an ACE-certified Personal Trainer

www.richardgeres.com