Best Travel Work Out (No Equipment) Videos: Body-Weight Youtube Work Outs for Travel
When traveling, it’s natural that your normal schedule gets thrown off. But when you’re moving from place to place and enjoying lots of great food on a trip, it’s just as important as ever to keep up an exercise routine.
Exercising first thing in the morning, six days a week, has been a long-time habit of ours. When we started to travel more, we were careful to keep working out.
Most of our morning travel work outs are not as scenic as this one at Galina Breeze
As with any successful habit, it’s essential to remove barriers and make it as easy as possible on yourself to succeed. I (Michelle) know that if I don’t have variety in my work outs, I will get bored. This means I need today’s work out to be different from yesterday’s, and I can’t stand repeating the same three exercises for half-an-hour straight. I also know that if my work outs are too overly challenging, I won’t want to keep doing them (Jedd is often the opposite, so we cycle through harder and easier work outs). Additionally, if it takes too much extra time and effort – like driving to a gym – it’s harder to get myself in motion.
Travel presents additional challenges. Unless you’re in a hotel with a gym, you probably won’t have access to equipment. Depending on the weather and culture, exercising outdoors may or may not be ideal. That means you’ll often be left with just a small space inside your room to do work outs.
For all these reasons, our winning solution has been an endless supply of work out videos. Whenever possible, we mix it up with running, long walks, biking, swimming, and hiking. But it’s the access to exercise videos from our laptop that gives us no excuse to keep going regardless of the circumstances!
What we look for in a great work out video really depends on the limitations of our location. In general, we aim for something 25 to 45 minutes long with a good mix of cardio and strength training.
Youtube Work Outs for Travelers
You can find all the youtube work out videos we mention below in one place, on our Body-Weight Work Out Play List.
You might also like: Fun Global Dance Work Out Videos
Travel Work Out No Equipment, Body-Weight (for First Floor only)
We actually book first-floor rooms whenever possible because of our exercise habit. If there’s no one underneath us, we don’t have to worry about jumping around and disturbing people! Thanks to Youtube, there’s an endless supply of work out videos to choose from. So far, these have been our favorite body-weight work outs that might be a little too noisy if you have neighbors below:
Calorie-Torching 30-Minute Cardio and Sculpting Tabata Workout
Raneir Pollard is most often seen on youtube as a comedian, and that’s why this action-packed work out is so fun. Tabata exercise involves a burst of high-energy moves with short rests in between.
Others on our Youtube Work Out Playlist that you should only do if you don’t have neighbors below you:
- No-Equipment Bodyweight Workouts from Class FitSugar
- Any of the dance work outs by Fitness Marshall
Silent, Body Weight, Low Impact Work Outs
The real challenge is finding work outs that don’t require equipment, can be done in a small space, and are low impact so you won’t disturb neighbors.
Of course, yoga and pilates can be good for this. We’ve been able to do yoga without any mats by wearing shoes if the floor is slippery and having a towel handy for poses that need some extra padding on the floor.
My favorite yoga channel on Youtube is Yoga Upload with Maris Aylward. She has playlists of her classes divided by length of time, beginner vs. advanced, and focus on a particular area (including wrist-free yoga). I like that her guidance is practical and not too woo-woo, but still very calming.
Dynamic Power Vinyasa Flow Yoga Workout for Total Body Strength – 30 Minutes
Another popular youtube yoga channel to check out is Yoga With Adrienne.
Favorite Work Out Youtube Channel of All Time (Update: Now moved to VHX)
My all-time favorite youtube work out channel actually has a series especially for “quiet” work outs that won’t disturb your neighbors. The trainer, Millionaire Hoy, built up an amazing youtube channel, and I can’t stop telling people about it. UPDATE: Millionaire Hoy switched to a subscription model and moved all his videos to VHX. We signed up right away and continue to use his work outs almost every day.
Here’s why I love it:
- The channel has over 1,000 home work outs – in other words: endless variety!
- The low-impact/quiet work out playlist alone has over 70 videos on it
- The low impact exercises are still high intensity so you really feel like you got your work out
- Most videos never repeat exercises so you don’t get bored (this is extremely rare to find even in professional work out videos)
- Videos are really expertly made – for example, he uses the picture-in-a-picture function to show you what’s up next and how to modify the moves, so there’s no time wasted on explaining the exercises. I tell you: this guys is really good at what he does.
- You can find work out playlists that suit your needs based on fitness level, duration, focus area, training type, equipment used, etc.
- There are a number of fitness challenges, where you can do a new video every day for 30 or 90 days. Try the “30 Day Beginners Home Workout Challenge for Weight Loss” to start with.
- Millionaire has a great back story about pursuing his passion and promoting fitness.
- It’s a one man show and he doesn’t stop mid-exercise to coach. You really feel like you’re working out with him, and it’s motivating to see how hard he’s pushing himself. Plus you get to give him a “fist bump” at the end!
- If you’re going somewhere with poor internet, you can download work outs to watch offline on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
We originally found Millionaire Hoy’s channel in Mexico when we were in a second-floor Airbnb room with other guests staying below us. We were so impressed with the “silent but deadly” work outs on this channel and have since explored many of the other work outs and became monthly supporters.
Millionaire Hoy: HoyPro.com
- Good for: basic fitness, including cardio and strength
- Equipment: choose videos based on what you have, plenty of travel work outs with no equipment (some use dumb bells, bands, yoga mat, pull up bar, etc.)
- Host: Millionaire Hoy
- Types of work-outs: total body, upper body, lower body, no equipment, toning & strength, pure cardio, tabata, kickboxing, abs, yoga and stretching
- No weights needed episodes: 564 work outs
- Time: 10 minutes to 60 minutes
- Pros: tons of variety, optional exercise modifications for beginners
- Cons: membership fee (but you’re supporting a great entrepreneur and his family)
Check out Millionaire Hoy’s HoyPro program here
Well, that concludes our round up of the best work out videos on Youtube for travel – whether you’re able to jump around outside or on the ground floor somewhere, or if you need a hotel room work out that won’t disturb your neighbors below. Be sure to check out our Youtube playlist of work out videos for travel. We’ll keep adding to it as we find more great videos, and we’d love for you to send us your favorites as well.
Work Outs Without Internet
For times when internet is too slow or absent (which is becoming rare these days, but definitely happened to us during Peace Corps), we have used a selection of work out video programs in electronic format.
As mentioned above, Millionaire Hoy work outs can be downloaded to your phone, tablet, or computer. This is our go to. If we think the internet might not be strong enough to stream video consistently, then we’ll download a few work outs for our travels in advance.
The one we use the most is Shaun T’s “T-25.” We’ve done these in apartments, parks, hotel gyms, and more. There are also videos from P90X, P990X – 30, and Insanity Max 30 that require minimal equipment. When we’re home and have a few weights on hand, we also add Hammer & Chisel (but really only the Chisel ones), Jillian Michael’s Ripped in 30, and George St. Pierre’s Rush Fit.
Focus T25
- Good for: basic fitness in a short amount of time, including cardio and strength
- Equipment: yoga mat, hand weights or bands (starting in the second month)
- Host: Shaun-T
- Types of work-outs:First 5 weeks (Alpha)- Cardio, Ab Intervals, Lower Focus, Speed 1.0, Total Body Circuit, Stretch; Next 5 weeks (Beta)- Core Cardio, Core Speed, Dynamic Core, Rip’t Circuit, Speed 2.0, Upper Focus; Last 4 weeks (Gamma)- Extreme Circuit, Rip’t Up, Speed 3.0, The Pyramid
- No weights needed episodes: all Alpha level and some Beta work-outs
- Time: 25 minutes + 3 minutes stretch. 14 weeks.
- Pros: short and sweet, good amount of variety, optional exercise modifications for beginners in Alpha and Beta
- Cons: stretching at the end of each work out is not adequate
In our opinion, T25 is the best fit for most travelers who want to stay in shape because it’s short and sweet, provides a good all-around work out, requires minimal equipment, and there are enough different videos so it doesn’t get old. Check out Focus T25 here
Like this post? Pin it for later and share with friends!
