The travel switch
When you start a session in BANKED you choose Home or Travel. Travel ignores everything you own at home and builds the session from bodyweight ladders only, so nothing prescribed needs anything the room does not have. Same A/B alternation, same progress log. Your goblet squat weight is waiting for you at home, unchanged.
Session A, hotel room
Session A · travel · 20 minutes
- Pause squat · 2 × 10–15
- Push-up · 2 × 8–15 (paired with the squat)
- Towel door row · 2 × 8–15
- Plank · 1 × 30–60 seconds
Two minutes of marching, arm circles and ten squats first. Rest 45 seconds. For the row: a towel looped round a closed door handle, lean back, pull your chest to your hands.
Session A · travel · 30 minutes
- Pause squat · 3 × 10–15
- Push-up · 3 × 8–15 (paired)
- Towel door row · 3 × 8–15
- Single-leg glute bridge · 2 × 8–15 a side (paired with the row)
- Plank · 2 × 30–60 seconds
Three minutes of warm-up. Rest 60 seconds. Levels shown are for someone with some experience; new starters get incline push-ups off the bed and glute bridges, experienced people get slow-lowering push-ups and hamstring walkouts.
Session B, hotel room
Session B · travel · 20 minutes
- Single-leg glute bridge · 2 × 8–15 a side
- Towel door row · 2 × 8–15 (no bar, so the vertical pull falls back to a horizontal one; paired with the bridge)
- Pike push-up · 2 × 6–12
- Plank · 1 × 30–60 seconds
Pike push-up: hips high, hands wide, head toward the floor between your hands. It is the shoulder press of rooms without dumbbells.
Session B · travel · 30 minutes
- Single-leg glute bridge · 3 × 8–15 a side
- Towel door row · 3 × 8–15 (paired)
- Pike push-up · 3 × 6–12
- Reverse lunge · 2 × 8–12 a side (paired with the pike push-up)
- Side plank · 2 × 20–45 seconds a side
If the room has a sturdy desk, the table inverted row is a harder pull than the towel row. BANKED offers it when your ladder level reaches it.
What to pack
| Item | Needed? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing | Yes | Every travel session works with the room, a door and a towel |
| A resistance band | Optional | Packs flat, weighs nothing, gives you band rows and pulldowns if you want a real vertical pull. Tick “bands” at home to see them |
| Trainers | Optional | Squats and lunges are fine barefoot on carpet |
| A hotel gym | Optional | See below. Often more hassle than the room |
Hotel gym or hotel room?
Gym or room
- The hotel says it has a gym.
- It has dumbbells you can actually see
- Choose Home in BANKED if the dumbbells match your home kit list; you get the loaded session and the progress log continues. Otherwise Travel and the room session, no loss.
- It is two treadmills and a mat
- Choose Travel. Do the session in the room, where nobody is waiting for the mat.
- It is on the 14th floor and opens at 7
- Choose Travel. The room is here and open now. Twenty minutes before the shower is a banked session; a plan involving lifts and opening hours is a plan to skip.
- It has dumbbells you can actually see
The time-zone rule
The week is Monday to Sunday where you are. Do not think harder than that. If a flight makes a day vanish, the week has other days. If it makes a day appear twice, you do not owe anyone a session for it. Two in the week, wherever the week happened, and it is banked.
Why this matters more than it seems
- A travel week that banks keeps the weights at home exactly where they were, because nothing was lost.
- A travel week that is skipped “because I’m travelling” becomes a fortnight, because the return week starts with guilt.
- Twenty minutes in a hotel room is not a compromise session. It is Session A. It counts in full, and BANKED says so.
Fair questions
- Won’t I lose strength doing bodyweight for a week?
- Not in a week, and not in two. The patterns are still trained and the sets are still hard at the right rung. Your home weights are unchanged when you get back.
- Does BANKED need a connection in the hotel?
- No. The session is generated on your phone and works offline. Log the sets; they sync when you are back on Wi-Fi.
- What if I travel most weeks?
- Then Travel is your main mode and that is fine. The ladders progress on bodyweight for months. If you want loading, a band in the bag is the cheapest upgrade; heavier dumbbells at home are for the weeks you are there.