Lesa Turnquist | Copy Co-Editor

First off, I’d like to say thanks for reading my award-winning blog. My blog got third place at the ICMAs (Iowa College Media Association). I dedicate that award to my readers. It’s all because of you guys! Am I right?

This last January I got the privilege to travel across eight different countries in Europe. In three weeks, I saw a ton of places, learned new things, and gained a new perspective on the world.

I also gained experience in exercise and traveling. Just because you’re halfway around the world doesn’t mean you abandon your workout plan completely. I found a way to workout and stay in shape without taking the whole gym with me.

A resistance band is a MUST. They’re not the ultimate piece of exercise equipment in your regular daily workout, but when you’re traveling, they can be folded down into a couple inches of space into your suitcase. I could only take a backpack and a personal item with me for this three week trip so I definitely needed something that didn’t take much room.

Not all hotels have an exercise room. Actually, in the many of the hotels that we stayed at in Europe, none of them had a fitness room, so you need to prepare for that wherever you go. I got my walking/cardio in during the day while we traveled the cities, but at night, I paired the resistance band exercises with bodyweight training to complete my workouts for the day. Bodyweight training was good, but the resistance band added a different component to my workouts, which only took about 20 minutes.

We all travel away from home—whether it’s for work, school, family, etc. We need to find a way to workout without bringing a gym with us or having to find a new one. The resistance band is a convenient tool to use for traveling, but it can also be used in your daily workouts even if you’re not traveling. There are tons of ways to use the resistance band that can easily be looked up on the Internet. Everything you read on the Internet is true, right? Okay, thanks to State Farm we all know we can’t believe everything, but there are some good ideas on there that you can use for your resistance band workouts.