Lester Holt swore he’d never have a belly. But when the “NBC Nightly News” anchor entered his 40s, he found himself loosening his belt to accommodate his growing waistline.
“When you’re young you can eat what you want almost without consequence,” he says. “When you get older, things you never imagined would happen to you suddenly happen. It was an awakening that I needed to make an effort to eat right and exercise.”
Mr. Holt, now 62, finds exercise boring. “I know it’s not a waste of time, but I can’t be on a treadmill for an hour,” he says.
Mr. Holt will work out in his hotel room while he’s in Tokyo for the Olympics.
About 10 years ago he adopted an equipment-free high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout that he does at home or on the road in a hurry. “When it comes to exercise, you can find a million excuses, but I can always find 20 minutes in my day,” he says. “During the pandemic I didn’t even have to leave home. I exercised in my pajamas in my living room.” Mr. Holt splits his time between New York and Los Angeles but is frequently on the road reporting.
He’s preparing to cover his 10th Olympic Games. “Hearing the stories of these super-fit athletes has been extra motivating,” he says. “Watching swimming and beach volleyball always inspires me.”
He’ll begin anchoring the evening newscast from Tokyo on Thursday. Due to Covid restrictions, he won’t have access to a gym and won’t be able to exercise outside. He devised a variation of his HIIT routine for his hotel room and plans to pack a jump rope and resistance bands. “The person in the room below me probably won’t appreciate the jumping,” he says. He also bought a set of plastic dumbbells that he can fill with water.
Mr. Holt says his biggest conundrum is the time difference and choosing between exercise or sleep. “I’ll have to start my day in Tokyo at 1:30 a.m. and will only be getting four to six hours of sleep,” he says. “That might be my excuse to skip the crunches and get more shut-eye.”
Mr. Holt does plank shoulder taps as part of his HIIT workout.
Photo: Maggie Shannon for The Wall Street Journal
The Workout
Mr. Holt prefers to work out in the morning, ideally before 10 a.m. His condo in New York has a gym, but since Covid he’s gotten used to exercising in his living room. When he’s in Los Angeles he exercises at the beach. His 20-minute HIIT routine involves three sets of nine exercises. If he’s in a time crunch, he cuts it back to a seven-minute workout. No routine is ever the same.
“I keep a long list of exercises in my brain, and I’m not above stealing ideas,” he says. “If I see someone at the gym doing something cool, I try it.” He starts with 30 to 40 seconds of jumping rope or running in place with high knees to get his heart rate up. He’ll then do a core exercise. Bicycle crunches are a staple, followed by a wall sit or dips. He then repeats a set with different cardio, core and upper- or lower-body exercises.
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If he’s in Los Angeles, he likes to go to Muscle Beach to use the parallel bars to do dips and pull-ups, and he’ll sprint on the beach between lifeguard towers. “Running is not my thing,” he says. “But sprinting is a great way to get your heart rate up, and the pain only lasts a minute.”
Burpees are his least favorite exercise, but he occasionally weaves them into a workout. He prides himself on his plank-pose endurance. He held a three-minute plank on the “Today” show and says his record is nearly four minutes.
Mr. Holt recently started incorporating yoga into his routine. “Flexibility has eluded me, but now that I’ve started to stretch, I see how it can affect my posture and how I carry myself,” he says. Downward dog, child’s pose and tree pose are his go-to exercises.
The Diet
Breakfast: Yogurt with blackberries and cinnamon.
Cheat: “When I anchored ‘Weekend Today,’ it was my routine to come home and make pancakes or Belgian waffles and I drowned them in maple syrup,” he says. “Thankfully, I broke that habit and now indulge once every six weeks.”
Lunch: A grilled chicken sandwich from the newsroom commissary. “If I’m really good, I only eat half the bread,” he says.
Dinner: “My wife is a tremendous cook,” he says. “She’s a Seattle girl, so we eat a lot of salmon, often with broccoli and pasta.”
Temptations: “When I’m covering breaking news and we’re set up in a parking lot, someone always makes a run for doughnuts or candy and chips,” he says. “It’s very tempting, because when I’m tired I crave carbs.”
Sweet tooth: “It’s a constant battle,” he says. “I’m a big label reader and try to avoid sugar, but when I’m on the road, I fall off the wagon.”
Mr. Holt isn’t a big runner, so he jumps rope to get his heart rate up.
Essential Travel Gear
Jump rope
Resistance bands
Water-filled dumbbells
Playlist
A musician and former radio DJ, Mr. Holt is always listening to music. “I have eclectic taste and like everything from country to jazz,” he says. “I like to approximate the beat as I exercise.”
Mr. Holt holds plank pose on the parallel bars.
Make Your Hotel Room Your Gym
Travel is back, but many hotel gyms remain closed due to Covid precautions. You can keep to your routine by planning ahead and getting creative, says Andrew Gavigan, director of education for Aktiv Solutions, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that designed Hilton’s Five Feet to Fitness rooms.
“Push the furniture aside so you have a space big enough to do a push-up or lunge,” he says. “You can use your suitcase as a weight to do squats or a chest press, and use a desk chair or the edge of the bed to perform push-ups or dips. The key on the road is to shoot for consistency versus a hard workout.”
Vanessa Martin, a trainer and founder of New York-based SIN (Strength in Numbers) Workouts, an exercise program that encourages people to incorporate fitness into their everyday lives, shares her go-to, 24-minute hotel-room workout. Start slow and adjust reps based on your fitness level:
Hotel Room Circuit (Repeat four sets. Take a 60-second break between each set.)
Minute One:
25 jumping jacks
10 hand-release push-ups
This push-up variation prevents cheating, because you must lower all the way to the ground and raise your hands up before pushing back up.
Minute Two:
15 Sprinters for each leg
Pretend you’re a sprinter in your starting blocks with your right foot forward, left hand on the ground and right hand behind your body. Your left knee will hover just off the ground. Stand up explosively, bringing your left knee up to your chest. Your right hand will swing up to knee height as your left hand drops by your side. You can add a hop at the top for an added challenge. Repeat on the opposite side.
Minute Three:
20 sumo squats
Same as a regular squat, but with an outward turn of your feet at hips-width distance.
10 sit-ups
Minute Four:
12 thrusters with plank walk-ups
Start standing. Squat down and place your hands on either side of your feet. Hop your feet back to a high plank pose. Drop your right forearm to the ground, then your left forearm. Rise back up onto your right hand and then your left hand, finishing in high plank. Hop your feet between your hands, then stand. Repeat. Alternate each lead arm. For rep two, drop the left forearm to the ground, then the right.
Minute Five:
10 alternating reverse lunges
5 burpees
What’s your workout? Tell us at [email protected]
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