Hotels Begin to Focus on In-Room Fitness

This seems like a given but hotels have been for years focused on elaborate public gyms inside their hotels. But now brands like Hilton are the first to innovate around in-room fitness, capitalizing on the very large niche audience that prefer solo fitness.

With the rise of apps for solo meditation and body-weight exercises, this makes so much sense. The idea is making exercise accessible for one of the toughest times, being on-the-go or traveling. For those that travel a lot for their job, this is critical. We often make excuses for not exercising or living healthy when we’re traveling or on-the-go. In May, Hilton became one of the first hotels to offer in-room fitness with 11 pieces of workout equipment.

The workout gear includes:

1. Indoor Wattbike bicycle

2. Gym Rax

3. Training station that lets users tackle body-weight moves with TRX straps.

4. Fitness kiosk, a touch-screen display that offers more than 200 videos, including tutorials on all the equipment, cycling, high-intensity interval training and yoga classes.

Hilton’s choices came from customer feedback that they’d be willing to pay more for convenience of fitness in their room. They also took into consideration a significant study from Cornell University. This report showed that “46 percent of guests expected to work out in the fitness center during their stay, but only 22 percent actually did so.”

The rooms were built much bigger to include enough space to move around the room and store the equipment.

The partnership came about after a survey by the hotel last year found that 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

The hotel brand Westin also had jumped on the bandwagon. The brant itself conducting a significant survey last year that noted more than 70 percent of global travelers struggle to maintain their wellness routines on the road, said Sarah Lipton, the brand’s global director of marketing and management, and that 51 percent of Westin guests are likely to have gym memberships.

This proves gyms and fitness across the hotel ecosystem shouldn’t be an afterthought. With the rise of wearable tech like fitness watches and on-the-go heart monitors, this shows fitness is only going to become closer to us and convenience is half the battle of getting up off the couch each day. Enjoy your next vacation!

Watch Puppies, Rekindle Your Marriage

Men, how do you keep the passion alive in your marriage? Surprise her with roses? Moonlight walks on the beach?

Well,we have a sure-fire, backed-by-science solution for you that won't cost a dime nor get sand in your shoes.

Puppies! Pictures of puppies, to be exact, although bunnies will work, too.

A team of researchers at Florida State University has determined thatpictures of cute animals, used as an intervention focused upon changing someone's thoughts about their spouse – as opposed to an intervention that targets their behavior – improves the quality of the relationship.

“One ultimate source of our feelings about our relationships can be reduced to how we associate our partners with positive affect, and those associations can come from our partners but also from unrelated things, like puppies and bunnies,” explained lead author James K. McNulty.

Here's what McNulty's team did: They rounded up 144 married couples, all under the age of 40 and married for less than 5 years. The average age of participants was 28 years old, and around 40 percent of the couples had children. To establish a baseline, at the start of the study, the couples were asked to complete a series of measures of relationship satisfaction.

A few days later, the spouses came to the lab to complete a measure of their immediate, automatic attitudes toward their partner.

Next, every three days for six weeks, each spouse was asked to individually view a brief stream of images. The stream contained embedded pictures of their partner. Those in the test group always saw the partner’s face paired with positive stimuli, such as a puppy or the word “wonderful,” while those in the control group saw their partner’s face matched to neutral stimuli, such as a button.

Along the way the couples were asked to complete implicit measures of attitude towards their partner, every 2 weeks for 8 weeks.

McNulty's thesis proved correct: Participants who were exposed to positive images paired with their partner’s face showed more positive automatic reactions to their partner over the course of the intervention compared with those who saw neutral pairings.

“I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty said. “All the theory I reviewed on evaluative conditioning suggested it should, but existing theories of relationships, and just the idea that something so simple and unrelated to marriage could affect how people feel about their marriage, made me skeptical.”

McNulty's team was quick to clarify that they are not arguing that behavior in a relationship is irrelevant to marital satisfaction. (That is, if your spouse catches you cheating, showing him or her a picture of a cute Cocker Spaniel likely won't cut it.) But a briefintervention focused on automatic attitudes could be useful as one aspect of marriage counseling or as a resource for couples in difficult long-distance situations, such as soldiers.

And this may be the best part, right here:

“The research was actually prompted by a grant from the Department of Defense – I was asked to conceptualize and test a brief way to help married couples cope with the stress of separation and deployment,” McNulty said. “We would really like to develop a procedure that could help soldiers and other people in situations that are challenging for relationships.”

The study has been published in Psychological Science.