Filed under
Wellness / Tried & Tested / Best Of
Tested over
6 months · 11 time zones
Prices checked
09.13.2026
Published
April 30, 2026
Best by Lauren may earn a commission when you shop through certain links. Every product here was bought with my own money or tested for at least six weeks. No brand has paid to be included, and nothing is ranked higher because it pays more.
Six months, eleven time zones, and four completely different kinds of gym — a sunrise shala in Lombok, a concrete room in Bangkok with no air conditioning, a reformer studio, and one hotel with the only stair-stepper in the city.
This is the equipment that made all four possible, and the supplements where I could actually tell the difference.
What I stopped taking
Most of it. I went into this year taking nine things and came out taking three, and I feel no different except financially.
The test I settled on: stop taking it for two weeks and see whether you notice. Almost nothing passed. Magnesium passed on the first night.
Training in a place with no gym
Three months of it came down to a resistance band, a set of stairs and the willingness to look strange in a hotel car park at seven in the morning.
The honest version: consistency in a bad gym beats a perfect programme you skip. Lombok had a concrete room and a single rusting dumbbell rack and it was one of the strongest stretches I have had.
