How Paul Saladino Helped Inspire a $1 Billiion Plan to Put Mini-Gyms in Airports

Mini-gyms might soon come to an airport in your city. If you’ve ever felt weird stretching or doing air squats between seats, or walking up the down the escalator at an airport during a layover, this may be an exciting development.

This week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, along with double-board certified MD Paul Saladino, revealed the “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” campaign at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. The three doing pullups on Terminal 2 quickly went viral, igniting public curiosity about what fitness in transit could look like.

- Advertisement -

The $1 billion initiative aims to modernize airports with upgraded children’s play areas, additional nursing pods, and dedicated movement zones “where people might get some blood flowing doing some pull-ups or some step-ups,” as Secretary Duffy said during a press conference.

We sat down with Saladino to see what he envisions it would take to get people moving in one of the most sedentary environments in the country. He told Muscle & Fitness that a brief, as much as a five-minute “micro-workout” between flights can be a meaningful lever for lowering inflammation, boosting cardiovascular health and even mental performance.

From an IG post to Federal Funding

The seed was planted a few months ago when Saladino posted on his Instagram about the lack of movement options in airports. He didn’t expect it to reach Washington. It was Sec. Duffy’s 17-year-old daughter, Paloma, who showed the post to his father, and who also joined them at the press conference and casually knocked out 13 pullups on camera.

“When Secretary Duffy called, I was kind of slack-jawed,“ he said. “I thought it was so cool that the Secretary of Transportation saw one of the pieces of content that I had done. I was really excited because it’s just something that I think a lot of people can benefit from. It’s really forward thinking on his part.”

What a Mini Airport Gym Might Look Like

If you’re picturing a full commercial gym dropped next to Gate B12, think smaller and more inclusive. The key elements of the “1.0 vision” Saladino had in mind is deliberately compact, low-risk, and free.

“What we have right now as a prototype is three to four hundred, five hundred square feet of floor space,” he says. “Part of it has a pull-up bar and a dip bar, part of it has parallettes. We want to have some step-up boxes. We want the gym to be inclusive, so I want to put a vibration plate in there, slant boards for calf raises, and kind of a movement area with yoga mats and just places for people to stretch.”

Saladino also stressed that these spaces are not being designed as full training facilities. Equipment like heavy dumbbells and kettlebells are intentionally left out to reduce injury risk and make the environment approachable for all fitness levels.

He also recognizes that getting sweaty is the last thing people at airports want to deal with, which is why keeping it short is key. “The idea is micro-workouts. My suspicion is that 80 plus percent of the use case of these gyms is workouts of 10 minutes or less,” he admits, suggesting that just four intervals of 20 seconds on an air bike will not really get you sweaty at all, yet it leaves you with great benefits for your cardiovascular system.

The Science: Why Two to Five Minutes Still Matter

For Saladino, the mini-gyms are a strike against how modern travel exacerbates the worst aspects of a sedentary lifestyle.

“Even an hour of sitting leads to vascular dysfunction,” he explains. When muscles are inactive, they stop releasing myokines, which are anti-inflammatory signaling molecules produced by contracting muscle. “After two to three hours, which is the average length of a flight, you do start to see inflammatory markers rise in humans,” he shared.

Brief breaks from sitting can counteract that faster than most people might assume. “You don’t need to do a lot,” Saladino says. “Even a little bit can interrupt the inflammatory process that happens with being sedentary.”

For example, ten to twenty step-ups on a box. A minute of calf raises on a slant board. Two to four 20-30-second sprints on an air bike. A few sets of pushups or air squats.

When we asked him about the minimum effective dose, he said it’s dependent on the intensity, but can be as little as two to three minutes. “If you go onto the echo bike and you do four sets of 30 seconds high intensity, that’s three and a half minutes of working out with your rest. And that’s meaningfully changing your physiology.”

The Objective Isn’t Weight Loss

Saladino wants people to rethink why they move in the first place.

“Most Americans think about working out to lose weight,” he says. “That’s the wrong way to think of it. You work out because it’s good for your vasculature, it stops the inflammatory process, and it benefits your brain,” he says, pointing to BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and myokines.

He argues that meaningful weight change comes more from improving food quality than trying to out-exercise airport calories. That’s why, alongside the mini-gyms, he also shared a lesser-known travel strategy. “TSA allows a dedicated third food bag on flights,” he says, suggesting to pack real food, such as fruit, protein, like his go-to Lineage beef sticks, and minimally processed options, so you’re not relying on overpriced, ultra-processed airport choices.

What Needs to Happen Next

The funding has been approved by Congress, but these mini-gyms won’t come to life unless airports step forward. That, Saladino says, is where the public, and especially the fitness community, comes in.

“What Secretary Duffy wants is for people to talk to their airports or to tag their local airport on X and tag him,” Saladino says, adding that the Department of Transportation will then work directly with interested airports on design and implementation.

Sitting for hours doesn’t have to be the default cost of modern travel. Small spaces, simple tools, and a few minutes of honest effort could turn layovers into something that supports long-term health instead of eroding it.

“Let’s refocus on this idea that being sedentary is bad for humans,” Saladino states. “We can quickly and easily correct this with small meaningful movements.”