Choosing the Best Professional Gym Bag to Take to Work

For anyone working in a professional setting, making time for the gym is a difficult but important part of a busy day. Finding a gym bag that can effortlessly go between the office and the gym and not look out of place in the process is a surprisingly difficult task.

On one hand there’s the professional equipment, a laptop, cords, cards, and documents to keep track of. Then there’s a pair of shoes, sweaty clothes, toiletries, and miscellaneous gym equipment. All this needs to play nicely in a single bag that’s going to be okay to carry in a professional office and can still hold its own on a wet locker room floor.

There’s a lot that goes into choosing the best professional gym bag to take to work. We’re going to lay out what we believe are the key features to an amazing bag, using Stuart & Lau’s The Regimen as our benchmark.

Nail the formality

Know your work environment and look to management. They’re a good yardstick for the level of formality that is expected in your office. Avoid cheap sports bags with glaring neon colors. And as a general rule: keep your gym bag as subdued in color as possible (black is by far the best option). For one, it won’t detract from your formal attire. And two, it doesn’t show dirt.

As far as aesthetic, aim for clean and classic. No dangling bits of strap everywhere. No huge logos. Picture a suit: fine details, fine materials.

Hygiene at high standards

What’s the quickest way to kill our workout buzz after we’ve left the gym? Carrying around a gym bag that is wet, smelly, or some unfortunate combination of both. To prevent this from happening a good gym bag should have three key features.

Waterproof bottom

Gyms and their locker rooms are wet places, thanks to showers and their runoff coating shoes and feet and floors. And all that water then tends to sludge together with the dirt and mud on the soles of sneakers, creating a floor environment most tiptoe over.

So a waterproof base is something that comes in handy, and keeps your bag and its contents crisp and dry.

Hanger-friendly

In addition, a bag that can rise up from the sludge and into our locker is a plus. It also allows us to access our gear at shoulder level and air out its contents.

The Regimen touts a swivel hook to hang the bag up, which keeps it ventilated and out of a pile in the bottom of a locker.

Cleans easily

The third is fabric that can be easily wiped down. The waterproof bottom, sure. But also the main exterior fabric. It saddles up to wet, dirty and smelly clothes on the daily, so it needs to clean easily and not hold onto odor.

Stuart & Lau use waterproof DuraLite™ fabric which keeps the Regimen looking sleek while still being easily cleaned.

Separate and conquer

Having a separate compartment for gym shoes keeps their bulk, smell, and dirt from infringing on the rest of our gear. So let’s pencil this in as a ‘must-have’.

A ‘nice to have’ is a great water bottle pocket. A water bottle pocket just makes our life easier by not having to scavenge through the entire bag to dig out a bottle or protein shaker from the bottom. And if your bottle of choice is a little leak-prone, then separating it from your dry tees is again a smart idea.

Organize, always

The next thing we look for when taking a gym bag to work is a bag that is well organized. When we’re rushing to our first meeting after the gym, the last thing we want is to be pulling out gym socks with our laptop.

The Regimen handles this by having two sections on either side of the bag to keep the professional carry separate from the workout carry. These pockets are decked out with a padded laptop sleeve, phone pocket with microfiber lining, internal and external water bottle pockets, and plenty of space for cards and cords.

Adapt to your needs

Finally, because we all skip leg days at the gym we appreciate having a bag that can shrink or grow depending on how much gym gear we are carrying on a given day.

For the Regimen this means being constructed such that its compartments open and close like an accordion to accommodate the day’s carry. And when it’s empty, it fully collapses – a nice touch when storing it at home.

As far as we’re concerned, the Regimen by Stuart & Lau is one of the best gym bags to take to work on the market. It’s got features we love and a design that is sleek and sharp which makes it a far cry from most other gym bags. Will the Regimen actually get you in shape? No, but if it makes getting to the gym and back that much easier, that’s worth as much to us as any expensive gym membership.

This article was sponsored by Stuart and Lau