Choosing The Right Home Exercise Equipment

Simply having fitness kit in your home is a really valuable route to avoiding the most common of excuses – no time or closed gyms due to a national lockdown! You’ll find it hard to justify not having enough time or the right equipment if your spare room doubles as a makeshift gym.   

The best equipment for you will depend upon your budget and your home space but it’s also worth considering whether to opt for strength training items or cardio stations depending upon your goals and preferences. These are the key decisions to be made:  

Space Savvy 

If you don’t have a spare room to designate as your ‘gym’ then small items and portable stations that fold down are a must. Ensure you can store whatever you buy under your bed, desk or in a wardrobe. Looking for a compact, weighted item to support strength training, a pair of dumbbells or a kettlebell is an ideal solution. Our must-have, multi-purpose and space saving pieces of equipment, that are essential to any home set up, consist of resistance bands, a skipping rope and of course, a trusty yoga mat. 

Spend Wisely 

Firstly, never compromise quality to save a few pennies as it will likely prove to be a false economy when the item breaks and poorly made products could increase your risk of injury.  

Rather than cost, think value, as some items are multi-functional and so represent more bang for your buck. A fitness ball, for example, lends itself to a wide range of upper body, lower body and abdominal exercises, allowing for gains in both strength and endurance. You can source home workout products and learn more about how best to use them through your search engine, social media and your local gym team. 

Going solo 

If you were to select just one, all rounder, stationery item, it would have to be the rower. Serving as an essential tool for improving the functional capacity of your heart and lungs, the rower also simultaneously tones both the upper and lower body. Unfortunately, the best models do not fold away very easily, so you’ll ideally need some dedicated space for this. 

Hit and Myth 

High Intensity Interval Training is a time-efficient way to induce benefits normally associated with traditional endurance training. Research showed that subjects who performed 6 x 30 second sprints, 3 times a week, showed the same beneficial changes in their heart, blood vessels and muscles as another group who performed up to an hour of continuous cycling, 5 days a week. And now the good news - if you don’t have a stationary cycle, don’t worry, sprinting on the spot will produce the same fitness improvements, so all you need to buy is a stopwatch. 

I Know What I Like 

Although many people have purchased a piece of equipment with the intention of ‘getting into it’ this has often resulted in items gathering dust in the garage or being used as a clothes horse in the spare room. If you really enjoy kettlebell training then your choice is obvious, simply buy what you know you’ll use.