Home Fitness
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- How much space do you have available?
- What are you trying to accomplish with your training? Are you looking to build strength, weight train, perform cardio, do ab exercises?
- What’s your budget? There is a pretty big range price-wise when it comes to home fitness exercise equipment. And buyer beware. You definitely get what you pay for in this area. You’ll find some great prices and realize it’s because the pieces of exercise equipment are shoddily made, unsafe, and just don’t last.
When it comes to weight lifting equipment and home gyms, there are a few options available to you. Of course, there are quite a lot of individual choices within those options but to make it easier, you should first decide what type of home gym would be suitable for you.
You have to decide what you want to accomplish with this piece of home fitness exercise equipment? What do you want out of weight lifting equipment for a home gym?
If you’re an experienced and serious weight trainer, you most likely will have to have free weights, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And you’ll probably want quite a number of free weights, an adjustable bench, squat rack, Olympic bar, adjustable dumbbells, etc.
When it comes to this aspect of home fitness exercise equipment, cost and space really come into play. While free weights are relatively cheap, if you want to be able to do all the free weight exercises you like and you want to do them in relative safety, you’ll need more money.
But one of the great things about free weights is that they last a lifetime and you can continue to build on what you have. So you could start out with some adjustable dumbbells and add to them as you go – an Olympic bar with weights, a flat weight bench, power rack, etc.
Another option would be to purchase some type of multi-gym system that allows you to do a lot of the basic exercises on one machine, without the need for a spotter, or changing weights. You’ll use a weight stack with a pin to select the amount of weight.
It usually changes in 10 pound increments. There are two main problems with this. You are limited in the weight you can use, unlike free weights. And as you get stronger, it becomes quite difficult to increase the weight on an exercise by 10 pounds at one time. With free weights, you can make smaller weight increases.
Another drawback to this type of home fitness exercise equipment is that these home gyms restrict your plane of movement. This can be very dangerous and cause injury.
Free weights allow you to lift and lower weights in your body’s natural movement pattern. Multi-station home gyms do not. Instead your fitting yourself into a machine’s pattern that may not be natural for you.
For example, when performing a bench press, the body’s natural movement is not straight up and down as you would think. It’s almost a slight curve, first out toward your feet and then up. But with a fixed plane multi-station gym, it is straight up and down and for some people this could cause injury.
If you are going to purchase a home gym like this, always go for quality and always take the time to try the machine out yourself with all the exercises to see how it feels for your body. Never buy one of these machines sight unseen.
Now, there are some pieces of home fitness exercise equipment that have the advantages of a multi-station home gym, without restricting your movement on an exercise.
So you get to use your body’s natural motion and still get the safety and convenience of a machine. Of course, you still have the other disadvantages such as the limited amount of weight you can use and the bigger jumps when increasing the weight on an exercise.
A couple of the higher quality and popular pieces of equipment like this are the Bowflex by Nautilus and the Weider Platinum Crossbow and the Total Gym.
While many pieces of home fitness exercise equipment sold via infomercial are poorly made, don’t work, and disappear quickly from market, Bowflex is certainly not one of them. Bowflex has been around for many years and has produced over $1 billion in sales! You don’t do that unless you are doing something right. And Bowflex does it right.
You can check out more information on various pieces of home fitness exercise equipment, like weight benches, treadmills, stationary bikes and more by clicking here
