Personal Home Fitness solutions
A good personal home fitness solution is to create your very own gym within the comfort of your own home.
Benefits:
- Cost (after initial outlay) can be alot a cheaper than monthly gym subscription.
- flexibility - train when you want and what time you want
- No waiting for equipment - unless family members have got the training bug as well!!
- Reduced travel time
Disadvantages:
- Motivation - easier to skip sessions but it is easy to skip sessions as a gym member - as well as being more expensive!!
- No spotter - unless the person you live with will do this for you
- Anti social - limits your potential to build friendships with people who hare the same interests.
- Learning potential - unless you hire a personal trainer to come to your home when you need to shake things up a bit
- Less access to high end equipment - but you can achieve everything you need for your personal home fitness needs with just the bare essentials - even just your own body weight!
Equipment recommended:
Dumbells
Pros:
- Stability and Balance - by being able to work opposing sides individually requires more work from your core stabilizer muscles, these become more highly engaged when performing your exercise and as a result get stronger.
- Spot yourself - if for example you are performing a seated concentration bicep curl with the dumbell in your left hand you can use your right to assist you in the final reps of the curl to get you past that point of failure.
- A dumbell exercise also offers a greater range of motion as opposed to a machine or barbell where the movement is much more fixed. This can help further stimulate muscle fibres at the lower and bottom end of the movement than could otherwise be reached as well as bringing into play other muscles that would not usually get stimulated through fixed ranges of movement.
- Convieniance - Dumbells require little storage space. With such a good range of selectable dumbells now available this is even more of a positive advantage.
Cons:
- Because of the range of motion and the fact that more stabalizer muscles are
engaged as well as other muscle groups, the muscles tend to fatigue
much more quickly.
This can limit the amount of weight used in sets as you would be too tired to be able to lift heavier weights, but however this sticking point can be overcome by incorporating Barbells into your home gym requirements.
Barbells
Pros:
- What the barbell lacks in range of motion it can make up for in its advantage of being able to add more weight to your sets. The fact that the range of motion is limited allows you to focus more on the push / pull of the movement without fatiguing the muscle to quickly.
- Grip width variation - a barbell allows much more variety in the width of your hand palcement or grip. This means that performing the same exercise with a different grip can target the outer or inner parts of a muscle part or a different muscle group entirely.
- To illustrate an example of this take the flat bench press at normal grip width (approx shoulder width apart) the delts are stimulated.
Take the same movement but bring the hands closer together (almost touching) the emphasise is now on the triceps, this is actually quite an effective mass builder exercise for the triceps which many professional bodybuilders use as part of there arm building routines.
Again to further illustrate how a grip adjustment can stimulate different parts of the same muscle let us look at the barbell curl - a popular exercise for developing the bicep. A wide grip will stimulate the short head whilst a narrower grip can target the long head.
Cons:
- As mentioned earlier the range of movement is limited which means less ability to bring in those stabaliser muscles. The fact that you can not train a body part individually also means that (using the bench press, chest development as an example) that one side could become more developed than the other. However in order to address this imbalance incorporate a mixture of dumbells and barbells...
- ......then you get the best of both worlds for your personal home fitness gym!
Bench
Power rack or squat rack
Invest in a good sturdy one, there are plenty of choices available for the home gym and they are not too expensive.
Pull up bar
This is really more of an optional extra and if you do decide to invest in a good quality power rack sometimes these have the pull up bar as part of the fixture. I personally think that this is a good piece of equipment to have as the pull up can be an excellant exercise for back and shoulder development (among others).
The pull up bar can exercise the abs as well, the hanging leg raise is an excellent abs / six pack developer!
Dips station
Again this more of an optional extra as you can get a very good triceps dip routine by just using the edge of your bench but if you wanted to invest in one of these and you have the space there are some realtively inexpensive models on the market.
Fitness ball
You can perform a whole range of exercises using a fitness ball. Apart from the fact that you can use it as an alternative to your bench (i.e using it to perform dumbell presses), it can help bring in you core muscles as you need to not only concentrate on the exercise performed but from remaining stable on the ball.
Note:
It could also be the only piece of equipment you need as you can perform a whole range of exercises using nothing more than you own body weight. So depending on your own personal goals, and if all you are after is a good toned physique, then you do not need to include weights at all!
Gym Mat
Not all of us want a highly developed muscular physique so investing in a good quality gym mat is probably all you are going to need (if you decide that a fitness ball is not for you). Using your own body weight, a good pilates or yoga routine is all you need. But the floor can be very uncomfortable and hard. A gym mat offers protection from the hard surface and also provides comfort.
It can usually be rolled up and stored away - so don't worry about forking out any money for the extras if you do not wish to become the next Mr or Mrs Olympia - fitness does not have to be expensive!
Cardio
Other equipment worth mentioning, other than a good gym mat, is a piece of cardio equipment (i have a elipitical trainer as this has low impact on my back - important as I have had a microdiscectomy on my L4 / L5 disc).It may be worthwhile investing in a good heart rate monitor as well for your cardio so you can keep an eye on how well you have been doing over a period of time. Again these are not to expensive these days and provide an excellant way of keeping track on progress.
Optional Extra:
One more piece of equipment you may be interested in for your personal home fitness studio is the Pilates reformer. I use one of these as part of my rehabiltation training to develop my core and help improve any imbalances in my body (i.e strengthening weak areas of my body).Although this may not be to everybody's needs and you can get a good pilates work out by just using mat work I find the reformer helps me by offering extra resistance whilst being able to train safely.
For me my intention is to strengthen the weak areas of my body before moving back to weight training which has always been my favourite method of exercise.
A reformer resembles a long bench at floor level which slides back and forth. It has a number of rubber bands, these create the tension, which are selectable. At one end it has a foot rest and the other it has two cables on pulleys.
A range of exercises can be achieved and can be relatively inexpensive as well (my model cost between £200 and £300). However this is not a must for your home gym, I thought I would just mention it to make you aware it is available for home use and not just restricted to gyms.
Exercises:
If you opt for a weights setup then concentrate on good compound exercises such as squats, bench press, shoulder press, lunges, deadlifts, romanian deadlifts etc as the foundation for your routine. Exercises such as the squat not only develop good quads but also strengthen your whole body.
For those who opt for body weight or a fitness ball use a program that exercises the whole body in order to make sure that no areas are missed and remains weak.
