| |
Health and Fitness > Fitness Equipment > Affordbale Home Gym: Your Own Body
0
Reviews [ add review ],
Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : Jay Villaverde
As a certified fitness trainer, I usually get asked what's the best type of equipment for a home gym. In the past I've informed the person that such and such a brand is good for various reasons. Don't get me wrong, there are some great quality pieces of affordable home gym equipment that will get you in fantastic shape, but lately my answer to people as to the best piece of equipment for a home gym has been.. your own body using bodyweight exercises.
When one thinks of bodyweight exercises they usually think of pushups and perhaps chinups. They also think that bodyweight exercises are good to "just stay in shape." Nothing can be further from the truth.
Bodyweight training can completely transform your physique when done correctly. If your goal is weight loss, bodyweight training can get you to that goal. If your goal is to build muscle, bodyweight training can do that as well.
One of the benefits of bodyweight training is that the gym is always with you. Anywhere you go, you have access to "the gym." I've done chinups on playground monkey bars while my daughter plays. There is always something available to push off of or pull up on.
If you have the room in your home, I highly recommend a piece of equipment usually called a "power tower." This is a self standing unit that allows you do chinups, dips, pushups and leg raises for your abs. This one lone piece of equipment, which doesn't take up much room, can transform your body.
It is the one main piece of equipment I use in every workout session. As a matter of fact, I've sold most of my home gym equipment and rely mainly on my power tower for a complete upper body workout. In my opinion there is no other exercise that compares to dips and chinups for the upper body.
What about exercising your legs you may ask? Bodyweight squats are great for your legs and for a challenge you can do them one leg at a time. There is another little torture device I own called the Roman Chair Squat Bench that allows amazing bodyweight squats to be done with little space. That is for another discussion however.
Although all you need is your bodyweight to get a good workout, there will come a time when your own bodyweight doesn't offer enough resistance to make the workout challenging enough to promote muscle building for example.
Sure you can just keep doing more and more reps each workout but if you goal is to build some muscle you will need to keep the
reps under 15 and if your bodyweight is not enough, you'll need to add resistance somehow.
This is where a weighted vest and/or dip belt comes in handy. A dip belt is just a leather or fabric belt that hangs around your waist with chains in the front to hold weight plates. This will allow more than enough resistance to be added to make dips and chinups more challenging. The weighted vest can be used for pushups and squats.
So for a few dollars you have all you need to get in tremendous shape. I can hear some people now wondering where are the curls, the tricep exercises, and so on. How will I get huge biceps if I don't do my million curls?
Trust me, if you can do chins with your bodyweight plus an additional 50lbs - 100lbs around your waist, I can guarantee you will not have small biceps.
All that's left is to design a routine based around pushups, squats, dips and chins. Although there are other great bodyweight exercises, these are the most basic for most people to do safely and easily. Other bodyweight exercises like handstand pushups will blast your shoulders but that is a bit more advanced and out of the scope of this article.
A routine can consist of bodyweight squats, dips and chins done 2 - 3 times a week. Just like any weight training routine, more is not better. You need time to let the muscle recover so 2 - 3 times a week is more than enough. Especially when you start to add resistance to the exercises.
If your goal is weight loss, bodyweight training can do the trick while still buidling some muscle along the way. All you need to do is take less time between sets in order to activate the fat burning process in your body.
For example, if you do bodyweight squats for 5 sets of 25 reps with very little rest between sets, I guarantee your heart will be up and you'll be burning fat. Same thing goes for dips and chins. Take less time between exercises for fat burning and take more time to recover when muscle building is your goal.
I hope you can see the benefit of bodyweight training in terms of overall health and cost effectiveness. You don't need the latest home gym or infomercial product to get in fantastic shape. As a matter of fact all I do these days are bodyweight based routines and at 45 I'm in very good shape as you can see if you visit my website.
Now go and pull yourself up on something.
Article reviews
Post your review
[ Note : no HTML/URLs - will removed automatically ]
More articles from Health and Fitness > Fitness Equipment
|
