Home Gym Guides

How many years have you told yourself the same thing: This is the year you’re going to get into shape? With images of your new, slender body so clear in your mind, you rush out and join a gym. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. Perhaps you went a few times, but getting to the gym is simply too difficult. You don’t have the time or energy to get there. Now you’re stuck in a three-year contract that’s costing you $40 per month–with no results to show for it. The contract will let you cancel at any time, but that would be admitting defeat.What do you do? Do you just give up and enjoy the way the couch molds around you while you watch prime time reality shows? Look, it’s not you, it’s the fitness industry. Like any other business, fitness clubs are there to make money. For the very few who are hyper motivated, health fitness clubs are great things chockablock with useful (and some not so useful) gym equipment. For the rest of us, they’re designed to get us to pay as much as possible and use the facilities as little as possible. Commercial space and gym equipment are expensive things.

How did super motivated people become this way? Being successful at something, more than anything else, makes you more confident and provides needed motivation. That success can begin at home. If you start with just the things you really need and work a little every day, you can convert you living room, or garage, or your backyard, into a working gym.

I have tried a home gym, you say. I purchased gym equipment, that big cable and pulley thing that now is used as a clothes rack (that started out looking like a torture device, maybe one of those racks that stretch you.) I bought that bike too, with the big fan for the front wheel that sends me lurching up and down with the moving handle bars. Makes a great towel rack though.

Fitness equipment doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy to work. Because you need to start slow and work up to the harder exercises, a large bag of playground sand and an army duffel bag will do the trick. Begin by chunking the sand into 5 pound bags. Use duct tape to secure them. Now, you can use as many or as few to put into the duffel bag. With the bag on, do a few deep knee bends and pushups. Of course, consult a manual, the internet or other source to be sure you use correct form with your exercises.

Once you believe you’ve made some advances, buy an inexpensive set of weights and a stand for them so that you can perform knee bends with the dumbbells and also standing presses. Forget the equipment for bench presses, since it’s not truly worth the cost. But in any event, be certain to see a physician before beginning (and don’t let that step be just another reason for not doing your exercises!).