Home Gym Guides

An important component that a number of fitness enthusiasts leave out when buying their own gym is the home gym flooring.Home gym flooring is nothing but a rubber floor that makes it easier for you to exercise and workout. Many people often end up injuring themselves while working out. This is usually because they use uneven flooring like carpet mats or floor tiles.

Gym flooring prevents injury by providing you with an even and soft surface to exercise on. The biggest advantage is that the flooring makes your body feel comfortable even while performing hard workouts. Concrete floors and carpets, as I mentioned before, are either quite hard or uneven and are really bad for your body’s posture and alignment while exercising.

While shopping around for home gym flooring, you will be presented two options. Either you can install it yourself or have someone install it for you. Usually, if you’re not too good at doing things like this yourself, it’s advisable to have someone do it for you. If you hire out someone from the same shop you buy it from the, you can save quite a bit on your total costs.

Another benefit of having someone install the gym flooring is that the person will take care that you use the right rubber flooring and that it’s installed properly which is very important.

Rubber gym flooring doesn’t cost too much either. It’s very affordable and available at pretty competitive prices in the market. While choosing gym flooring for your home gym, you must always visit at least a couple of stores so that you can compare the prices and get the best deal possible. Sports shops and hardware stores are good places to look at.

Once you have your gym flooring installed, test it out by performing some workouts. This will ensure that everything is right and that you feel comfortable. Always keep the flooring clean and provide it the care and maintenance it needs.

Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells are a wonderful new innovation for the home gym that simply make working out with free weights a breeze. Dumbbells are the best tool for muscle building, even better than a straight bar and much better than a resistance machine. The makers of the original Power Rod technology and the new Bowflex Revolution have now used their creativity in the free weight arena to come up with a truly clever idea in the Bowflex SelectTech.When it comes to resistance training, serious fitness enthusiasts know that nothing beats free weights. In order to keep good form, the body must employ numerous stabilizer muscles, which keep the limb steady while working it against the resistance. Strength training machines are often more inclined toward isolation exercises, by keeping the movement restricted throughout with the use of mechanical assistance. Though this can show large gains when first starting, a plateau is often reached after awhile that will have developing body builders switching over to free weights.

Free weights, however, also have some disadvantages. One of them is that the likelihood of injury is much higher than with a machine, because the same range of motion that leads to muscle development, could potentially tear a ligament or put undue stress on a joint, if the exercise is not conducted properly. This is especially true of exercises that use a lot of weight, like bench presses or squats. The only real way around this is to work up carefully and slowly to the big weights, always keep correct form, and use a spotting partner if possible.

The second big disadvantage to free weights is the need for a large number of weights, and a fair bit of room to keep them in. This is where the new Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells come in. These dumbbells have the classic dumbbell shape, of two weights on either side of a handle. The big difference is that instead of having to either remove and replace weight plates, spinning off the threaded collar each time, or grab from a huge rack of dumbbell pairs, the SelectTech dumbbells use a dial to set the weight, then when you lift the appropriate amount of weight is attached to the handle and whatever you aren’t using is left behind.

What this means is that instead of needing a huge rack of dumbbells, usually at least 10 pairs, you simply have one set of handles and the various weight plates. But unlike standard weight plates, the SelectTech sits neatly in a tray, and without the need of threading a collar each time the weight can be changed in an instant.

This is especially advantageous to those who like doing circuit training. Circuits are a combination of aerobic and anaerobic workout, so that the heart rate is increased at the same time muscle is worked. Generally circuit training requires jumping from set to set without any pauses in between, and unless you have a professional dumbbell rack this is near-impossible with a standard adjustable dumbbell. The Bowflex SelectTech makes it easy.

The dial on the Bowflex dumbbells allows you to switch from 5 to 52.5 pounds in an instant. All that you need to do is rest the dumbbell back in the tray, set the dial to the appropriate weight, and lift it out again. It is that easy. The trays keep the unit compact, and the dials keep the changeovers fast, so it is really the best of both worlds and a really great innovation for the home gym.

Like most Bowflex equipment, however, the SelectTech dumbbells are expensive. However, a full set of dumbbells will cost you as much, and used dumbbells are in demand, as anyone who has scoured Ebay or Craigslist will know. So if you are going to spend upwards of $300 on a set of dumbbells, you should take a good look at these.

It isn’t all that often that a truly useful innovation is created for the home gym market. Often, what is touted as a breakthrough is often some gimmicky retread of someone else’s idea. Bowflex has consistently looked at some of the barriers that exist to working out at home, and found clever ways to address them. The SelectTech dumbbells are designed to get around two of the problems with using free weights at home - the need for lots of space and the need for speed in switching weight - and succeeded admirably.