Home Gyms – Lifting Weights Without Long Waits
© Doug Champigny, http://flirtingwithfitness.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
It happens every day – people join gyms or health clubs, work out for a month or so and then stop going, even though they often have to keep up their monthly payments for a full year. If this sounds familiar, maybe a home gym is the best exercise solution for you.
One of the biggest issues with memberships in gyms or health clubs is the time required. Not just the time in transit to and from the gyms, but while you’re actually in the weight room. Unless you’re training in huge health clubs, you’re bound to need equipment that’s already in use by other athletes – sometimes there can be 3 or 4 people ahead of you waiting for the squat rack, for instance. So an hour workout suddenly take 90 minutes, and when transit time is added in your commitment to working out is suddenly taking 2-3 hours a day out of your already overburdened schedule.
Home Gyms Are Often The Best Choice For Serious Weightlifters
Another issue is the whole exercise equipment versus free weights saga. Every serious trainer knows you get better results using free weights, but more and more health clubs have fewer free weights and more exercise machines. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is because the exercise machines are superior – in most cases it’s an insurance issue or the gym trying to avoid liability from accidents with free weights. Gyms worth joining have a much larger free weight area than that taken up by exercise machines, but those ‘hardcore’ gyms are harder and harder to find nowadays.
Home gyms, on the other hand, can be designed to fit YOUR exact needs. If you have a large area you can dedicate to your training area, like a garage or full basement, you can include a power rack, a squat rack, your bench press and racks for your weights, bars, handles, etc. In a smaller area like an apartment or spare bedroom, you can still fit in the bench press and dumbbells or kettlebells and have a great workout at home. There’s no waiting for the next exercise and no commute time to get to your workout.
If money is a factor you can start with just a couple of dumbbell bars and some weights, and then add to them as you get stronger. No gym will scale your payments from almost nothing, going up a bit every couple of months, but that’s exactly what you can do when building your home gym. Once you have the confidence that you’ll stay with it and are ready to take it up a notch, buy the best weight bench you can reasonably afford and add it into your routine. Over time you’ll build a great collection of bodybuilding equipment and as you grow stronger you’ll feel the pride of needing to add more weights to your stack.
Home gyms aren’t some magic panacea, though – you still need to show up for every workout and make progressive gains in the amount of weight you can lift to build muscle and burn bodyfat. But if commercial gyms or health clubs don’t seem to fit your lifestyle, home gyms are often your best choice!
How about you? Do you prefer training at gyms and health clubs or in your own home gym? Leave a comment & let me know!
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