Live Healthy Fit

When setting up a home gym there are many things to consider. The following is a list of points, questions and equipment to help you plan your own home gym. This guide is more about a gym for general fitness and weight loss than for the serious body builder. What you need is a place and the gear to do cardio, weights or strength work and stretches.

Cost

• You can work out at home with no cost or you could spend thousands on your home gym or anywhere in between.
• Free and very low cost ways to work out include: using bottles or cans as weights, doing TV workouts, mat exercises like pushups etc, skipping rope for cardio.
• To save money on home gym equipment: buy second hand from garage sales, classified ads or even Ebay.

Space

• How much room do home gyms need? If you are going to include anything like a cardio machine and weight bench or machine then you should probably have a minimum of 10-foot square space.
• This could be a spare room, garage, shed, basement or half of the lounge room.
• When choosing your space consider the strength of the floor and how noisy it will be with the equipment you want in the home gym. A treadmill on a second floor can be very noisy, as can weights.
• You may need to protect floor with mats or a rug.
• Make your home gym space a place you want to spend lots of time, brighten it up with lighting, pictures, etc or even a coat of paint.

Ideas for equipment you may want

• Two cheap but effective pieces of cardio equipment are a skipping rope and an aerobics step.
• Cardio machines you should look at include treadmills, bikes, rowers and stair climbers.
• Free weights and a bench are much cheaper than weight machines.
• If you have the money there are great resistance training machine or multistation machines.
• An inflatable fit ball is great for doing a variety of low impact exercises such as crunches and stretches on.
• A medicine ball is handy for a number of exercises.