Choosing the best pieces of exercise equipment for home use can seem confusing.
The market is overflowing with shiny new products and ridiculous hyperbole. It’s big business!
The good news is you can easily cover all your bases with just two items.
In fact you don’t even need any items. Using nothing more than your own bodyweight and the beneficial pull of gravity you can enjoy an extremely effective home workout. Squats, lunges, isometric holds, push ups, presses, rows, pull ups, planks, bridges, sprints, stretches. You really can get in tip top shape using no exercise equipment whatsoever.
That said there are a two pieces of exercise equipment which can greatly enhance your workouts by a) offering up a greater variety of exercise options b) providing a simple way to progress your training sessions and c) offering beginners an easier entry point to home-based training.
Resistance Bands
Lightweight, portable, inexpensive and easily scaled to all fitness levels resistance bands are an ideal fit for home workouts. Using a good set of adjustable resistance bands and a solid anchor point you can mimic many of the exercises routinely performed in expensively equipped gyms. They do have some drawbacks, but with such a low price point they more than provide a great return on investment. Click here to learn more about the types of resistance band I recommend.
Adjustable Dumbbells
One pair of adjustable dumbbells replaces a whole set of regular dumbbells which again makes them ideal for home use (and extremely cost effective in comparison!) Using presses, rows, curls and raises you can successfully target all your upper body muscles and by holding the weights in each hand you can easily add scalable resistance to many of your favorite lower body exercises.
Progression is the key to getting in shape and with adjustable dumbbells the process couldn’t be simpler. As you get stronger, simply use progressively heavier weights to keep you in the desired intensity range. Despite being more expensive than resistance bands, adjustable dumbbells remain an excellent investment in your future fitness and treated well should last an awfully long time!