Health Beauty & FitnessHealth, Beauty, Fitness Tips

If you are thinking about doing some fitness training but don’t want to waste money and space in your home with big equipment purchases, you can look for ways to exercise around your home and outside. By finding items that you already own or by using the great outdoors, you can be more “green” when you’re exercising too.

Any personal trainer will tell you that you don’t need a bunch of fancy equipment in order to do some fitness training and get in shape. First of all, take a look around your house – you can use canned food as weights, towels as exercise mats, a stack of books as a stair, some spare rope as a jumping rope and even a chair can help you exercise at home.

Why not take your items outside? It’s much easier to jump rope (an excellent cardio workout) when you have lots of space. For any of your fitness training, being outside is better and will make you feel better – fresh air and plenty of it will increase the workout you’re getting.

When you’re outside, you can take your fitness training to a whole new level. Go for a brisk walk (or even a slow one) or a run and increase your workout all the more. Even if running isn’t your thing, you can still walk or hike around your local area on trails or just the side walk. Take your bike to work instead of your car or just head out on a leisurely bike ride.

It’s always best to team up with someone, even a personal trainer, to stick with your fitness training plan. It helps keep you accountable for your goals and your daily routines. Another green and great idea for your fitness training is to join a team for your favorite sport, such as volley ball, tennis, soccer, basket ball or any sport that you enjoy doing.

If you really want to get serious with your fitness training plan, you might eventually need some equipment. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to break the bank and buy all new equipment. Check out the Internet for used equipment or local sporting goods stores for second hand goods – many cities and towns have a “bargain finder” newspaper or portion of the daily newspaper where people can sell or give away items. However, you can make do with water jugs, a chair and a stepping stool. Your fitness plan doesn’t have to include a bunch of expensive equipment.

I used to own one of those big pulley system weight machines. It cost me a couple of thousand dollars and was really good quality. I sold it on Ebay for $150 last year.

Now I use low cost equipment and get heaps better results. I can go outside and train, or I can train in front of the television. I can train in the living room and watch the kids at the same time. Or I can pack it all up and take it to the park and train with friends and clients in a different setting. No longer am I stuck in the study. And as I said, the results have been amazing. So what do I use?

First off I would recommend a good set of adjustable dumbbells. You know the ones where you can add or remove weight plates as required. I actually have a couple of sets. One I keep quite heavy for use with leg exercises and one set that I change around a lot more depending on what exercises I am doing. These will probably be your most expensive purchase, but you will use them over and over. There are so many different ways to use them and you can easily work your whole body in any number of ways. Almost any exercise can be done with a set of dumbbells.

Another piece of fitness equipment I use a lot are my medicine balls. There are so many different ways to use medicine balls too. You can get them quite cheap at large sporting goods stores or from the internet. I use a 4kg one and a 6 kg one. I use these in every session with my Personal Training clients and Bootcamps too. They are great to use on your own or for partner work.

One of my most used pieces of equipment is a step. I had a friend build me one from some timber he had laying around. It is about 12 inches high and wide and about 4 foot long. Clients can get on either end of it and step up and down together. It is amazing how much harder they can go with someone else to keep up with. The step combines well with the dumbbells or the medicine ball for step ups, step downs, sideways step ups, lungeing off the box or onto the box or even dips off the side. You can also jump on and off the box or even use it to do push ups with. Put your hands on it to make them easier, or your feet to make it harder. Clients that find it hard to get up and down from the floor, can even do ab exercises on it and it doubles as a bench as well. To improve fitness, a step is invaluable.

Another cheap piece of fitness equipment is the humble skipping rope. Uses are obvious and you will be surprised how hard it is if you haven’t tried it lately. If you persist though, you will improve your fitness really quickly with regular jump rope sessions and they are great for weight loss too.

There are many other inexpensive items to include in your home gym set up. These can include resistance bands which are great to take on holidays and yoga type mats which come in real handy when training outside on hard surfaces. Kettlebells are a great item to have, but they can be quite expensive so search around for them. There are many suppliers on the net. I use them a lot in my training sessions and my clients love them too. There are many kettlebell exercises for either strength development, endurance improvement or fat burning, and they work really, really well.

These are just some of the inexpensive ways to equip your home gym. Don’t be fooled into thinking you need an expensive pinloaded weight machine. All of my clients, not to mention myself, have fantastic results without them.