Home Gym Buying Guide

Home gyms can be beneficial in achieving your fitness goals, but you must know how to buy one.

Whether you want to lose weight or tone your body, buying a home gym can help you reach your fitness goals. When shopping for a home gym, you can be overwhelmed by the various exercise equipment, such as power weights, treadmills, cable/pulley systems and exercise bicycles. Home gyms can cost from $100 to over a $1,000. Higher priced home gyms do not mean that they are the best, so you must know what to look for when buying a home gym.

Instructions

1. Assess the home gym's portability. If the home gym is portable, you can move it as needed or even take it with you when you leave home for vacation. Depending on the complexity of the home gym, some home gyms easily fold up and can be taken with you, which will increase the likelihood you will exercise away from home. If vacationing or traveling with work, you may not always have access to a gym, so your home gym would be available whenever you needed it.

2. Determine its flexibility. No one person is shaped the same, so flexibility on a home gym is important. No matter whether you are working on a treadmill, ellipetical or a more complex home gym, you need to be able to adjust it to fit your body. Some home gyms have cable/pulley systems; it is important that you can adjust those to fit your height. Exercise bicycles should be flexibility for you to adjust the seats for comfortable exercise workouts. Other home gyms--such as treadmills--have programmable workout routines that you can adjust to your fitness needs.

3. Ensure there is a wide range of resistance on your home gym. Home gyms will usually start with five pounds of resistance and can be increased to 150 to 200 pounds. The more resistance you have on your home gym, the more your body works and burns calories. The more calories you burn, the more weight you lose.

References

• Overstock: Home Gym Buying Guide
• Strong Lifts: How to Build a Home Gym: A Buyer's Guide to Gym Equipment