Two pieces of essential home gym equipment for tight spaces
Small home gyms are becoming a staple of almost every household nowadays, especially in lockdown, and with lockdown to looming home workouts are becoming more and more essential to everyday life and mental well-being.
With gyms being closed at the moment, and people looking to save money in the current climate, home gyms are becoming more and more popular for almost everyone. It doesn’t matter if you have whole gyms worth of equipment, or just a few little bits to get you started. You can use some simple pieces of equipment to do a whole different range of workouts that will allow you to increase your fitness, put on some extra size (muscle!) And overall increase your body composition and overall mental well-being.
Dumbells / Kettlebells
Whatever you prefer to use, we don’t think any home gym is ever complete without some sort of weighted equipment, and dumbbells because rebels are essential to almost all workouts that we put together.
The best part of choosing dumbbell/kettle bells for your new home gym, is that it really doesn’t matter too much how much more money you spend. Essentially in the end way is way, so really just matters how much weight you get and if it is enough for you to fulfil your workout goals.
Saying that there are huge amount of different dumbbells on the market today, some of which feature clever designs to easily adjust the weight over traditional dumbbells which take a long time to screw more weights onto them. However they come at a cost, obviously!
Bowflex 552i Single Adjustable Dumbbell
It’s not often that we rave so much about just one product, but when it comes to these Bowflex adjustable dumbbells there is literally so much to rave about!!
These are one of our favourite products that we actually own ourselves. Dumbbells are an essential part of any gym workout, and you just have to have them however they can take up a lot of space and home gyms especially ours are crammed into the corner of our garage where we don’t have a ton of space, so it’s always been super important to us to have everything we need in this gym organised carefully.
This is where the adjustable dumbbells come in, these are amazing because they allow you to have a whole dumbbell rack without any of the space that they take up. You can easily adjust pick and pull the dumbbell that you want whilst leaving behind the weight that you don’t need easily and without any fuss.
Making these an essential part of any gym workout because you can quickly rapidly change the weights which we find we do a lot when we are working out and using different weighted sets or different exercises in a circuit where you need to have different weights depending on the movement you are doing this.
So whilst they might be a little bit more expensive than you are initially looking to spend, we definitely recommend spending the extra money on these is a set of dumbbells because they are just fantastic and they make working out a lot easier overall. Plus who likes a cluttered workspace!!
York Fitness 20 kg Cast Iron Spinlock Dumbbell
These are one of the best value dumbbell sets that you will find on the market. These are an absolute classic and I think almost everyone at some point has had a York dumbbell set, they are heavy duty well made and built to last a lifetime!
While we are the 1st to admit that we prefer our more expensive adjustable dumbbells, we just don’t think there are viable option perhaps the everybody because of the pricetag! These are a much more affordable set of dumbbells which are extremely configurable just as the more expensive set.
They don’t get any more simple than this, all you have to do is load up the weight that you want make sure it balances on each side and then spin the lock back onto the dumbbell and your often ready to go.
This set comes with 20 KG’s of weight, which should be enough to get you started. They have got some quite small weight plates which is actually a really good thing because it allows you to make small adjustments in the way that you need perfect for when you’re starting out!
You can easily add more weight to the set, the weight plates themselves are very easy to find at almost any retailer, and the holes on these dumbbells allow you to use other brands of weights as well making them an extremely adjustable set that you can expand on in the future.
Sometimes it pays to just keep it simple stupid!!
Resistance bands!
These are our favourite piece of home gym equipment that you can get under £20!! Probably better than some of the pieces of gym equipment you can get there almost 10 times the price. Easily one of our favourite piece of equipment just because they are so configurable to your exercise plan and your goals!
Resistance bands are some of the most versatile pieces of equipment that you can own if you are looking to get back into shape. Resistance bands can be used almost any workout that you can find on any machine in the gym. They are extremely variable and can be used to mimic almost any machine and movement in the gym.
What’s great about resistance bands are that they are a relatively cheap piece of equipment that you can use in the home gym, but they are also extremely configurable in terms of what exercises you can do with them and also the amount of weight and resistance that you can add onto them very easily. Because they come with a range of different colour-coded weight ratings, you can easily do almost any exercise with them which would normally require much heavier weight plates to do.
For instance, normally you would need a lot of weight plates to do deadlifts, however with resistance bands you can easily add extra resistance band onto your workout and mimic the movement of the dead lift easily without all the equipment that can take up an enormous amounts of space in your home gym as well as being very expensive!!
And it really is just a simple as that! You don’t have to have a serious amount of equipment to be able to begin working out and make a start on building your own home gym. Sometimes the best pieces of equipment you can buy are actually some of the cheapest as well.
Most workouts that you will find on the Internet, even if they are workout programs designed for personal training or with it to take place within a gym, doesn’t mean that you need to have all of the equipment that they recommend.
You can easily replicate similar movements with some of these cheaper pieces of equipment that we have listed above, that should make your life a lot easier and also get you started in the gym for a much lower price than perhaps gym membership.
Gym memberships again getting so much more expensive these days so is really key that you don’t go splashing out on a gym membership that you then never use when it is super cheap and super easy to get started on your own at home!
Dan Woods
I'm a healthy and fitness nut! Been in this game over 10 years. If it's fitness, i've done it! Name a sport, i've invested silly money into it! Let me share my knowledge with you!