Home Workout Equipment – What You Really Need
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Home workout equipment doesn’t have to be expensive or take up a lot of space. Here’s what you really need for your home gym. It doesn’t break the bank nor do you need to build an extra room on your house.
Your Body
Some people laugh at me when I say that for home workout exercises your most important piece of equipment is your body. But, honestly, it’s true. One of the greatest chest and triceps exercises, the push-up, requires nothing more than dropping to the ground and doing them. And if you are a beginner, you will be amazed how difficult step-ups and lunges done just with your body’s weight can be.
Push-ups require no home workout equipment except your body
A Pair Of Dumbbells
To give you more variety, dumbbells simply can’t be beat as the most versatile piece of home workout equipment you can have. They are small, take up little space and virtually every body part under the sun can be exercised with them: dumbbell presses work the chest, kickbacks are an isolation for the triceps, biceps curls for the biceps and step-ups do the legs – you name it.
A good beginner dumbbell set weighs 2 x 20 lbs (2 x 10 kg), about 1/4th of that coming from the handles and locks
What you want are dumbbells with solid handles and spinlocks, both made of metal, and changeable cast-iron plates, like my pair above.
Fixed-weight dumbbells you may soon outgrow and then end up having to buy another pair and another after that, while cheaper adjustable dumbbell sets sometimes have hollow handles, locks made of plastic and plates filled with sand. The first two mean that they won’t be able to hold a lot of weight and wear out, while plates filled with sand are rather huge and you won’t be able to put on more than a couple of them on one dumbbell – a sand-filled 10 lb plate has about the size of a cast-iron 20 lb plate.
With a bit of luck you can buy a used pair, otherwise have a look at the 40-pound dumbbell set right here
A Pull-Up Bar
It is one of the questions I have answered most often: “I don’t have a pull-up bar, how can I replace them?” You can’t. Really, I mean it. You cannot replace pull-ups. The pull-up is the most basic and most important exercise you can do for your back. A cable pulldown may look similar, but the effects are different. In my experience people also cheat more easily on pulldowns than they do on pull-ups – with pull-ups you either get up or you don’t, with pulldowns you may catch yourself leaning back.
Pull-up bars like these aren’t very expensive and shouldn’t damage the door frame
A simple door-mounted pull-up bar will do the job admirably
A Solid Board
Yes, a board. With a chair and / or some books a board serves as my inclined bench, preacher bench for preacher curls and platform for many other exercises.
This is my hamstring curls set-up
Check this playlist for videos where it’s prominently featured. My study has to double as my workout room and there simply is no space for a full-grown bench, let alone on top of that a preacher bench, which would just be used for two or three exercises.
You can get a board like this at any home improvement store, sometimes even for free, if it’s a leftover piece of wood. Otherwise it should be around $5. Just make sure it’s solid wood and not pressed wood or plywood – those will bend over time and may break at the most unfortunate moments.
Home Cardio Equipment?
Last but not least, let’s not neglect cardio. In summer, this is a no-brainer: you need a bike, roller skates, inline skates or a pair of running shoes (check here for some tips on those) or whatever else is used to do what tickles your fancy.
But what in winter? Running is not that much fun in eight inches of snow. And yet it doesn’t have to be a stationary bike, elliptical trainer or treadmill to keep you fit. If you can afford one of those and have the room, good. If not, think back to what kids liked to play with before there were Playstations, internet and, well, color television: jump ropes.
A sailor aboard the USS Enterprise jumps rope
Jumping rope can be fun and surprisingly difficult. At the beginning you will probably be more worried about where your legs and the rope are at any given moment. But later on should find that 10 minutes of this activity can be one of the most exhaustive things you tried in your life. This one here costs about ten dollars
Adding It Up
If you buy from the links above and pay for the board, you spend the following for your home workout exercises: $60 for the dumbbells, $40 for the door-mounted pull-up bar, $5 for the board – a total of $105. If we assume that you also buy a good pair of running shoes for $50 and put down $10 for the jump rope, then we are at $165.
When you are a beginner, these $165 will get you through at least your first year of working out, perhaps even the second. After that all you have to do is buy some extra plates for your dumbbells, which will approximately cost another $50. Compare that to $600 per year for a gym membership or $3,500 for a home gym workout station. The latter isn’t even ideal for a beginner or intermediate trainee, who are better advised to stick with free weights.
No Money At All?
If you have absolutely no money to spend, it’s still no reason to worry. Your individual home workout equipment can be whatever provides a resistance to work against. Here are some tips on that.
Pull-up bar picture courtesy of Drew Stephens. Jump rope picture courtesy of US Navy.
20 Comments
I cant agree more with you Evil! I workout at home myself, mostly for my privacy and to save time. But as someone becomes stronger, leg training is a small problem.
I know you and Scooby have shown some home leg exercises, but in my opinion if you want to train legs heavy, home workouts are not apropiate. They may become dangoures!
I agree: when it comes to squats and deadlifts, you should have shown them to you by a qualified coach.
IMO you can still workout legs at home effectively, but it does take some more effort. Exercises like RDL’s and hack squats can be combined to give a great leg workout, while dumbbell exercises such as step-ups, lunges and bulgarian split-squats should be more than enough for somebody starting off.
It’s often an area where opinion’s differ, I know a lot of people wouldn’t like to do any deadlift variations like this, but it’s more effective than relying on unilateral dumbbell exercises.
True that. With any of the excercises you named, you can reach a high level of intensity.
Contrary to posts above, I think you can work your legs very well at home. Go to a gym and ask to “try once for free”; most gyms accept that. In your “free lesson”, instead of having the coach devise a plan for you, say that you want to learn how to do deadlifts. If you do this on two or three gyms, you’ll have two or three coaches teach you deadlifts. Using that plus some online videos, you can learn how to deadlift.
Then, using deadlifts and lunges, you’ll get a pretty decent leg workout. Other good exercises include pistol squats (a favorite of mine), straight-leg deadlifts, and single-leg calf raises to top it off (the two-leg version requires loads of extra weight and makes it unpractical).
HK, and I thought *I* was cheap!
Keep in an BB OHP position then sumo squat and back – that will DOM muscles in your leg that you never knew existed.
I do lots of leg exercises with no equipment. I got some of these ideas from Mark Lauren (q.v.), others from martial arts masters. I’m 51, so my knees can’t take pistols and such, for what it’s worth. For example, take a cheap book bag and fill it with textbooks. Wear it while doing Bulgarian split squats, and hold the low position for a count of 5. The books shifting back and forth make this tougher. I do side lunges in my office: make them harder by lacing your fingers behind your head and working to keep your back straight. Try 1-legged Romanian dead lifts on a throw pillow. For calf raises, all I need is a stairway. For 1-legged squats, all I need is a dining room table to hold on to (yeah, I cheat).
Yep, I can imagine that using a weight that shifts calls in a lot of the smaller stabilizer muscles!
BTW, respect to the unconventional approach! In my opinion, fitness always has to be what works for you as a person, even if you then do it in a way that others never thought about.
Ab wheels are evil, inexpensive but worth the investment. You can make bulgarian training bags with a large inner tube and sand/dirt- makes a good exercise because it’s taking your shoulders through all planes of motion opposed to just a linear movement.
Nice pic of the “mobile chernobyl” aka USS Enterprise!
Haven’t been on your website in a while, nice upgrade- looks nice.
I think you just made me reconsider spending a lot of $$$!!
Cool to hear!
ok, you said we can do cardio with a rope. but do you have recommendations for stationary bikes? i want one but i don’t want to waste my money. and you said you have a stationary bike. which one?
Let’s see if I can come up with some recommendations
For now, all I can say is that you shouldn’t exactly go for the cheapest offers out there. A good stationary bike does cost a bit.
If you have a proper bike already then a good alternative to a stationary bike is a turbo trainer that clamps to the back axle and uses a roller to give variable resistance. It takes up very little room when collapsed down too.
Alternatively stop being a wimp and just ride your bike in the wind and rain
Very good idea, Steve, you harccore bike rider!
Hi Scooby,
Can you give tips on how to pick the proper weight for dumbbell exercises? For example, when do you know that 10 lbs is right for you, or when do you know when should you move up already?
I searched through your site but can’t seem to find any article. If there is, would appreciate it if you can share with me!
Thanks!
Oh man, I was watching a video of Scooby in youtube, and it just slipped my mind when creating this comment!
VERY SORRY EVIL!!! You’re still #1 for me!!
LMAO, Lean
No worries! 
As for your question: If you have trouble to do at least six reps per set with good form with a given weight, it is too much. If the last rep on the final set doesn’t feel like OMGIAMDYING, it’s too little.