Have you been seeking to live a more fit, healthy lifestyle but you aren’t sure how to get started? Are you wanting to start working out but can’t afford expensive exercise equipment or a gym membership? Has your doctor been talking to you about getting more activity in your day? While it is true that developing a new habit of fitness and exercise can be hard, it’s not true that you need to purchase a lot of expensive equipment in order to accomplish this. In fact, there are many exercises and workout routines that can be done without any equipment at all. Some people will stick with these regiments while others will eventually seek to branch out into harder or more targeted moves. Either way, getting fit and working out doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive and there are some great deals on home gym equipment available. Here are some of the more affordable types of exercise equipment that can be used for different types of workouts:
Weight Training
Weight training is done to build muscle and strength, become healthier, and reach fitness goals such as losing weight. There are many benefits to weight training in addition to weight loss and muscle building. Most people who are participating in weight training wouldn’t consider themselves to be bodybuilders. Weight training also has other health benefits including increasing muscle tone, decreasing the risk of injuries such as fractures and sprains, and stabilizing joints. It helps to increase balance and can strengthen the heart and lungs, as well as help to increase bone density. In addition, this form of exercise, like all physical activity, has mental health benefits such as helping to reduce anxiety and depression. Weight training may even reduce insomnia.
You can buy affordable weight equipment such as dumbbells, resistance bands, and kettlebells. Many effective exercises can be done with free weights such as these, which can reduce the cost to get started. While there are other exercises and workouts that require more expensive equipment or a gym membership, you can get quite an effective workout with simple equipment in the beginning. Once you know that you enjoy this form of fitness, you can consider adding more expensive weight-lifting equipment.
Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercise is designed to increase the strength and function of the heart and lungs. It is characterized as an activity that makes your heart beat faster. There are many advantages to aerobic exercise, including improved heart and lung function, decreased risk of heart problems, and lower blood pressure. There are also other benefits less directly related to the heart, including weight loss and improved stamina. Like other kinds of exercise, aerobic activity can also help to boost the immune system and improve mental health. When you perform aerobic activity you release endorphins which can help to boost your mood and act as painkillers.
One of the great advantages of aerobic exercise is that you can get started without any expense or equipment. One of the best forms of aerobic activity is walking or jogging. You can walk each day around your neighborhood or you can go to a green area such as a park and walk there. If the weather is poor, you can even get exercise by walking in shopping malls or large stores. There are some forms of exercise equipment that you can purchase inexpensively to give you more forms of aerobic activity, such as a jump rope or an indoor trampoline. Swimming is also an excellent form of aerobic exercise, so a membership to a local rec center might be a good investment once you have determined that this is the form of fitness you prefer.
Yoga and Flexibility Fitness
Pose and flexibility-focused fitness exercises like stretching and yoga are popular and may help reduce muscle pain from other exercises like strength training. Yoga is an ancient religious activity that focuses on holding poses that increase the body’s strength, balance, and flexibility. There is also a mindfulness aspect to yoga. Another similar fitness practice is pilates, which involves holding poses similar or identical to those from yoga while performing movements to strengthen and stabilize the core. These forms of fitness help to strengthen and stabilize the joints, can help to prevent injury, and increase flexibility. In addition, other benefits include pain reduction, improved posture, decreased menopause symptoms, and better balance. There is also strong evidence for mental benefits and reduced insomnia in people who do these kinds of fitness exercises.
For the most part, getting started with stretching and yoga workouts is free. All you need is a class or training, which can be found online in many places. If you want to use equipment to make your yoga or pilates training easier, more effective, or more advanced, you can usually buy everything you could want very affordably. Equipment such as yoga mats, blocks, and exercise balls are not usually expensive and can be purchased in most sporting goods stores and large department stores.
Bodyweight Exercise
Bodyweight exercises are a form of resistance training that uses the body as the weight instead of using machines or exercise equipment. Bodyweight training is popular and easy to do, and it can be very effective in helping people to lose weight and gain muscle tone. It has many of the benefits of weight lifting, such as helping to build muscle, making people stronger, decreasing the risk of injury, and stabilizing joints. While bodyweight exercise alone might not be sufficient for bodybuilding effects, it is very helpful for increasing overall fitness and very good at building core strength, as many of the exercises help the areas of the abs, shoulders, butt, and thighs.
Bodyweight fitness can often be done without any extra equipment, so it can be very easy and cheap to get started. However, there are some pieces of inexpensive equipment that can help get better results or make certain exercises safer. For example, pull-up bars are safer than makeshift options, and the addition of extra resistance through ankle weights, dumbbells, resistance bands, and resistance tubes can help take workouts to the next level.
Conclusion
There are many benefits to using affordable exercise equipment rather than investing a lot of money in expensive memberships or equipment you don’t yet know you will use. It’s better to begin where you can and learn what kinds of fitness you prefer.