Set Up A Home Gym In Your Living Room

With most of us having now experienced what it's like to try and stay fit with all of the gyms in the country closed, I think we’d all agree on the importance of having some sort of home gym equipment.

Not everyone has the luxury of a spare room or garage that you can dedicate to use as a workout space. Luckily, there are plenty of different bits of equipment that you can use for workouts in the comfort of your own living room.

Depending on your level of fitness, experience and goals will often highlight the type of equipment you use to make your own gym in the living room. Some of the best pieces of living room gym equipment are:

• Yoga Mat
• Resistance Bands
• Slam balls
• Dumbbells
• Kettlebells
• Barbells & Weight Plates
• Treadmill

Yoga Mats, Resistance Bands & Slam Balls

A yoga mat, a set of resistance bands and a slam ball can be all you need for your living room gym.

A yoga mat is perfect to make any floor surface usable for exercise, it's grippy enough to safely perform high intensity movements and offers some joint support with the thick foam.

When it comes to resistance bands, they’re inexpensive and you can hit virtually any body part at a challenging intensity. Consider any bodyweight exercise that comes to mind, be it a squat, push up, pull up, walking lunge, when you add a resistance band into the mix, an already tough exercise can have you shaking with the intensity with the added bonus that there’s no special new technique to learn to use them safely.

A slam ball is an incredibly versatile, durable and fun piece of kit to work out with. It can be used as a standard weight for goblet squats and russian twists, or use it for ball slams to really get your heart rate up.

Visit our Workout Guides for exercises you can do using different pieces of kit.

Dumbbells & Kettlebells

Adding dumbbells and kettlebells into your living room gym is a great way to kick the intensity up a notch. Ideal if the resistance band workouts are no longer as challenging or if you’re just looking to increase the number of exercises available to you, the added weight a dumbbell/kettlebell has to offer brings a welcoming variety to your living room gym.

They’re also a great way to incorporate more dynamic movements like dumbbell thrusters, kettlebell swings and Turkish get-ups, that help create a more well-rounded physique and increase your functional strength.

Barbell & Weight Plates

Excellent for increasing overall strength, power and size, barbell workouts are great for loading up the compound movements that get the whole body involved, maximising calories burnt, motor unit recruitment of individual muscles, and sharpening your central nervous system to really push your limits.

If you really want to push your weight on things like squats and bench, a barbell is perfect for this, but you will need to incorporate a rack to make sure you're working out safely.

Treadmills

Treadmills are a mainstay in the fitness industry and for good reason. You can run thousands of metres without leaving your living room.

Wanting to get a quick run but you don’t feel safe running late at night or it’s pouring down with rain? No worries. Jump on the treadmill and you can stay in routine without missing your workout.

With multiple different training modes, you can choose from a Steady State aerobic run through to a High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) Mode that’ll have the incline and speed adjusting automatically.

Our P100 and P200 treadmills also fold away so that you don't have to worry about having it on show all the time.

As you can see having your own living room gym setup doesn’t have to involve you slogging your way through the same set of mind-numbing bodyweight exercises you learnt in PE over and over again but can actually be a fun, challenging and rewarding experience, that’s full of variety, is cost-effective and convenient, making working out at home a viable option for many routine gym-goers. It’s also great to have a few pieces of home gym equipment as a Plan B if your gym has to shut unexpectedly or your schedule limits how much time you get to train.

So next time instead of missing out on your workouts altogether, get a step ahead of the game and head down to your living room gym and keep the progress rolling!