Your Fitness Home Gym From The Floor Up
When people want to do home exercises, they tend to start with stockpiling equipment, but something that can be neglected when you are building your own fitness home gym is the floor itself. Depending on where you are building your gym, you may need to take steps to protect your floor and/or your equipment.
A great place to set up a home gym is a basement or garage. Both locations offer plenty of room and allow the gym to be hidden from view if guests come over. Most garages and basements have concrete floors which is extremely hard and can chip or damage your weights if they are dropped to hard, which does happen from time to time. It can also help dampen the sound of weights banging against the ground.
Adding a few layers of shock absorbing material to the floor can make all the difference. A simple solution is to add a few layers of plywood with a nonslip rug on top. It is firm and does the job, but may not be as aesthetically pleasing as some other options. A better and just slightly more expensive option are interlocking rubber mats. You have probably seen them at the free weight area of your local gym. They interlock with edges reminiscent of jigsaw puzzles and come in a variety of colors to spruce up your gym area.
If you are building your multi gym in a room in your house with nice flooring, the interweaving rubber floor mats are a necessity. Believe me, you want to take care of this before any damage occurs to your beautiful hardwood floors as opposed to after.
With your floor in place, you are ready to start adding some bigger pieces of equipment to get your best home gym exercise. Having a shock absorbing floor is also extremely helpful for jumping rope or other aerobic activities such as a home gym sport, to reduce the pressure that can be placed on your knees.
Wii Fitness Home Gym
The trend in home exercise lately has been heading towards a more electronic direction. Integrating the electronics that are in their lives into their workouts comes naturally to most people including myself. Some of the best electronic helpers come from the same device: the Wii.
When the Wii Fit and its Balance Board were first introduced, it caused a sensation. Some predicted that it would become the best selling electronic device ever, while some thought it would fade into obscurity. Well, its safe to say that the former was right and the latter was way off.
The Wii Fit’s Balance Board became the electronic item that you had to get your hands on but couldn’t. And that lasted for well over a year. The Balance Board is great for improving your balance, posture and strengthening your core. But for a great gym workout, I’d recommend another product from the Wii’s arsenal.
EA Active, released in 2009, is exactly what I needed. It is an ideal home gym exercise. Wii Fit felt too much like a game. EA Active definitely has some fun moments, but for the most part it is an electronic trainer that pushes you to workout harder than you would on your own volition. Using the included resistance bands, you get a real workout. The leg strap allows the Wii to accurately track your movements so that it can tell you if you need to run faster for the running section of squat or lunge lower for the most effective workout.
The game features a bunch of already designed workouts as well as an easy interface to set up your own workout. Its main selling point is its 30 Day Challenge designed to introduce you to all of the workout options get you on the path to a healthier life.
My original gripe with the Wii Fit was that you couldn’t queue up a workout. You had to go back to the menu and pick your next workout, which got to be quite tedious. This has been fixed with Wii Fit Plus which can be purchased with or without the Balance Board. There are several options for different gym exercises as well as a new way of setting a calorie goal for your entire workout.
There several other fitness games out there as well, and they are starting to get smart by synching up all the different accessories and coming up with some new ones making it a multi gym of sorts. One that looks awesome is a dumbbell set that connects with your Wii Remote to increase your workout. With so many pieces of equipment, a variety of games and the technology improving exponentially, it is clear that the Wii is soon becoming a vital component of any home exercise gyms.
Click here to see some fantastic Wii Fitness related items.