Inner Circle Women

Archive for the ‘Fitness Equipment’ Category

Everyone buys gym memberships with the best of intentions. You plan to go several times a week. You plan to take advantage of classes or sessions with personal trainers. You have every intention of formulating a plan, and sticking to it. The problem is: the gym is too easy to avoid. And the reasons for avoiding it are just too good.

It’s not just laziness. Commute times are getting longer and longer: the last thing you want to do before or after work is spend some more time driving to a gym and fighting for a parking space. That’s assuming you even have the option: if you have kids to pick up or drop off, or chores to do at home, you may simply not have the time you feel you need to get a good workout at the gym.

This is where the benefits of home exercise equipment really show. You can snatch a few minutes here and there on the treadmill while dinner’s cooking. You can watch your kids while you work out. You can watch your own DVD’s in the comfort of air conditioning set to your preference while you use a stationary bike, elliptical or treadmill. You can listen to music you like, set up some aromatherapy that you find inspiring, or do some reading while you exercise. And when you’re done, you can take a shower in the comfort of your own bathroom, with all your favorite shampoos, soaps and towels right there waiting for you.

Most importantly, how many times can you look at a piece of exercise equipment before you run out of excuses? If you’re thinking, “You have no idea how many”, you might be surprised. Every time you see it, you’re reminded of the benefits it offers you, and you start thinking of ways to work it into your schedule almost without trying.

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While treadmills are a great alternative to real running and complicated exercises, however, they are not without their downsides.

To start off with, treadmills can be very expensive, especially if you buy one with all the luxurious special features. By the time you add in sales taxes, delivery charges and all the rest, you’re looking at a pretty significant chunk of change. Of course, there’s nothing saying that you need to get one with absolutely every feature around – if it’s your first treadmill, you’ll be absolutely fine with a more basic model, whatever the salesman might tell you.

The next problem is that treadmills can be very large, and there might not be space in your house. Again, this problem is quite easily solved, as long as you keep your wits about you and realise exactly how big the treadmill you’re buying is, instead of just blindly choosing one that takes your fancy and hoping for the best. There are surprisingly small treadmills on the market for smaller homes – all you have to do is look for them.

Some people complain of loud motors on some cheaper treadmills, and it can be annoying if you’re not used to it. A good solution is to put on the TV or listen to some music, which also helps with the boredom that many people experience when they just run on a treadmill and do nothing else at the same time.

The final point is one that is important to people who are training for actual races. As treadmills have no wind resistance, they are quite unsuitable for training for real outdoor running – you should be getting out there and doing it on a track instead. While a treadmill can come close to simulating wind resistance if you adjust its slope gradient, it’s not good enough for serious training, and you might injure yourself if you run a race after only training on a treadmill.

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It seems like every time you go to the gym, they’ve got another fancy new machine. The number of ways to build exercise machines seems to be almost endless, and coming up with new ideas for them is a lucrative industry. When you look at gym equipment, though, you can pick out some of the most useful and flexible machines and tools, and separate them from the gimmicks.

The number one piece of gym equipment, without question, has to be weights. Weights are just heavy pieces of metal, and yet are a vital ingredient of almost every gym machine, as well as very useful in their own right. Lifting weights can strengthen the majority of the muscles in your body, if you use a variety of lifting techniques.

Beyond that, many classic gym machines replicate real-world sports and activities in order to exercise your muscles. Treadmills, for example, reproduce walking and running, rowing machines allow you to train your arm muscles without actually going out on the water, and exercise bikes simulate cycling. Punching bags allow you to box without an opponent. Each one of these sports simulations has a specific reason for being included, usually that it is good for a specific muscle group, as well as being useful for people who are actually training for the sport in question.

If you’re thinking of buying gym equipment for your home instead of going to the gym, weights are probably the best thing to get, as they are versatile and compact. Machines like treadmills and exercise bikes can be ten times the size of a set of weights, not to mention ten times the price, yet cannot do as much for you as a simple set of weights can. Try not to get caught up in the latest ‘as seen on TV’ gimmick, as most advertised gym equipment will only do anything for one specific muscle group, and even then probably won’t do much for that. Make sure you know exactly what you’re buying and what it will do for you before you make the investment.