Consumers Digest

fitness equipments? Best exercise equipments?

I'm looking for home exercise equipments. It should be good, but not so expensive. please give me an advice.

Public Comments

1. http://www.myhomefitnessreview.com strives to be the best source for Home Exercise Equipment Reviews. this site has fitness equipment reviews that look at the top exercise equipment for home use.
2. Most home equipment is expensive. (ex. Bowflex) The cheapest home workout things you can get is a: Door gym, it goes in your door and you do pull ups / chin ups on it. You should probably also get an exercise ball to do crunches and balance exercise. I would also get some free weights and use those. (I recommend getting free weights a little bit heavier than you can handle as lifting heavier weight builds muscles better than low weight / high reps)
3. If you are planning for the long term go with an Olympic free weight set. Dumbbells and barbells. The reason for this is if you buy a weight machine you will run out of weights. Most have only 210 lbs or so of resistance. When you reach that your screwed. If your doing squats and deadlifts you will reach 210 lbs in a year or so. Then your weight machine is useless. Go for an Olympic set because most standard barbells weight limits are like 300 lbs. After 300 lbs you will end up having to buy the Olympic weights any way and if your old weight set is a standard set (they have a one inch bar and holes in the weights) it won't fit on the Olympic bar (2 inch ends) so they will be useless and you will have to buy Olympic weights (the ones with the two inch holes in them). You also need to buy a bench. This is tricky. With some benches the supports seem to go exactly when you need to grip the bar. This for some reason is not uncommon. When you buy your bench make sure that you can grip the bar where you need to when it is on the bench. Other accessories would be a chin up bar, a squat rack or cage (for safety if your don't have a spotter for the bench press and when doing squats getting like 300 +lbs into the air and on your back isn't easy nor safe), maybe get a bench or a cage with a pulley system. Also don't get fixed weight dumbbells. The ones that are a single piece of metal and you can't change the weight. And don't get the quick weight dial a weight dumbells because after 50 lbs or so they are also useless in a year or two and you have an expensive piece of junk. You can buy most of this stuff used. It is not hard to find. Look in your buy and sell or walmart, etc... Also don't forget to check the maximum weight that your bench can hold. Some are less than others as with barbells. You can also buy a set of free weight dumbbells and a bench (that inclines and maybe declines). From this you can get a reasonable work out. And it is the cheapest way to go. To summarize : Olympic weight set, bench (that goes incline and has the barbell holders the right distance apart)
4. Fitness equipment for what? Muscle gain? Fat loss? It's not what piece of equipment you have, but how you use it. You would be better off joining an inexpensive gym and buying a good program. Here is a good place to start http://www.workoutanswers.com