The Top Ten Home Gym Essentials

As a personal trainer running a business out of a small home gym, the following are my top ten absolute essentials, without which you will be unable to perform many of the most effective exercises to get yourself fit, strong and healthy. They also don’t have any good alternatives, to take a treadmill as an example, you CAN run outside and save yourself the space for something more essential, like a…

- Suspension Band

A suspension band is my first pick for a truly essential piece of equipment, while you can do pushups, squats, planks and good mornings with just your body-weight and nothing else. Rows aren’t doable without a suspension band, unless you have a perfect table or beam to hang off of, but even then making them more or less difficult is impossible without more equipment. Grab yourself a suspension band, hang it on the door, on a tree or a sturdy beam in the ceiling and do any row you like, as well as many other exercise variations; like a supported squat, a bicep curl or a modifiable pushup.

- Weights

The next essential would be weights, while body-weight exercises will get you strong, fit and muscular, they aren’t the ideal; weights are. An external resistance which allows you to progressively overload the muscles by adding more weight to virtually any movement over just your body. This is the stimulus to which your muscles adapt, growing bigger and stronger over time, as you increase the additional weight or resistance while keeping everything else constant.

- Barbell

If you’ve gotten yourself a set of weights, the next essential will be a barbell. While you can definitely hold onto a 20kg plate and do squats with that, eventually you will want to continue increasing that resistance and that’s where a barbell comes in. Designed to hold many more plates that you’ll probably ever need, a barbell is a very stable and safe way to add external resistance to your exercises. There’s a reason why most compound lifts are loaded on a barbell, like the deadlift, squat and bench press.

- Squat Rack

The fourth essential will be a squat rack, without which you will not be able to get the loaded barbell onto your back for a squat, unless you get very creative with it and in the process potentially injure yourself. This goes for many other movements too, a bench press is hard to get going without a rack, as is an overhead press, and you don’t want to be spending most of your energy and focus getting the bar into position before a heavy lift.

- Dumbbells

While not as essential as a barbell, dumbbells bring a different stimulus to the mix. A barbell is more stable, more easy to control and therefore more easy to load up heavy. While dumbbells are less stable, less easy to control and the weight you use will need to be dropped in response, but this may not be a bad thing. This instability also provides more freedom of movement, allowing your muscles to go through a fuller range of motion on some exercises when compared to the barbell (Arnold press vs overhead press), that instability also forces the stabilising muscles to work harder than with a barbell, causing more development.

- Adjustable Bench

A bench is our sixth essential home gym piece, while you can do the bench press off the floor just fine, that and many other exercises won’t be the same without a steady adjustable bench. A fairly inexpensive piece of equipment that doesn’t have to take up much space and is very versatile too, any exercise where you need a platform off the floor can be done with just a single adjustable bench; split squats, dips, incline chest flyes… or also just sit on it while picking the music for the session.

- Bands

Resistance bands provide a different type of resistance to your free weights, a steady tension the further you pull them, they come with a host of new exercises you can do that wouldn’t be doable with a barbell and dumbbells unless you invested in a much more expensive and bulky cable machine. Another plus side to bands, like with the suspension band, is that you can pack it down and take it with you on the road.

- Gymnastic Rings

Gymnastic rings are our eighth essential item, for this you will definitely need a sturdy beam or tree to hang off of, but if you can find one, gymnastic rings will add another level of challenge to body-weight exercises. Imagine pull-ups, dips and hanging leg raises, just less stable and more difficult than usual. Again, something you can pack up and potentially bring with you to train anywhere, provided you do have a sturdy beam.

- Kettle-bell

A kettle-bell is the ninth essential on the list, another type of free weight just in a different form. The unique shape of the kettle-bell allows you to swing and rotate it freely while keeping a steady grip, opening up the potential for more exercises which a barbell and dumbbell wouldn’t allow you to do, at least not comfortably. Exercises like kettle-bell swings, the pull-over and the single arm overhead snatch.

- Mirror

The final essential piece of home gym equipment may come as a surprise, and you probably already have one laying around, but it’s not just for checking out all the gains you’ve made. Watching yourself in the mirror is a great way to recognise and realise what you are doing form-wise, whether you are performing the exercise in a way that is correct and safe and where you might want to focus and improve. And of course, a great tool for seeing your own progress, never mind what we said before.