Top 10 Home Gym Pieces of Equipment You Must Have

Regardless of whether you own a gym membership or not, having workout equipment at home is always a good idea if you want to lead a fit lifestyle. Sometimes your busy schedule may simply push gym time out of your day, making the home gym a real-life saver. Complementing your gym workouts with home workouts is a great idea too, so there’s every reason in the world to equip yourself for training at home.

With that said, today we’re going to look at the top 10 pieces of equipment that you must own for a more or less complete home gym. We’re not going to talk about exercise machines or even weight racks, only simple non-expensive pieces of equipment that don’t take up much space are on the list. However, having all these items you won’t miss gym all that much if you do skip it.

#1 Exercise Bench

A bench is a good piece of equipment to have because there are plenty of seated and elevation exercises that you’ll do, especially with weights. Ideally, get a bench with an adjustable incline level. You can get away with using chairs for many exercises but if you invest in a good bench, you’ll be able to do so much more.

#2 Doorway Pull Up Bar

Pull-up bar exercises are too effective to be skipped so you really can’t afford to have a bar at home. A doorway bar is easily installed and relatively cheap so there’s no reason why you wouldn’t have one.

#3 Resistance Bands

There are many exercises you can perform with resistance bands so it’s really a good piece of equipment to have, especially since it takes no significant space to keep around. Combined with a pull-up bar, resistance bands also make a great makeshift “cable machine” too.

You can get bands of varied resistance (or adjustable tubes) but if you’ll just get one, use the following rule. You should be able to stand in the middle of the band, grab both ends and pull with your arms all the way up for a shoulder press. If you can do that and it provides good resistance – that’s enough to have.

#4 Adjustable Weight Dumbbells

While you can do a lot with your own body weight and resistance bands, weight training is still too important to ignore. So you need dumbbells. In addition to that, an important aspect of weight training is to be able to progress by lifting heavier. That’s why adjustable weight dumbbells are so great – they allow you to progress and they don’t take a lot of space as a set of different weight dumbbells would.

#5 Stability Ball

A stability (or Swiss) ball provides you with a great variety of core exercises so it’s an item that you should really consider too. Having one would be a great help in building that six-pack.

#6 Ab Wheel

Speaking of abs, an ab wheel is probably the best piece of equipment to build abs of steel. You can see ab wheel exercises as advanced versions of planks that will amp up your core strength training. It’s relatively cheap and small, so it’s really a no-brainer to have around.

#7 Jump Rope

Instead of an expensive and bulky treadmill or an exercise bike, get a jump rope. The intensity of jump rope exercises will give you a much better cardio workout than a treadmill ever would.

#8 Stretching Mat

There are a lot of floor exercises that you’ll do at home, so a stretching mat is a good thing to have. Avoid those sweat stains on the carpet or the floor and make exercising much more comfortable with this useful item.

#9 Power Gripper

Your hand grip is very important in exercising as well as in life in general, but aside from indirect training, you’re probably not doing any grip exercises. It’s easy to train your grip anytime you have your hands free, though. A power gripper is perfect for that and you can probably pick it up in your local supermarket.

#10 Medicine Ball

The medicine ball is a weighted ball that you can do a variety of full body exercises with, and while it’s not essential (as you can replace most of the exercises with a dumbbell), it can be a useful extra piece of equipment to have around in your home gym.

So there you have it, the top 10 pieces of workout equipment that will complete your home gym. Most of them are relatively cheap and take very little space so there’s really no reason why you would not get them.