Home Gym Equipment: Guy Gear

By Kevin Neeld
Fitness Expert

Men are leading increasingly time-crunched lifestyles, and it’s a struggle to find the time to make it to the gym. Even worse, it’s a struggle to maintain a high-intensity attitude at the gym next to the all-too-prevalent population that only goes to the gym to socialize and the spandex-covered aerobics enthusiasts.

Luckily, there’s a solution for you, a solution that will likely save you a lot of time and money: a home gym with home gym equipment.

At first, building your own home gym may seem like an intimidating task, but it’s really pretty simple. The key is to identify the various aspects of an effective training program and find the home gym equipment you’ll need to excel in each area. Any comprehensive training program should include resistance training, core training, conditioning (or aerobic training), and flexibility work.

As stated, cardio is integral to a training program, but we’ve decided to omit such equipment from this list because there are ways to achieve aerobic fitness. Get outside and find some ground-based training to do (jogging, sprints, pushing or pulling a sled, cross-country skiing, biking, or climbing), because it really is superior to running on a treadmill.

So where should you start when looking at home gym equipment? The training tools below will give you everything you need to start building a results-driven home gym.


home gym equipment

Perfect Pushup
The push-up is one of the most underrated upper-body movements out there. It’s a great exercise to develop the chest, anterior shoulder and triceps musculature and to reinforce proper core stability through the midsection.

The Perfect Pushup offers two major advantages over just doing push-ups on the floor: safety and variety. Don’t get us wrong, push-ups are not an inherently dangerous exercise. However, some guys have limited range of motion in their wrists and find that push-ups hurt. Using the Perfect Pushup allows you to maintain a neutral wrist position, which completely alleviates this problem.

The Perfect Pushup also allows you to create slightly different stresses to the body without completely changing the exercise, which is the perfect recipe for continuous results and development. With the Perfect Pushup you can do your push-ups with a neutral grip (greater elbow range of motion and, therefore, slightly greater force production from the triceps), a 45-degree grip, an overhand grip, and a rotating grip (neutral grip at the bottom of the push-up, overhand grip at the top). Altering these grips will allow you to create a slightly different stimulus to your body and prevent you from plateauing or getting stale.

Retail price: Starts at $29.95


Iron Gym
The Iron Gym is a must-have piece of home gym equipment. You can set it up in less than five minutes and it provides options for a complete upper body workout; we’re unaware of any similarly priced item that allows such a diverse selection of effective exercises. While the Iron Gym allows you to do push-ups on the floor, the primary benefit of the Iron Gym is the variety of upper-body pulling exercises you can do with it.

Using the Iron Gym, you can do wide and narrow grip chin-ups (underhand grip), pull-ups (overhand grip) and alternate grip chin-ups (one overhand, one underhand grip), and neutral grip chin-ups (hands facing in). That boils down to seven different pulling exercises you can do, without diving into the exercises involving pulling with a greater emphasis on one side.

You can also use the Iron Gym to do a variety of hanging abdominal exercises, with the added bonus of using your upper back and arm musculature to support your body weight instead of taking the lazy way out and resting your elbows in hanging slings.

Retail price: $40


Heart rate monitor
Regardless of your training goals, it’s helpful to know the cardiorespiratory stress you’re putting on your body. Heart rate monitors are the best reasonably priced tool available to the general public that allows you to get an idea of the physiological stress you’re placing on your body.

Monitoring your heart rate can have profound implications for fat loss and fitness training. Recently, there has been an increase in the attention paid toward resistance training and body weight circuits for fat loss. These circuits allow you to build muscle mass, while working at an intensity that rapidly burns calories and creates an oxygen deficit within the body that keeps your metabolism increased for hours after your training session. By wearing a heart rate monitor, you can ensure that the circuit is elevating your heart rate sufficiently to create the desired stress to your body.

Retail price: Polar RS300X G1 at $249.95


PowerBlock Dumbbells
The final piece of the puzzle for creating an effective home gym is to add some form of external resistance to your exercises. PowerBlock Dumbbells are a unique piece of equipment that allows you to change the weight of the dumbells in either 2.5, 3 or 5 pound increments (depending on which model you go with) and provide a resistance of up to 90 pounds per hand. This is a great concept. This means you can replace an entire dumbbell set up to 90 pounds with just one set of PowerBlock Dumbbells.

Dumbbells lend themselves well to a variety of lower-body exercises and upper-body exercises for a near total-body workout. As we mentioned with the Perfect Pushup and Iron Gym, you can perform all of these upper-body exercises with a variety of grips to slightly alter the stimulus/stress to your body.

Retail price: 2.5-50 pounds per dumbbell at $359

Kevin Neeld, CSCS, has helped athletes of all ages fulfill their athletic potential. Through the application of functional anatomy, biomechanics and neural control, Kevin specializes in guiding athletes to optimal health and performance. He is also the author of Hockey Training University’s Off-Ice Performance Training Course. To learn more about how Kevin can help you achieve your training goals, visit www.KevinNeeld.com or contact him via e-mail at kn@kevinneeld.com.


source: askmen.com