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You want to lose the belly. That beach vacation is approaching sooner than you expected. You will need more strength and capacity to play your favorite sport. You merely need to get in better shape.

Whatever the reason, you need to build some resistance exercises into your day to day routine. Unfortunately, if you're like the majority of people, you can't always make it to the gym as often as you would like. A great choice to this problem is to do some or your entire workouts in a house gym.

It takes a surprisingly small amount of space to set up an area for resistance exercise. With a little planning (and maybe moving a few dusty, old furniture pieces) and the right equipment you can be up and running in no time.

Needless to say your training goals have to play a large role in determining the type of equipment that's best for the home gym, so this article will assume a couple of things: we will assume that you are Not just a competitive bodybuilder (if you were, talk of carving out a small spot in your basement will be blasphemous), we shall also assume that you want your workouts to build up functional strength as well as a better physique.

The most basic setup you could put together would be a group of dumbbells, a bench, and a pull-up bar. That could give you the possiblity to do a very wide range of exercises, involving both pushing and pulling movements. To have the most from the dumbbells, you would need either to buy several different pairs in order to change the resistance as needed or get a single set of Power Block-type dumbbells, which enable you to quickly go from 5 to 50 pounds in weight selection.

The great thing about dumbbells-or any free weights, for that matter-is they force lots of muscles, in addition to the ones you're specifically attempting to build, to help out. Guess what? Additional info what happens in true to life. You start to enhance your functional strength once you make all those supporting muscles help you move some form of resistance through a flexibility.

Equipping your house gym with dumbbells does have drawbacks, however. As your strength increases you will have to work harder in one or more aspects of your fitness plan to help keep improving: intensity (how much weight), volume (the amount of repetitions of every exercise), and technique. So as to continue adding more intensity, you will need to buy more weights, that may become expensive and consume even more space.

A recent development in exercise equipment will be, for many, just what the doctor ordered for equipping a home gym-and even for being able to do the same workout on the highway. It's called "suspension training," and it was developed by a group of U.S. Navy SEALs so they could maintain peak conditioning and strength wherever on the globe they happened to be.

The bottom line is, suspension training involves a set of adjustable straps that mount to a ceiling or higher the door hook, which lets you do an almost unlimited variety of exercises using your body weight. I can hear the objections now: but how do i keep getting stronger if all I could use is my own body?! Simply changing the angle, hand position, stance width, etc can truly add to the intensity of every exercise. And because there aren't any set weights (think about the plates in a barbell set or Nautilus-type machine), it is possible to continually adjust your training as your strength improves.

The power of suspension training-which forces all those supporting muscles to pitch in-to exceed the training your body weight provides is seen in a simple example. You may be familiar with the "plank." Or even, the plank is basically holding yourself in a perfectly lined-up pushup position, either together with your hands or your forearms contacting the bottom. A popular fitness trainer recently spoke about suspension training and said that he can normally hold a plank for about 2 minutes before his muscles begin to shake. Doing the plank with a suspension training device caused his muscles to start out to degrade and shake within 15 seconds!