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

Whatever the reason, you have to build some resistance exercises into your daily routine. Unfortunately, if you're like most people, you can't always make it to the gym normally as you would like. A great choice to this problem is to do some or your entire workouts in a home gym.

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

Of course your training goals need to play a big role in determining the type of equipment that's best for your home gym, which means this article will assume a couple of things: we will assume that you are NOT a competitive bodybuilder (in the event that you were, talk of carving out a little spot in your basement would be blasphemous), we shall also assume that you want your workouts to build up functional strength in addition to 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 would give you the chance to do a very wide range of exercises, involving both pushing and pulling movements. To find the most out of the dumbbells, you'll need either to buy a number of different pairs as a way 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 good thing about dumbbells-or any dumbells, for that matter-is they force lots of muscles, as well as the ones you're specifically attempting to build, to help out. Do you know what? That's what happens in real 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 has drawbacks, however. As your strength increases you will need to work harder in one or even more aspects of your exercise plan to keep improving: intensity (the number of weight), volume (the amount of repetitions of each exercise), and technique. As a way to continue adding more intensity, you will have to buy more weights, which can become expensive and eat up even more space.

A recent development in exercise equipment will be, for many, precisely 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," also it was developed by a group of U.S. Navy SEALs so they could maintain peak conditioning and strength w here ver on earth they happened to be.

The bottom line is, suspension training involves a couple of adjustable straps that mount to a ceiling or higher the door hook, which enables you to do an almost unlimited variety of exercises using your body weight. I could 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, and so forth can add to the intensity of every exercise. And because there aren't any set weights (think of the plates in a barbell set or Nautilus-type machine), you can continually adjust your training as your strength improves.

The power of suspension training-which forces all those supporting muscles to pitch in-to go beyond the training your body weight provides is seen in a simple example. Maybe you are acquainted with the "plank." If not, 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 physical 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 wear out and shake within 15 seconds!