Home Exercise Tips

With all our busy schedules these days, sometimes getting to the gym is just more of a time requirement than anything else. And when time is short, the days of going to the gym become less and less. In just a few weeks, you can fall out of your regular exercise routine, and before you know it, several months have gone by and you've put on weight you wished you hadn't. Exercising at home can be the perfect solution to our hectic lifestyles. Here's some tried and true tips to making your home exercise program top notch and long-lasting.

First, figure out what your goals are. Are you trying to lose weight? Are you simply in maintenance mode? Are you trying to tone up or build muscle? The reason that you need to be crystal clear about your goals is because that will determine what type of exercises you will need to do, and in turn that will dictate the equipment that you will need to have in your home gym. Maybe you're in maintenance mode and you don't want to use weights at all. In this case, a cardio machine will do. If you want to build muscle or just tone up the muscle you already have, then you're going to need some weights, even if it's just a simple dumbbell set.

Second, always do a warm up. The minimum warm up is 3 minutes. Just because you're working out at home doesn't mean you can cut corners on this one. I understand that we're exercising at home to save all that time driving back and forth to the gym, but a warm up is critically important. I don't have the room here to explain in detail why (physically) it is very important that you warm up, but always do it. It can be a simple set of body weight exercises to get the blood flowing or walking on the treadmill. Personally, I prefer a warm up that consists of several different body weight exercises that cover off all the major muscle groups. This gets the entire body warmed up, instead of just primarily the legs (when doing walking.)

Third, always make it fun. This is one of the other benefits of exercising at home. You can listen to music while exercising and that keeps it fun. You can also watch the news or some other program on TV, and in this case you can be using your exercise time for double use (like catching up on your favorite TV shows). Of course, you can listen to music at the gym and watch TV as well (in most gyms, but not all). But that always involves head phones. At home, I can just let the boom box blast my favorite music without having to have ear buds in my ears. It's just more comfortable. Making your exercise time fun and efficient will make sure that you actually look forward to it, instead of dreading it as something you "have" to do.