What Is The Best Fitness Equipment? It Depends On Your Goals
There are many people searching the Internet for the best fitness equipment. But just typing "best fitness equipment" into your favorite search engine and seeing what comes up probably isn't going to get you where you want to go. First of all, everybody selling fitness equipment is going to tell you theirs is the best. So you'll find a lot of marketing people making claims and citing research, but that really doesn't help you that much.
The problem is that the 'best fitness equipment' really doesn't exist. Or more accurately, it exists in a different form for different people. In order to determine what equipment is optimal for your goals, you need to first determine exactly what those goals are. Too often, when people decide begin a fitness program, their goals are very ambiguous. 'I want to lose some weight', 'I want to get in shape'. Admirable intentions, but really not focused enough to get you succesfully to your objective. You need to be more specific - 'I want to lose ten pounds of fat and see my abs', or 'I want to gain ten pounds of muscle and increase the size of my biceps by one inch' are much better. When your goals are specific, you can choose the equipment that will help you achieve those specific goals.
If you've read any of the other articles on this site, you'll know that I believe that it's not usually necessary to have access to a lot of fancy equipment to meet most goals. There are exceptions, such as when rehabilitating an injury, but most people can do fine with some simple equipment, rather than buying a complex piece of machinery or joining a gym to get access to one.
If you want to lose ten pounds, you could buy a treadmill or elliptical trainer. And if you really enjoy doing those types of exercise, and have room for the machines, that's great. Go for it. But if you don't have the room, and your pocketbook isn't currently up to the purchase, or joining a commercial gym, don't fret. You can perform aerobic exercise in many different ways. You could walk briskly, or jog or run when the weather's amenable. When it's not, you can get yourself a jump rope for ten dollars that'll give you all the aerobic work you can handle. Or try a circuit of bear crawls, mountain climbers, and walking lunges in your house. This'll give a great fat burning aerobic workout with many of the additional advantages of strength and interval training added. If you want to build up your upper body, you could buy a multi-gym or join a commercial gym and use the upper body machines. But you can also pick yourself up a used weight bench, weight plates, and bars and get the same results for a lot less money. If you don't have the room for the weight bench setup, try bodyweight exercises such as pushups and dips. You can make these harder by varying the position of your arms and feet, or buying some inexpensive products that use elastic resistance to increase the difficulty. Chin-ups and pullups are also great exercises, and you can get pullup bars that stow away in a closet and snap into a door frame in five seconds when it's time for a workout. So you can see that trying to find the best fitness equipment is an exercise in futility unless you first examine your goals. Not only will that help you to find the equipment that will work for you, but it may save you a lot of money in the process!
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