Basic Home Workout Gear

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A fitness mat is an essential part of your home workout gear. It will let you work out anywhere in your house: on wooden floors, heavy carpets...even outside on the grass if you want! For those with joint pain and problems it will minimize the impact when doing maneuvers such as planks, yoga positions, and balance exercises.

You don't need anything other than a mat to do these challenging and effective home workouts! Here are just a few examples of routines you can find on YouTube and where you'll be putting that exercise mat into use.

Dumbbells or hand weights are definitely a home gym essential. Weights are great not just for building upper body strength but also for adding resistance and weight when doing lower body exercises like lunges and squats. It is advisable to have a variety of different weights available for your workout - some cardio can be enhanced with like 1 or 3 pound weights, where as larger weights are better for strength training. I'd recommend a beginning home exerciser should at least have 1 pound, 3 pound and 5 pound dumbbells on hand; someone with more experience might wish to begin with 3 pound, 5 pound and 8 pound weights.

These are just a few sample exercises and workouts using handweights. Note that you can also use them while doing lower body exercises like lunges - the extra weight in your hands means your legs work harder with every move!

Medicine balls, sometimes called fitness or exercise balls, are also great to have in addition to your dumbbells. They are sometimes used in pilates and core strength building exercises - you can grip one between your knees while doing crunches or other ab exercises, for instance.

In these videos you can see how to add a medicine ball to your strength and cardio home workout routines.

Bigger than a fitness or medicine ball, the balance ball is one of the latest rages in pilates and core exercise routines - and for good reason! These large balls allow you to work on balance while building core strength and flexibility. You can do push ups while on the balance ball, crunches, leg rises and much more. I've recently started using a balance ball myself and really love it - it's great for when I need to work out some tension in my back or simply want to relax a bit while still building core strength.

Stability ball, balance ball, Swiss ball...whatever you call it, this piece of workout gear is great for a variety of different exercises. Here are some short workout videos that show you how you can use it!

As you do more home workout routines, you might find these other pieces of home fitness gear worth adding to your "personal gym".

The kettlebell is a great piece of fitness equipment that can add really challenging exercises to your strengthening and core workouts. Although you can often use a dumbbell instead of a kettlebell, there are some exercises which really require a kettlebell to do properly. This kit comes complete with three different weight kettlebells and a training DVD - you can find plenty of kettlebell workouts online on Youtube as well.

A single fitness band may be all you need instead of an entire set of resistance bands. The fitness band is popular in pilates exercises - you can adjust the length to add more or less resistance as you want, and the handles make it easy to keep your grip while working out.