Gym memberships are expensive. And the fact is that for the price of about two months membership you could buy a home gym complete with a weights bench and weights. The benches available now allow the average person who is in reasonably good shape to perform many exercises alone and in safety. This article will help you understand how to evaluate the pros and cons of a home weight system for yourself.
However, one of the most important considerations in selecting home fitness equipment is how are you going to use it? You should select your weight training program first, and then purchase the weight bench and other training equipment to accomodate that program. We proudly recommend the intense and highly effective training programs from our partner, BeachBody, such as the P90X 90-Day Extreme Fitness program and the Insanity Total Body Conditioning program. These programs will help you learn to exercise in a way that is safe, and that will get the kind of results you want so that you know you aren't just wasting your time.
The competitor weights bench is one of the most popular weights benches for sale at the moment. The fact that it comes with weights makes it a good value for starting a home gym. Of course there are a number of weights bench with 100 pound weights sets or similar and any of these will be a good place to start as long as you read the reviews and make an informed decision based on quality, reliability, longevity, and warranty options. When choosing a bench there are a few things to keep in mind, let's take a look.
Before we buy we should think about how we will be training at home. If space is a real issue then you can buy a number of benches that fold up after use. And these also come with squat racks and leg curl so they are a very complete system. You'll be able to do a number of full body exercises to target a variety of muscle groups, in addition to the standard decline and incline bench press, etc. It is probably best to buy a bench that does have a leg curl and leg extension machine as it means you can get much better development without needing any other equipment.
But safety is paramount so we always need to have at the very least a bench with a squat stand so we can rest the barbell after a set is complete. But, and this is important, the best possible buy is a bench with no rack. This means we can then buy a separate power rack. This is the only really safe way to train alone. A power rack allows us to train full out with no risk. We can drop a bar and it will be caught, we can go full out on squats and simply leave the bar at the bottom position.
This is the failing of a bench with a squat rack, we need to be able to push the bar back up. So, if you can afford it then a bench and also a separate power rack is the safest option.
