For so many people out there, going to the gym is an expense.

It’s not just the monthly membership fee, but it’s also about the commuting aspect as well as making sure that your home can you survive without you, which is especially true in the case of parents!

And as so many people struggle with increasing gym fees, the option for many is to exercise at home. But while there are so many resources online to make sure that your whole body gets the benefit of exercise, for many it is a major obstacle.

And with this in mind, what can you do to make sure that you are able to exercise at home effectively?

What is the best way to exercise at home?

How to make exercising at home work for you

Have lots of exercise options

If you’ve got friends that have workout programs like Insanity, then sure, you can very easily get a few of the classes uploaded onto an SD card, but this can create issues if your card doesn’t work and you need to recover corrupted SD card files or you don’t have a working computer.

Exercise needs to be stress free and enjoyable, so it’s better to set yourself up for success and have several ways to exercise at home in case you do run into problems like broken SD cards or laptops!

Here are some options for exercise at home:

Use YouTube to find free workouts
Buy DVDs
Download exercise videos
Make it up yourself
Use flowcharts on Pinterest – you could even print and pin your favourite routine to your wall
Buy some equipment – weights, exercise bike, treadmill, etc.
Run around the garden, if it’s large enough

Shake up the routines

So you have lots of ideas to workout at home, but what can you do to keep yourself motivated? One way to do this is to mix up the routines. The whole point of exercising is to challenge your body and confuse the muscles.

And if you’ve got a smartphone there are so many apps that can guide you as well as fitness programs like Peloton that work exclusively to be a key motivator for those that don’t have the money to go to a gym or the confidence, but instead bring the class to your living room! But even for those people starting out, mixing the exercise routines is more than enough to give yourself that challenge.

Trying different exercise routines is also a great way to work out which ones you enjoy and are therefore likely to stick at.

The importance of quality over quantity

There are so many people out there that don’t have the time to fit in a 45-minute workout. When people are at home and they have other duties, what can they do? It’s time to focus on quality.

A very good example at the moment is the trend towards strength-based resistance training. And specifically, there is a focus on super slow. The super-slow workout can have as much of an effect if not more of an effect than a standard exercise routine.

This borrows from high-intensity training and if you are someone who only has 10 or 15 minutes if you focus on the “big five” movements that challenge your body weight, like the squat and the overhead press but do these really slowly you are going to fatigue the muscle far greater than a typical workout where you are relying on momentum to do a push-up or a squat.

And this is a very important thing to consider, especially when everybody is so busy. When you’re exercising at home there are products that cater towards this like the X3 Bar. When we think about exercising at home we’ve got to figure out the right routines for us as well as focus on quality, but also make sure that we are motivated. If we can say to ourselves that we will finish a workout in 10 minutes, this is a far greater motivator than anything else!

Exercising at home can be a great way to squeeze in exercise if you don’t have enough time to go to the gym or it’s too far away or expensive. Just work out which is the best routine for you and how to work out effectively in your own home.