Covid-19 has got many people in a spin about fitness as lockdown has made it difficult to exercise. There are many bodyweight exercises you can do in the comfort of your own home but it’s not quite the same as using a fancy bit of kit. Luckily, we live in an age where technology is constantly developing and equipment is becoming more affordable to the masses. This means we can have gym level equipment in our own home.
Here we take a look at smart fitness equipment you seriously need to consider getting for your home.
Mirrors
Yes, that’s right, a mirror. Fitness mirrors are the latest on the scene and once you’ve taken a look it’s hard to think how it wasn’t invented before. Take your normal conventional mirror, fill it with technology, cameras and WiFi and you have yourself a fitness mirror. You can take thousands of classes with equally as many instructors standing in your front room. There are two leading brands in the fight for the top spot in the world of fitness mirrors, so take a look at this comparison to understand the features of both. It’s better to assess your needs as an athlete and invest in something that’s going to be useful to you. Fitness mirrors look like the future and I’m sure they will be a staple in many houses in the coming years.
Exercise Bike
These things are brilliant, and with new technology, they have only gotten better. An exercise bike is exactly what you think it is, a bike that you can use for exercise indoors. The way things have developed is fantastic, many bikes now come with large display monitors that tell you everything you need to know about your session. How fast you’re going, how many calories you’ve burnt, and with the addition of other bits of kit like a heart rate monitor it can display things with precision accuracy. You can now join spin classes online and my favourite feature of all is putting up a video of riding in the mountains so you feel as though you are somewhere completely different. I will never be able to compete in the Tour De France, but I can cycle the routes in my dining room.
Treadmill
Sometimes the worst thing about going for a run isn’t the run itself, it’s the thought of being so far from home and when you get halfway there’s only one option, run the other half. With a treadmill you can do all of that from the comfort of your own home, you can set your workouts and your goals and go from there. Similar to the exercise bike, new technology has given treadmills heads up displays that bring a new life to something so traditional.
Dumbbells
You might be asking yourself why I’m saying anything about dumbbells at all, and you’re right, they’re classic and how can you develop such a simple weight? Well, for the home gym there has been a fantastic modification in the humble dumbbell. Gone are the days where you needed to buy every weight separately which takes up a huge amount of space. The development has enabled you to have every weight in a single dumbbell and you choose which weight you want and when you pick it up it leaves the rest of the weight on the floor. Such a simple innovation that has saved literally meters of space in people’s home gyms.
Wearables
There are many people that now pride themselves on exercise, and many take it to new levels. There are apps to measure your calorie intake and calories burned which means you can really track your macros and reach your goals. Measuring your calories burned can be difficult without having a monitor. Now, with the development of wearables, we have the capability to see every calorie we have burned due to having heart rate monitors and GPS tracking devices on our wrist. It’s worth mentioning that if you want an accurate reading of your heart rate then it will be best to wear one around your chest as sometimes the wrist ones can be a little temperamental.
Fitness and exercise is something we should all take part in. Whilst the government has plans to try and get all young people exercising there is still a large amount of the global population that is overweight. Exercising helps you in every way, physical and mental, so it’s something you should try! It might feel daunting at first but once you get going, there will be no stopping you.