Pull Yourself Up: Home Gyms with Body Weight

The great advantage of using home gyms with body weight resistance is that it takes so little investment in terms of equipment and money. They are proof that you do not have to spend thousands of dollars to get in shape; your own body is the handiest resistance weight you could have.

Using Your Body as a Weight Machine

As you know, lifting free weights such as dumbbells, and pulling/pressing selectorized stacks, cable machines, and even resistance bands, will build muscle but those exercises involve the use of resistance training equipment.

Some of the best home gym exercises you can do, however, involve bodyweight training, which involves lifting only your own body against gravity. You can start with push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and handstand presses—and none of them require any apparatus. You can also take advantage of inexpensive tools specifically designed for exercises that use the body as the source of weight resistance.

Affordable Body Weight Gym Systems

The Weider Club Power Tower ($299) is a freestanding machine on which you can perform dips, vertical knee raises, chin-ups, and pull-ups. The combo machine offers killer body weight exercises to build up your arms and shoulders and burn off the fat around your abs and obliques. This is an excellent home gym for doing “playground monkey bar” exercises—indoors.

The Weider Bodyworks 5000 ($149) has an incline board and four adjustable power bands. You can do dozens of cardio and strength training exercises on this body weight home gym. If you are older, out of shape, or otherwise unable to do even one chin-up, a glideboard would be a good choice for you since you only need to lift a percentage of your bodyweight against gravity. To increase resistance, you can adjust the incline on the board, or add weight to the bar. You will not only improve your strength on a Bodyworks board, you will also get a leaner, toned body.

Weider Home Gyms with Body Weight

The last example of home gyms with body weight resistance is the inexpensive Weider Powermax gym ($49) which comes with three bodyweight training apparatus: the doorway pull-up bar, a pair of rotational push-up stands, and a pair of ab straps. All of these effectively work the upper body.

The quick-attach doorway bar allows you to do chin-ups (palms facing you) and pull-ups (palms down or away). These are excellent body weight exercises for building the biceps and the biceps/back respectively. If you can’t isolate the biceps during 25-lb dumbbell curls, switch to chins and lift a huge weight – your own body! Chins/pulls are also considered by trainers to be vastly superior to lat pull-downs for building back strength in the same way that squats are vastly superior to the leg press for building leg strength. And one last bonus: the doorway bar can also be switched to the bottom of the door frame in seconds, and you can do dips on the floor, or hook your feet and do sit ups and crunches.

The hanging ab straps are actually arm straps; use them if you have a weak grip and/or weak forearm strength. The straps take pressure off your hands and wrists so that you can work the desired set of muscles, i.e., isolating the abs while doing hanging leg or knee lifts. Once you try ab straps, you may not want to use a VKR (vertical knee raise) station ever again.

The push-up stands are the best way to get an inverted bench press at home. The rotating base allows more muscles to come into play during the press, and since the “stands” elevate your hands off the floor, you can press deeper towards the floor, giving your muscles a greater range of motion. They also take the strain off your wrists in the same way ab straps do.

Home gyms with body weight exercises can help you achieve excellent fitness results in a short amount of time. They are easy to use, don’t take up a lot of room, and bodyweight training is affordable for anyone.

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