Where To Find Free Home Exercise Equipment: It’s Closer Than You Think

When it comes to exercising, people will find every excuse in the world to not exercise. Often times it’s that they lack the proper equipment, clothes, or space. The truth is that you don’t need to have the best and latest equipment or your own home gym to exercise in your house. By using some commonly found items in your house, you can design a challenging and efficient workout with absolutely no expense to you. Things like backpacks, kitchen counters, laundry detergent containers, walls, stairs and of course your own body weight will become your very own exercise equipment. When you take the time to look at common household items with the mindset of “how could I use this in my workouts”, you will find that you have all that you need to starting working out in your home.

Let’s start with the house itself. What can we use to start your workout with a great warm up? Going up and down the stairs is a great way to warm up for your workout. Walk up and down the stairs at your own challenging pace for a minute to get your heart beating and blood pumping. Once you have done this for a minute, then you will then transition from a cardiovascular exercise to a resistance exercise. For this, you can use your own bodyweight. This could be something like push ups to work the upper body, mountain climbers to work the core and lower body, or even body weight squats to work the legs.

After this round of resistance exercise, you will transition back to a cardiovascular exercise, such as running in place. As you may have noticed by that point, we are alternating resistance exercise and cardiovascular exercise for one minute each. By doing this, we are using a principle called active rest, where we are allowing the muscles of the body to relax and not be engaged in resistance exercise, but we are also keeping the body moving and burning calories and keeping our heart rate up.

So what about weights for the resistance portion of our workout? It is recommended that you use items that can take impact and are durable. The first piece of “exercise equipment” that comes to mind is the large laundry detergent containers. The ones with the cap on the top are best; you may also want to wait and use all the detergent and fill the container up for water as a precaution. You can do a lot of different things with the detergent container, such as “dumbbell” rows, for your back, as well as triceps kickback for the triceps.

If you are looking for an easy way to add weight for push ups, triceps dips, or squats, look no further than a backpack. Fill the backpack with something heavy, such as textbooks; you want to make sure that whatever you fill the backpack with does not have sharp corners or anything that can poke you in the back while you are working out. In addition to wearing the backpack on your back, you can also use it as a heavier weight for exercises such as chest press, bent over rows, or dead lifts. If you want a real challenge, you can run up and down the stairs with your backpack on for a minute; this one is a real challenge.

Another place to look for your new exercise equipment would be the kitchen. You can use the corner where two pieces of the kitchen counter meet to do triceps dips, and abdominal work, such as leg raises or knee-ups. You can also use the counter for the 

triceps extension exercise. This is where you put your hands down on the counter and hold your body at an angle and use just your triceps to raise and lower your body. Use this exercise after you are done with a set of triceps kickbacks with the laundry detergent container, and your triceps will be set.

Another super simple option that is often overlooked is something as simple as a wall. You can do wall sits, in which you hold your back against the wall and lower down as if you were going to sit in a chair, and hold this position for anywhere from fifteen seconds to a minute.

Feel free to be creative and try a combination of different things. You can always put your backpack on and use a stair to raise and lower yourself on, doing calf raises. You can always use the door frame as a support and do one-legged squats, bracing yourself against the door frame; the options are endless when you look at your house as your gym and the ordinary things contained within it as your exercise equipment. In the end, you can get a challenging, fun workout in your own home; all it takes is a bit of creativity and the willingness to get up and work out! Enjoy!