Looking for some home fitness or home gym equipment? Confused by the endless reviews for Bowflex, Nautilus, Nortic Track, Golds Gym, Weider, Schwin [and about 100 other] types exercise equipment?
Well, it’s your lucky day. After thousands of hours spent reading exercise equipment reviews, opinions, and ratings, I can tell you with 100% certainty what the best home or gym exercise equipment is:
It’s the equipment you’ll really use.
It really doesn't matter what brand you buy. Just shop around and don't buy off brand junk. Fitness equipment is like a car. You can spend a little, or you can spend a lot. Regardless of the price, a cheap car will get you where you want to go just like an expensive car. Likewise, fitness equipment will exercise your body whether it costs $50 or $5000.
A majority of fitness equipment comes from China. For example, Icon Health and Fitness makes all these brands: Nordictrack, HealthRider, Proform, Reebok, Weslo, Image, Weider, and JumpKing. Since one company makes them all, do you think the difference is all that great?
So when people ask me to offer a impartial rating of exercise equipment, my answer is the same: What do you want to use it for? In other words, the type of equipment you need is more important than the brand. So decide what your objective is first, then hop online and read some honest consumer reviews of exercise equipment.
For example, I don’t like running. So the worlds most expensive treadmill wouldn’t do me much good. However, I don’t mind the low impact cardio you get with a stair stepper or elliptical machine. In all reality, I could put some bricks in a backpack and go up and down some stairs for about twenty minutes- and get just of good of a workout- or even a better one- than I would get from even the best exercise equipment.
That being said, I highly recommend whatever exercise equipment you’re reviewing- you try it before you buy it. When I went to buy a new elliptical, I tried about 10 different ones. The one I bought didn’t come after reading a bunch of consumer reviews of exercise equipment, it came from deciding which one felt the most comfortable. A few machines felt awkward, a few others, the stride was too long. So the best fitness equipment for me wasn’t a matter of name brand or price, it was which machine did I think I would actually use.
So sure, look up exercise equipment reviews on line [just be careful the review is written by someone that’s not selling the machine]. Just like most everything, you get what you pay for. The most critical part is this: Don’t count on any machine to change your habits for you. That’s why the classifieds are so full of hardly used home fitness equipment. If you want to save A LOT of money, change your exercise habits first. That takes about three or four weeks for most people.
If you can’t exercise consistently everyday for a month by just going for a walk or any other activity that gets you moving, the best exercise or fitness equipment in the world isn’t going to change that for you.
As much as hate to always bring this up, you need to remember the reality of the situation: Nearly 2 out 3 Americans are overweight or obese, while spending over 40 billion dollars annually on diet, weight loss, gym memberships, and fitness equipment.
If you can change your habits on your own, great. If you can’t, I highly recommend you read New Body New Life first. It will help you see your unhealthy habits, but most important, it will show you how to change them over to healthy ones. At $39.95, it’s just the fraction of the cost of most of the fitness equipment you can buy. Check it out, you have 60 days to look it over. It could save you ten times that much.