Home Training: With a Punching Bag, Rowing Machine, Exercise Bike and Elliptical Trainer

I noticed many people are buying equipment for home fitness, such as punching bags, exercise bikes, rowing machines and elliptical trainers. If you have access to all these there are some considerations to be made before starting out.

The equipment you have is all cardiovascular in nature. It will help burn calories, but to change the type of physique you have you will need to do a bit more. You must first set meaningful goals before starting out. What do you want to achieve? If you want big muscles your equipment wont help with that. If you want to burn fat and lose weight it will help - but it will not make you lean or sculpted. You'll stay pretty much as you are, if maybe a little slimmer around the waist. Be aware of what is or is not possible. Then choose a routine to reach your goals.

For cardio conditioning I would suggest you cycle through all the various pieces of equipment on different days - going from upper body to lower body training where possible. An example would be to use the cycle (lower body), punch the bag (upper body), use the elliptical trainer (legs, I guess?) and rower (upper body and a little lower body) - all on separate days. When you have gone through all of them start again at the beginning of the cycle. Train 5 or 6 days weekly.

When you start out keep sessions short. Do just 5 minutes a day of each cardio activity for the first month then add on about a minute each week from them onwards - to give your body time to adapt. If you use a punching bag ensure you can punch correctly and do so lightly when you first start out. If you mess up in the punching you could become arthritic as a result. Many people don't know that you need to learn how to punch and you need to get conditioned to punch correctly - or you'll hurt yourself. I don't advise punching without propoer instruction first.

In addition to this, some sort of full body resistance training is probably required as well. If you don't have a gym with weights and you don't have a set of dumbells or barbells to use then I suggest some basic bodyweight exercises for the legs, midsection, chest, back, shoulders and arms should be used. Find out what is available through simple internet searches. If you can only add one more piece of equipment I would suggest a dumbell or barbell. If you can add two I'd suggest you also add a pullup bar.

Good luck.

Idai Makaya
www.idaimakaya.com