Sunday, February 12, 2017

Working Out At Home


I've never put much effort into working out at home. I like the camaraderie and inspiration of other dedicated fitness seekers and bodybuilders at the gym, a big motivator for me. But YouTube has changed that. Due to it being a 90-minute roundtrip drive to the gym, I struggle with that investment of drive time, since the workout itself is 90 minutes.
I currently go to the gym twice a week and work out 3 days a week at home ever since investing some time in the vetting YouTube videos, of which there are literally thousands. With 50 years of workouts under my belt, where I’ve tried just about everything, my experience allows me to decide without much trouble when someone offers me a great idea. 
I’ve promoted Mike Thurston’s videos here before, but there are others who provide knowledge and insight as well, and as I discover them I will share with you.

As the owner of a Flexsolate Gym In A Bag, I had never given its fitness bands a fair shake. My thinking was, after using heavy weights, fitness bands were for underachievers and grandmothers. A couple of YouTubers have changed my mind. I followed along with them and found their instruction surprisingly challenging, and soon saw a real change in the shape and cuts of certain muscle parts. Eric Janicki has very challenging chest and shoulder workouts utilizing fitness bands and bodyweight:



Chest for me is a challenge, and results have lagged compared to other body parts in my case, but recently I found this intense exercise by Jeff Cavaliere at Althlene-X that I do with fitness bands and a fabric handle rather than a hard plastic or metal handle, despite the instructor using a pulley:



As my confidence in the ability of fitness bands to be of significant benefit grows, allowing me to have very satisfying at-home workouts, I have searched YouTube for both fitness band workouts and pulley workouts, substituting fitness bands for the pulleys.

Fitness bands are surprisingly cheap on Amazon.com. You’ll want the fabric loop handles which offer more freedom of movement than hard plastic, thus placing less strain on joints. My Gym In A Bag retails for the outrageous price of $159.00, but almost the same equipment can be had for $20 more or less at Amazon:



The king of home workouts is Scooby. He demonstrates that not having a home workout bench is no obstacle at all:



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