The Truth About Fitness Equipment
Now is the time of year when people are being bombarded with advertisements for fitness products of every kind. If you are wanting to lose weight you probably have considered one or more exercise machines as a possible way to lose weight and start shedding the pounds. Unfortounately for you, there is a grim reality about exercise machines that most people just don’t seem to understand…
Fitness equipment and exercise machines don’t work unless you do!
That is to say, they are only as useful as you make them. If you don’t use them, they are very, very expensive paperweights. That’s it. They aren’t even the most attractive decorations. They take up a lot of space. It’s not cool to buy an exercise machine only to let it collect dust.
Most people are guilty of this and it’s not like I can blame you. I grew up in a house with a very nice little home gym in our basement with weights, an exercise bike (with an uncomfortable seat), and even a nice rowing machine.
I don’t think anyone in our family ever got much use out of any of it. For maybe one year my brother used it quite a bit and it helped him get into fantastic shape. Othewise, nobody really made much use of them.
Over the years our family accumulated even more equipment. Eventually I think my parents threw all of it away or maybe gave it to Goodwill.
The point is that hundreds of dollars were spent on machines with the intention of “saving money” by not joining a gym. On that point it worked. We never joined a gym and so that’s one less bill each month.
It’s just that we never made much use of the equipment either. It took up space for years and when we moved, the equipment moved with us, which was a huge pain. In the second house, it still didn’t get used much.
If you go on to Craigslist for your city, you’ll probably find tons of weight benches, treadmills, and so on that all have the same empty promises – save money by putting the equipment in your own home and not paying to use it at a gym.
Now, for some people a home gym can work wonders. Some people are too lazy to go to the gym to work out, but they can find the time to do something in their own home. To those who can make that work, that’s awesome. I commend them.
For the rest of us, I can just say that most of the different kinds of fitness equipment can work incredibly well….IF YOU USE THEM.
Exercise machines are by their very definition designed to help you exercise, which means you have to move your body and exert enough energy to sweat. If you aren’t sweating, you probably aren’t working hard enough to get the real benefits of exercise.
To get a good workout you should work up a good sweat.
To work up a sweat you need to actually USE the exercise machines that you own or the weights or the fitness DVD’s or whatever your workout program is.
That’s all there is to it. If you want to get in shape, you just need to actually put the work in to get there.
If you aren’t willing to put in the hours of exercise over weeks and months of training, you can’t expect to see results.
Just look at a show like The Biggest Loser. Do the trainers have the contestants just going for an easy walk around campus? Do they just do some simple, slow biking? Of course not!
On that show people get off their butts and the trainers force them to work out hard for hours at a time if need be. That’s the only way they are going to see the results that they need to see to be health human beings.
Is it starting to sink in yet?
The reason those people lose weight so fast is because they work incredibly hard to get there. I don’t mean just 20 minutes a day 2 or 3 times a week. I’m not talking about 8 minute abs. I’m talking about working hard for an hour or more every day. That’s how hard they are working to lose the weight and get fit.
How are they doing it? They aren’t working hard by sitting on a couch watching television. They’re using the machines and the training available to them.
That’s what you need to do. You need to use the equipment that is avilable to you in your own home or gym or whatever. If you have a treadmill, USE IT. If you have some weights, USE THEM.
If you don’t have fitness equipment littering your house and you want to get in shape, no problem. Buy a fitness DVD like P90X, Tae Bo, or something from Jilian Michaels for like $10-20 and USE IT.
It doesn’t matter what kind of exercise route you go. If you work out hard for say 1 hour a day, 3-4 times a week, 52 weeks a year, you’ll see results. If you aren’t willing to work hard and USE IT, then don’t expect to lose any weight or look like some kind of fitness model.
