In most places, gyms have been closed — or not recommended places to visit — for almost a full year, which means home workouts have become de rigueur. Fortunately, it is more than possible to get a good sweat going using equipment and tools inside your home. Unfortunately, equipment and tools for home gyms typically aren’t terrifically styled.
Workout Equipment for a Stylish Sweat Session
If you anticipate continuing to workout at home even after gyms reopen, you might want to invest in more attractive exercise equipment. Here are a few ideas for a stylish sweat session.
Marble or Wood Weights
Training with weights is one of the most effective ways to build muscle and lose fat, but the dumbbells most people buy aren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing. Most often, weights are unsightly metal, perhaps covered in a brightly colored rubber-plastic — not exactly objets d’art worthy of displaying in a room with sophisticated design.
Because you likely don’t need a significant free weight set for your home gym, you might consider investing in a few weights of more aesthetic material, like marble or wood.
Though much pricier than the typical hammered metal or rubber dumbbells, these options also double as gorgeous decorative pieces within your home.
Yoga Pillows
The beauty of yoga is that it needs no equipment. Pretty much anywhere, you can fall into a flow that helps center your mind and tone your body.
However, to improve your practice, you can invest in a number of yoga tools, and one of the most attractive for your home is the yoga pillow.
Yoga pillows help to support the body in vulnerable positions, which can allow you to relax more deeply or push yourself in certain ways without compromising form and endangering your body.
You can find yoga pillows and covers that double as attractive accent pillows for your furniture or complement your room’s décor on their own.
Wall-mounted Stall Bars
Adding texture to walls — with art, wallpaper or molding — is growing in popularity. An intriguing way to add texture to a space you use for exercise is to attach a stretching rack or a series of workout bars to your walls.
Wooden stall bars can blend attractively into décor while providing you a functional space to stretch, balance, attach resistance bands and more.
Even better, you can DIY your own wall-mounted bars relatively inexpensively, and considering that stall bars facilitate many bodyweight exercises, this is an excellent option if you are looking for a budget-friendly home gym solution.
WaterGrinder
Perhaps the only product on this list that is truly one-of-a-kind, the WaterGrinder is a resistance machine that uses a basin of water to help you build strength.
Unlike other strength training machines, the WaterGrinder is compact, so it can be kept in the corner of a room rather unobtrusively. Even better, the WaterGrinder is made from exceedingly attractive materials, sleek wood and metal, so when not in use, it looks more like a sculpture than a piece of exercise equipment.
You might consider investing in this tool, or its sisters the WaterRower or Sprintbok, if you want a workout machine that puts design first.
Giant Mirror
In truth, you can get fit at home without any equipment whatsoever if you have sufficient experience with bodyweight training.
However, even the most committed calisthenics athlete prefers to workout in front of a mirror, which provides greater insight into how the body is moving and where form can be improved.
Fortunately, giant mirrors are very much a staple of sophisticated room design. You might splurge on a floor mirror, which you can anchor to the wall and use to monitor yourself during your workouts, but you should at least have a larger wall mirror in your exercise space.
As with the wall-mounted stall bars, you can DIY a huge mirror by ordering a custom mirror from a local mirror cutter and crafting a frame at home.
Wrap-Up
Your home gym doesn’t have to look like the industrial workout spaces frequented by fitness enthusiasts. By selecting a handful of attractive and well-crafted pieces of equipment, you can ensure your home remains as aesthetically pleasing as ever.
You might even feel more compelled to start a sweat session if you have stylish tools to help you reach your fitness goals.
