Toning Machines

Keeping fit in a busy life involves regularly making time to work out, but schedules often interfere with plans and sometimes mean skipping exercise classes for meetings or activities with the family. A popular way to ensure those sessions are kept up is to have some gym equipment on hand at home.

Exercise Wheel

The exercise wheel is one of the most popular and inexpensive items of basic exercise equipment found in homes. The Everlast model we tried cost $15.00 and offers a double wheel design for added stability. Great for stomach crunches, a specific for abdominal exercises, it develops upper arm and shoulder strength.

A slow start is recommended for those who have not used the wheel with proper instruction, at a gym, for example. Starting out with 3 sets of 12 repetitions a day may seem too slow, but shows results fast. It takes persistence to get the correct form, which is important to avoid any injury, but results were visible after only two weeks of use. Those who experience difficulty with grip can benefit from using a pair of exercise gloves with the wheel.

Hand Weights

Especially popular with women, these now come in a variety of colors and sizes to perfectly match the décor as well as weight requirement. They are excellent for aerobics, step training, upper arms, shoulders and back strengthening and the non-slip coating makes them easy to keep hold of. Depending on what exercises are used, the weights defiantly are effective at toning muscle groups. Priced at $9.00 for the two pound size, they are a good addition to the home gym and easily kept within reach at the office, for some 15 minutes sessions to keep the blood flowing while sitting over a hot computer.

Medicine Balls

A very versatile piece of equipment, this ball can be used for a variety of exercises to work on upper and lower-body toning, core exercises and swings and rotational movements. We tried the 6 pound model with two handles for greater security of grip, which costs $40.00 from Body Solid Tools. The ball was added to an existing set of exercises and succeeded in raising the level of the workout.

Bow Style Exercisers

These versatile tools have an advantage of portability for travel and office use and cover a large range of exercises. We tried the Steel-Bow Bullworker which is fully adjustable for different heights and strengths, an improvement over earlier models, meaning more than one size of person can use it. It come with instruction DVDs, making learning the techniques correctly is easy for beginners. The speed with which the workouts can be carried out was impressive and the results were consistently good. This model costs $70.00.

Large Full Body Toning Machines

The important feature to look for in the larger machines is that the basic exercises usually done at the gym can be performed. These include bench presses, bent over rows, leg presses, pull-ups, shoulder presses and dead lifts. Home gyms are considered inferior to free weights by body builders, but for general toning needs they can provide a good total body work out. The most efficient way to use these full body toning machines is to do large compound exercises that employ as many muscles as possible.

We tried the Powerline BSG10X Home Gym, featuring a useful short assembly design and a 160lb weight stack and found that the 40 different exercises easily met most home gym needs. At $849.00 it was pricier than the cheapest models that typically cost from $500.00. It was chosen for the maximum amount of exercises, strength of components, small amount of space it took up and ease of assembly. (30 minutes)

Just For Abs

Good abdominal muscle tone is very important because those muscles support the back and so the whole skeletal structure. A review of many models that exercise, support and tone this area reveals that the cheaper ones disappoint many who have used them at the gym, because the poor quality of construction. We tried the Club Pro Ab Trainer, not just because Oprah recommends it, but because gyms actually use this model. At $200.00 it is not cheap, but it will safely support exercises specific to toning abdominal muscles.