There’s been a lot of changes to everyday life recently, and with it, our living rooms have not only temporarily turned into offices as people work from home, but they are also now our gyms. Working out from home has never been more popular (even if that is because it’s been enforced on us somewhat) and there is no shortage of workouts to follow along to on social media to give us plenty of ideas and motivation.
But what happens when you don’t have any dumbbells, kettlebells, or bands at home? What can you use as an alternative to make sure you keep your workouts functional and don’t lose all the progress you’ve made throughout 2019?
Thankfully, our homes are filled with objects that can be substituted in to provide resistance to exercises and provide us with enough stimulus that we can still – at the very least – maintain our physiques.
Below are 8 everyday household items that your can use in place of exercise equipment.
Furniture
Utilising the furniture we have in our homes is an effective way to hit multiple muscle groups during our workouts.
Sofa
One of the heaviest pieces of furniture many of us will have and can use is the sofa. Picking the sofa up at its end is a great way to emulate a deadlift or RDL’s. You can also use it as a replacement for a leg press or bench press by lying underneath the sofa and pushing it up with either your legs or arms (we do however recommend only doing this if you have someone to assist and spot you -safety first!).
Dining chairs
Most of us will likely have at least two dining chairs in our homes. If you want to hit upper body then place to chairs back to back and use them as a homemade dip station to work the chest and triceps; to work your back, place a broom handle across the chairs and you can replicate an inverted row; or use them to emulate a plyo-box and perform incline and decline press ups.
For your lower body, you can use them to perform step ups, single leg squats by placing your back foot on the chairs seat, or assisted pistol squats.
Water Bottles
Water bottles have countless possibilities to be used within our home workouts, mainly because they come in a variety of sizes, allowing for different weights. Using small 500ml bottles can be used for isolation exercises for smaller muscle groups such as side raises or tricep kickbacks; larger, 1 or 2 litre bottles, are an effective substitute for dumbbells with exercises such as lunges, chest fly’s or bent over rows; and if your fortunate enough to have 15 litre water cooler bottles, then they can be used for compound lifts such as squats, deadlifts and chest press.
To make these exercises even more challenging, fill your bottles with sand to increase the weight.
Ruck Sack
It’s time to dust off your old rucksack (or steal your kids, now they’re not at school) and fill it with anything you can find to add a bit of weight. Try books, cans of soup, bags of rice, potatoes or even the water bottles we’ve just discussed.
Your homemade “weighted vest” can now be incorporated into a number of exercises from squats, jumping lunges, press ups or running to increase resistance and make bodyweight exercises extra challenging.
Suitcases
It’s unlikely you’re going to be using your suitcase to go on holiday any time soon, but you can still make the most of a bad situation by using it as a weight for your home workouts instead.
Again, just like your rucksack, fill it with anything that will add sufficient weight for your chosen exercises. Some exercises that it can be used for are shoulder presses, bicep curls, bent over rows and squats or if you have a large enough outdoor space, you can do some strongman conditioning by picking it up and running the length of your garden to emulate loaded carries.
Cloths, Towels and Sheets
When working out at home, we are going to be performing a lot of exercises that utilise our own body weight, but without equipment some bodyweight exercises are harder to carry out than others.
Cloths can be placed under our hands or feet to minimise or remove friction between us and the floor making it possible to perform bodyweight chest fly’s, bodyweight pikes and lying leg curls to name a few.
Training your back at home can also prove challenging, but by using a towel we can help create tension in the upper and mid back by “pulling the towel apart” and can be incorporated into superman back raises or mimicking the movement of straight arm pulldowns.
Using bed sheets can also be utilised in your home training by tying a knot in one end and securing it over the top of a closed door. You can know use the sheet to perform inverted rows, bodyweight bicep curls and bodyweight tricep extension.
Buckets
If you’ve got a couple of buckets lying about in the garden shed, then they can be used as a versatile piece of “gym kit”. By filling them up with sand or stones, they can quickly add up to becoming a substantial amount of weight, which can then be used to perform heavy farmers walks, shrugs, bent over rows or walking lunges.
Staircase
The staircase in your house can be seen as the original Stairmaster. Incorporating runs up and down your staircase can be an effective addition to home workouts to add in an element of cardio and help increase your heart rate. For strength training, your staircase can also be used for exercise such as “box jumps”, incline or decline press ups or shoulder pike presses.
Your Own Body
Okay, so this one isn’t a household object, but as mentioned above in our list, when working out at home, you are very likely going to be doing some form of bodyweight exercises at some point, so were including it in this list.
Bodyweight workouts can be as varied and intense as you like, by implementing different training methods such as Tabata’s, EMOM’s, AMRAPS, circuits or just using straight forward reps and sets schemes. You’ll also have access to a whole host of high intensity exercises such as squats, press ups, burpees and mountain climbers, which will help keep your workouts diverse, interesting and on track to achieve your fitness goals.
“If you have a body, then you have a gym”
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