My Home Gym

Winter is coming.

Not for a while, obv, but eventually, and I have decided to be prepared.  Every year I feel somehow surprised when it gets bastardly cold and all I want to do is hide under a blanket.  Every year I convince myself that I'll be able to run outside in January, and every year I make myself sick.

No more.

Since I now know the value of cross-training and since I am breaking up with my gym, I have decided to create the perfect home gym that will carry me happily through this winter and the winters to come.  I do still have a plethora of winter outdoor running gear including yaktrax:

Looks like a murder weapon, doesn't it

But, even my stoic Scandinavian heritage fails on the coldest days, and honestly, who am I trying to impress?  Sometimes, it's just too cold to go running, and on those days, I have my home gym.

We live in a pretty large apartment, and have a room that we don't really use for anything.  It was supposed to be BF's office, but it's too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter (and personally, I think he just prefers to work in front of the tv), so I'm turning it into a workout space.  I spent a small amount of money on some gear:

• $30 for a fitness hula hoop
• $13 for a 10 pound kettlebell
• $25 for a used rowing machine from Craigslist
• $9 for a jump rope that I now realize I can't really use inside

And BF and I already had some freeweights of varying weight, and I have a yoga mat. We also have an area rug to put over the hardwood floor (thank god), and I bought a carpet-sized lint roller to get the cat fur off of it.

Then I went online and downloaded the complete collection of Zuzana Light's ZWow workouts.*  The reason I downloaded then is threefold:

• Now I can get right  to the workout without having to watch commercials
• If she ever takes them down from youtube, I will still have them
• If, for some strange reason, our internet stops working, I will have no excuse not to work out!

She uploads a new workout every week so there's always something new, you don't need much, if any, equipment to do them, they only take 20-30 minutes and they are HARD.  I'll probably only do one a week because they're so tough--much harder than I would be on myself if I was going to the gym.

So, for the low-low price of $77, I have a pretty good home gym.  I have everything I need to get in a good workout at home and my own trainer to keep me motivated.

Yup, her boobs are ridiculous, but I would like those abs

If I ever get bored of the 36 workout videos I have (which is doubtful because I've never even owned that many workout DVDs), there's a new one each week, and they're all free!  Isn't the internet great?!

*If you want to download and save videos from Youtube, you just need to download and install a free program called aTube Catcher.  It downloads videos from the url, and then you can store them on your harddrive or a flash drive.