Home Made Gym Equipment As Easy As 1, 2, Free...

...Well, almost free. You can make most of this home made gym equipment for pretty cheap. The materials for the equipment on this page won't be hard to find. Most of the stuff we used was just lying around the house anyway.

shaye doing the ab bench exercise

This is the home made gym equipment that you will learn to make from this article:

Home made ab bench
Home made milk dumbottles

Benefits of Making Home Made Gym Equipment
	You can make it exactly the way you want it. From shoddy to extravagant, built in drinks holders to squeaky bent boards, smooth foam padding to splinters in your back. Like we said, whatever you want.
	If you build your own equipment you are much more likely to use it. We use our ab bench almost every single day.
	Home made gym equipment is cheap. Cheap's good right! It's also FUN to build. :) We like hammers.
	It gets your brain thinking about new ways of challenging your muscles.
	Building your own home made gym equipment reinforces your commitment to exercise.

Right, onto the fun part...

How to Make The Ab Bench

If you don't know what sort of exercises you can do with this bench have a look at this page.

Seriously, have a look. They are the best ab exercises you will ever see. This is our favorite piece of home made gym equipment.

So what do i need for building this homemade equipment

As you can see from the picture you need to be able to lean the bench up against something. We've just used a seat bench. You could use anything really. Chair, bench, outdoor table...your partner hehe.

example for home made gym equipment

You need to get a long, thick piece of wood. The dimensions of the one we use are 45x290x1780mm or 2"x11"x5'10". They're easy enough to pick up from a timber yard. We just used an offcut from our deck.... That beam wasn't important anyway... We hope!

Piece of wood for fitness training ab bench

You need some sort of piping. We used plastic electrical piping which was lying around the house. Steel piping would probably be quite good too because it's very rigid.

You'll also need some tools: A drill, a hammer and some nails.

So how do i make the ab bench

You should probably try to scope out a place where you want to put the bench before you start building. Ideally you want a place that is going to allow you to adjust the angle of the bench as you get stronger. Until eventually the angle gets so high that you can do what Tom's doing and don't even need a bench.

ab exercises for home made gym equipment

There are two options for the ab bench:

Nail the piping onto the board itself.

board for home made gym equipment

This is good if you want a portable board. You can lean it up against anything and use it. It'll be like your very best buddy, you can take it shopping, go out for coffee and take long romantic walks on the beach... Ahem!

bend the nails over for this piece of home made gym equipment

If you do it this way please make sure you choose the right length of nail. Or at least bash the nails down. We don't want you impaling yourself now do we?

Or...

Nail the piping onto a solid structure, like the railing on your deck. You can basically use anything as long as it doesn't move.

railing for home made gym equipment

Make sure it's in a position where you can lean it up against something.We've used the seat that runs around the edge of our deck. It works fine.

ab bench example for home made gym equipment

If you want to be really fancy you can cover it with foam. But what we do is just put down a towel and a yoga mat. Trust us, you need to do this. Both of us tried it without and ended up with big angry weeping wounds where our tailbones were rubbing on the bench. OUCH!

How to Make Milk Dumbottles

So what do i need for building this homemade equipment

There are lots of options for what you can do with these. You can fill them with anything you want.

Water
Sand
Concrete
Rocks
Milk.....hmm maybe not

They all give different weights.

In this example we've used a concrete mixture to fill up our milk dumbottles.

The milk dumbottles we've made weigh about 4.5kg (10lbs) each.

You need a milk bottle... If you can, try to get the bottles with the nice ergonomically designed handles. They're oh so smooth and don't hurt your fingers when you use them.

milk bottle for home made gym equipment

Sand

sand for home made gym equipment

Rocks

rocks for home made gym equipment

Cement

cement for home made gym equipment

Water

So how do i make my own dumbells

This is the easy part. You need to mix all your ingredients together.

The ratio of sand/rock to cement is 5:1 so if you use 10 scoops of sand/rock mixture use 2 scoops of cement. Then just use water to make the mixture slushy. Pour it into your milk dumbottles and you're ready.

finished product for home made gym equipment

It takes about two months for these to harden...nah just kidding. It did for ours though. It's probably a good idea to leave the lid off the bottle for a few days to allow the concrete to cure a bit better

You want something you can use today, right? Right!

There will be updates to this page as soon as we think of some more home made gym equipment idea's. Keep watching.

If you're okay about spending a little bit of money setting up your home gym, have a read over our fitness training equipment page. It contains valuable information that will save you time and money!

Keep up to date on home fitness training, subscribe to our Newsletter here

Here are some exercises that use our home made gym equipment :

Try coming up with your own idea's for home made gym equipment. If you start to get creative with this it can be really fun. Please, let us know if you come up with some cool idea's or design features. Just contact us here. If we like your idea we can put it up on the home made gym equipment page for everyone to see.

Get into shape in your spare time!