Losing Weight At Home

Here is the third part of this series of post about losing weight at home, I hope you’re enjoying them. This post will talk about the benches, the ones you can set up at home.

By the way, if you want to know how I learned everything I know about weight loss, maybe you will be interested in this book (disclosure: affiliate link).

Bench

bench

Here you can see the bench I currently use. It’s a quietly cheap one: i bought it some years ago for 40 bucks or so. The bench feet can be adjusted in height and one of them can be reclined, so that it becomes an inclined bench.

Given these various possible configurations, it can be used for ab exercises, just like the ones you can do in the gym on the ab inclined bench, as well as chest press exercises, plain and inclined.

Since this one has no rack attached, you can do bench presses mostly with dumbbells. Using heavy barbells would be dangerous.

Anyway, if your purpose is to lose weight rather than gaining bulk muscle, this will do the job.

As for the choice you need to do if you don’t have one, here are the main factors to consider:

- Space taken: home banches are generally less space taking than gym ones and they are way lighter, so that they can be easily moved anywhere around. Check the bench dimensions on the package and see if it has any folding features. As for this one, I prefer stable ones, since they are usually more resistant.

- Weight supported: as I said, home benches are lighter than gym ones, but they can support les weight too. Check the weight it can support and compare it to your own weight and your fitness actual status and end goal. Usually, the bench features come as the person maximum weight, the free weight (dumbbells or barbells) weight charged other than the person itself and the overall weight. This could be an important parameter for your choice.

Bench Exercises

Lets give a look at a list of the exercises you can do on a bench.

First of all, you can use it for lying exercises like:

• Chest press with dumbbells
• Incline chest press with dumbbells
• Ab crunch
• Reclined ab crunch

Next you can do some other exercises using it as a different support, like:

• Seated shoulder presses with dumbbells
• Decline pushups
• Split squat with elevated foot on bench
• Jacknife ab crunches with forearms on bench

You could also use it as a support for your arms for some back exercises, like one arm row, with the free hand supported by bench, or for more advanced ab exercises, like Vcrunches balancing on the bench itself.

These are just a large preview of what you can do. Overall, you can think of any exercise you do at the gym on a bench and modify it just a little bit to adapt it to your home bench.

If you have any suggetsions, please share them by leaving a comment.

(Disclosure: affiliate link in the images)

Losing Weight At Home