How to Workout at Home on the Cheap

If you want to workout at home, you got to decide where you’re going to train: indoors or outdoors? Personally, I prefer training outdoors in the garden — it gives me more options. But not everyone can train outside — I don’t know maybe you live in a flat a 100 meters from ground level and can’t train outside. Not a problem, you can still train indoors; everyone has got space to train inside… well unless you live rent free in a 9-by-4-foot room in San Quentin or in a cardboard box under the subway.

Assuming you don’t want to waste your hard earned buying loads of overpriced gym equipment, you can buy everything you need on the cheap.

Lets start off with inside the house.

The Iranian meel (or Indian club) is a great tool for developing arm, shoulder and grip strength but it also improves shoulder stability and reduces injury.

Takhti 1956 Olympic Wrestling Champion & 2x World Wrestling Champion

Wrestlers have been using meels for centuries. You can use heavy 20kg meels if you really want but typically meels are light. I often start off strength training sessions with five minutes of meeling with a pair of 1.5kg meels.

You can waste fortune buying them but a school kid could knock up a pair in woodwork. All you need is some wood, a lathe, a wood turning chisel and a sander. How fucking hard is that?

But if you don’t have a school kid to make a pair for you — or they’re too busy making guns in metalwork — no bother, all you need is a couple of table legs or better still fill up two empty bottles of wine.

Another good indoor piece of equipment is the medicine ball. If you want great abs, a medicine ball is a brilliant — there are so many different exercise you can do with it. Obviously you can go and buy one but you could buy a cheap basket ball instead — then cut a slit in it, fill the inner tube with sand and super glue it. I use 1kg, 3kg and 5kg medicine balls.

Then one of my favourite pieces of equipment is the kit bag, you can fill it up with sand and that will be one of the most versatile pieces of equipment that you’ve got: the amount of exercises you can do with a sandbag (or kit bag full of sand) are limitless and it’s great for functional strength. Obviously it costs next to fuck all too. Another variation on that is putting coke bottle in the kit bag, which makes it a little more sturdier. You fill the coke bottles with as much water as you need to give you the weight you want.

Now for training outside.

girl on monkey bars

When I was a kid, the old man couldn’t afford to buy us a climbing frame. So he bought a rope ladder and secured it to two trees and we had some monkey bars. We could climb underneath it, over it, or swing across. Rope climbing is another great exercise, as well as climbing up a vertical rope you can climb across a horizontal rope. I prefer a chain to a rope though because it’s more awkward.

If you fancy a prehistoric strength training workout, stones and logs are great and cost nothing. Another alternative is a beer keg, which you can fill it up with as much water as you want. One of the best pieces of equipment is the tire. I use tires of various sizes, they can be thrown, bounced, flipped, carried, dragged and tossed.