Do you have a small budget or small space but want to own some useful fitness equipment in your home, office or apartment?
Craig Lewin of Busy Body & Fitness HQ stores shows Hut Allred of New Wave Fitness a few ideal pieces that will give you a great workout, but don’t take up much space and are cost effective.
In their video, see how a Stability Ball, Hand Weights, Stretch Tube, Foam Roller and Exercise Mat all fit the bill:
Hut: This is Hut Allred from New Wave Fitness with Craig Lewin of Busy Body and Fitness Headquarters, and you just finished a Good Morning America segment.
Craig: We did. We had Good Morning Texas here, channel 8, which was a lot of fun.
Hut: I said Good Morning America…
Craig: You did. We’re working towards Good Morning America. Hopefully they’ll see our segments and call us and then we’ll fly to New York and do good Morning America.
Hut: I’m a visions guy. That’s the next segment.
Craig: Makes me have faith.
Hut: That’s great. I wanted to talk about some items that people could use at their home or wherever to get in shape and not necessarily have to invest in a large piece of strength-training or cardio equipment. What type of tools could they start leveraging for their home environment without investing in one of the bigger machines?
Craig: People can actually come in to the Busy Body or Fitness HQ stores and we can get them started on small stuff. You don’t have to have a lot of space for these things. I brought a couple of these things today to show you guys. First of all, at the end of the day, you can literally just take an exercise ball…(I’m going to get these foam rollers out of the way for a second.) Here’s an exercise ball that we sell—really easy, small, doesn’t take up a lot of room. As you know, being a trainer, there are so many things you can do with these exercise balls. So simple. You can use it for all of your stomach crunches. You can take these dumbbells—now I can lay on here, I could do a bench press on here. I can sit up on it and work on doing a shoulder press. I can turn around and use it for leverage to be able to work on my back. There are a lot of exercises you can do. This actually ends up being like a bench, right?
Hut: Absolutely. It creates a lot of instability, which forces you to recruit more muscle fiber than you’re used to. It’s a great tool and it’s 35 bucks.
Craig: It’s cheap. That’s the thing that’s great as well. And it doesn’t have to just be with dumbbells obviously; there’s a ton of exercises. In fact, we’ve got a really cool little book in the stores. It’s called “The Great Body Ball Handbook.” It shows you over a hundred different exercises you can do with this ball that will make you cry for your mommy.
Let me show you this as well—a stretch tube. Something so simple. I think one of the biggest reasons we sell so many stretch tubes has to do with the fact that a lot of people are traveling so they’re able to take these with them, which is cool. You can stand on these and do bicep curls. You can go here and do shoulder presses. What’s neat about these too—they come with door anchors so if you’re in a hotel room, go to where the bathroom is and hook it up. Now you can do all of your pull-downs, tricep pull-downs—there’s a ton of exercises.
Hut: So basically with our stability ball, hand weights, bands, we’re able to do all of the movements that will allow us to recruit all major muscle groups, like a traditional home gym, but again, something we can take with us from our home, on trips, et cetera.
Craig: And something that’s not expensive. A stretch tube is $15; a ball is $35. These dumbbells are very inexpensive. It’s just a way to at least get moving, doing stuff at the house If you’re not doing something already. By the way, I also don’t want people to think that, “Well, if I start with this, is it really going to give me a good workout?” You can get a great workout with these things!
Hut: Huge workout—even just with your body weight, doing a lot of these movements using that ball, an amazing workout.
Craig: I remember when you used to come to my house and you were doing training with me. I remember we did so many different exercises with stretch tubes, and I swear I felt like it was the most amazing workout ever. Tell us about the foam rollers. We sell a ton of them and they seem to have just gone through the roof.
Hut: This piece of equipment actually is one of the most unique pieces out there right now. Talk about improving mobility, flexibility, just rolling on this is like having your own massage therapist at your house. It basically helps work out all your minor and major muscle groups and really makes it easier for you to move and easier for you to recover from your workouts. It’s basically getting on this bad boy and rolling your back, rolling your pits or your shoulders and arms that get sore. It helps work all of that out, which really makes the recovery and exercise program more efficient. That’s what we want, especially as we get older, because we don’t recover.
Craig: That’s been a big thing. I know the other night, we were working on doing squat exercises and my glutes were cramping up, on fire, and the back of my legs. I rolled out on a foam roller, which can be a little uncomfortable sometimes…
Hut: When you first start, it’s very uncomfortable.
Craig: But woo! You can feel it. It made a difference the next morning. I was like, “This is the first day I’ve woken up and I’m not in pain.”
Hut: You use a foam roller every day, you’ll never stop. It’s that good.
Craig: I see people using them all the time. Like I said, in our stores, we have 11 stores in Dallas – Fort Worth Metroplex, and people are coming in for foam rollers so much that it’s to the point now, I have a whole wall full of different types of foam rollers. There are even different colors now! Green, bright orange, bright pink. We’ve got a lot of colors.
Hut: Where’s our New Wave blue?
Craig: I know, we need New Wave blue. Wait—I might have one! Hold on a second. We’re going to get New Wave blue. It’s right here, I’ll bring it in on the set. So here’s New Wave blue.
Hut: All right!
Craig: There’s a ton of different stuff. If you just want to stretch out, these are really nice mats. We started doing something, which is pretty cool. We brought in one of our vendors where the mats have college logos on them. This is kind of cool. This one is for UT. I had to be UT just ‘cause I’m a Horn, but pretty exciting, just something a little bit different.
Hut: That’s great. So a lot of small tools that you can use to get started with your fitness for the new year, 2014…
Craig: I could do all this for under $100. I could get a foam roller, stretch tubes, some dumbbells and a ball for $100.
Hut: And get phenomenal results from your exercise program
Craig: Absolutely.
Hut: That’s great. Well, I enjoy all of this because we use a lot of this with all of our clients. If you want to give any of this equipment a chance, come on in to any of the stores. Again, we’ve got 11 locations in the Dallas – Fort Worth Metroplex. If you want to come in here, this is Plano Busy Body. You can actually see the man if you get that opportunity. Good stuff, brother.
Craig: Thanks, Hut. Good to see you again.
Hut: Good to see you as well.
Craig: Thanks, man.
Hut: And we’ll see you next month. Thanks, guys.