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The Best Home Gym Kit Under £20 for Building Muscle and Strength
From squat racks to adjustable dumbbells, the price of gym kit can soon rack up. These cheap alternatives can be just as effective, without costing the earth
The key to building an affordable home fitness setup is to utilise the one thing you carry around with you every single day: your bodyweight. Whether you’re starting from scratch or a seasoned callisthenics athlete, bodyweight workouts can be just as challenging and effective as free weights for building size, strength and fitness at home.
Combine this with some inexpensive home gym items and you can level-up those bodyweight workouts into an altogether more impactful home set-up. From wide-grip pull-ups to sandbag ground-to-overheads, these eight pieces of home gym kit will unlock a whole host of muscle-building exercises at home.
Best Home Gym Kit Under £20
Decathlon CORENGTH Locking Doorway Pull-Up Bar
Decathlon CORENGTH Locking Doorway Pull-Up Bar
If there’s one piece of home gym kit worth investing in, it’s a pull-up bar. In fact, Men’s Health Fitness Director Andrew Tracey says everyone over 40 should own one: 'A cheap pull-up bar can help you build muscle, improve grip strength and preserve a physical skill that may even save your life one day.'
You'll ideally want to pick up a sturdy freestanding or wall-mounted bar, but if you're working with a tight budget, a doorframe bar is a fair compromise.
This one from Decathlon costs just £19.99, features a patented bar lock system designed to withstand up to 100kg of weight, and extends from 65cm to 95cm, so it should accommodate most doorframe sizes.
If your budget can stretch a little further, I’ve been using this freestanding Gravity Fitness Pull-Up Rack. If you rent, it’s a great alternative to a wall-mounted bar, which you’ll have to drill into the wall, and because it's portable, you can pack it down and take it with you anywhere. Lie it length-ways and it also doubles-up as parallel bars for dips.
Read More: Best Pull-Up Bars
Generic Wooden Gymnastic Rings
Most ring exercises are compound movements (think push-ups, dips and pull-ups) so you hit multiple muscle groups at once, making them an highly effective way of building muscle size and strength at home.
There’s also no solid ground to push off from with olympic ring exercises, which means that you are constantly working to stabilise yourself, adding an extra level of difficult and intensity to your workouts.
The other great thing about rings is that, so long as you have somewhere sturdy to hang them off – like a tree branch or goal post – you can take them anywhere. Just pay attention to the length you're buying based off what you'll be attaching them to: too short and you won’t have enough length to do low exercises like ring push-ups.
Read More: Best Gymnastics Rings
Mirafit Resistance Stretch Workout Bands
Mirafit Resistance Stretch Workout Bands
Extra-long resistance bands like these from Mirafit are perfect for providing assistance to pull-focussed bodyweight exercises. For example, if you're scaling towards an unassisted strict pull-up, hooking a band under your feet will reduce the difficulty of the movement by effectively cancelling out a proportion of your body weight. You can then gradually increase the difficulty by switching to a lighter band as you work towards a full rep.
Equally, you can use bands to increase the difficulty of bodyweight movements. For push moves, that could mean wrapping one around your back and securing it in your hands during press-ups. For pull exercises, you can anchor the band under your feet and attach it to a weight. Because they deliver more resistance as you stretch them further, they offer a different challenge than free weights.
Read More: Best Resistance Band Exercises and Workouts
Extreme Fitness Strongman Sandbags
Extreme Fitness Strongman Sandbags
When it comes to building muscle at home, sandbags are about as simple as it gets. They're exactly what the name suggests – bags filled with sand – but the great thing about them is that, pound for pound, they are the cheapest way to go heavier whenever you need to scale up the difficulty of your workouts. After all, sand is cheaper than stone and cast iron.
With sandbag exercises, your stabilising muscles are constantly at work as the sand shifts around the bag when you lift and chuck the weight, forcing your body to continually re-balance itself.
These sandbags from Extreme Fitness are sold without the sand, but they're sized so that when full, you get from 20kg up to 70kg of weight, depending on the size you choose.
Read More: Try This DIY Sandbag Workout
Tyre Tread Slam Ball
Tyre Tread Slam Ball
A weighted ball like this is a surprisingly versatile piece of kit to have at home. It can be used to slam, squat, press, chuck or simply carry, meaning you can do a whole bunch of loaded compound exercises that'll help build endurance, balance, stability and coordination, without the need for a bunch of free weights.
This is a slam ball, meaning its designed to be durable enough to be chucked about. For £20, you can pick up this 10kg version, but for a little extra you can go up to 20kg.
Read More: Try This 5-Minute Medicine Ball Workout
Mirafit Rotating Push Up Handles
Mirafit Rotating Push Up Handles
You don't need any kit to do press-ups. That's the beauty of them. But if you're doing a lot of reps each day, picking up a pair of handles like these from Mirafit can help to reduce the strain in your wrists and prevent discomfort, leaving you to focus on keeping your form disciplined.
These are rotating, so they allow your hands to naturally shift inwards as your lower your body. It also engages your core slightly as you keep the handles in position.
Myprotein Ab Roller & Mat Set
Ab rollers are a simple and relatively inexpensive piece of kit, but they pack a punch. As you wheel back and forth, you stretch and contract your core muscles under a huge amount of resistance without the need for heavy weights as you would with exercises such as Russian twists.
Read More: Best Ab Rollers
Adidas 6mm Thickness Yoga Black Mat
Adidas 6mm Thickness Yoga Black Mat
The best exercise mats take your home workouts up a gear. Whether you're stretching it out with some yoga or getting hot and sweaty with a bodyweight workout, a grippy and cushioned platform will help you to get a solid footing on hard flooring.
This mat from adidas isn't the most high-tech, but it has a good thickness of 6cm and with both a textured side for the floor and grippy side for your feet, it should do the job nicely.
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