It's harder to have fitness goals when you don't have a lot of money. Even if you can scrape together a few dollars on a gym membership every month, life and work commitments can make it hard to get to that gym. So this is my post on how to improve yourself physically at home without spending a shit ton of money that you don't have. I've broken this down into three parts: The people that are really flat-ass broke, the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash, and cheap nutritious food. Here we go!
1. For the people that are flat-ass broke.
You're flat ass broke. You don't have enough money to join a gym, but you want to be more physically fit. That's where calisthenics come in.
The literal, dictionary definition of calisthenics is, "gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement". In layman's terms, it means body weight exercises.
Thankfully, the internet (and for all intents and purposes, I'm assuming that you have enough money for an internet connection, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) has a shitload of body weight workouts that you can find just by hitting the Google and typing in "body weight workout".
You'll find a whole slew of images, articles, and such showing you how you can do strength training without leaving your home.
But let's say that you've done those. You're no longer a beginner, but you're still flat ass broke and needing a challenge.
This is where HIIT comes in.
HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training, and it's the fucking Beast Mode of body weight exercise training.
If I had to sum up HIIT in a sentence, it would be, "Do fifty pushups; take a break for ten seconds, then do fifty more."
Fortunately, the internet gods have blessed us in 2017 with YouTube videos. YouTube has an INSANE amount of HIIT workout plans that you can do in the comfort of your living room. Just as an example, the following video is the first one of many that I found just by going to YouTube, and typing "HIIT workout" into the search engine. I didn't view this video, but it's the first of 1,700,000 results:
The pros of HIIT training:
It greatly improves your "mental toughness". In the military, they called mental toughness "muscular strength endurance". It's the ability to drive on even when you're completely maxed both mentally and physically. When we know that we've been several days awake on limited rations and water, but still have to charge a machine gun. For my Facebook friends that read this (you know who you are), it's the ability to stand at the ready against a fascist when you're armed with nothing more than a baseball bat even when some white supremacist shitbag tries to do harm to you and your child. Doing HIIT training makes you mentally tough enough to clock that son of a bitch and still have enough breath in your lungs to fuck up any of his friends that show up.
The cons of HIIT training:
Body weight exercises, no matter how hard trained, have their limits. While you will gain muscular strength endurance, you need actual weights to increase your strength in the long run.
That brings me to the importance of parks.
There's some parks out there that have exercise stations. There's a trail around my township hall that does that. You go to one station, do the exercise that their sign says to do at that station, then run your ass off to the next one until you reach the end. Even if your nearby park doesn't have that, they probably have some pull up bars. Pull ups and chin ups are the be all, end all, of upper back exercises.
If you're like me and still have yet to be able to do a single chin up, do what's called a "reverse chin up".
A reverse chin up is where you go to a pull-up bar and grip it underhand, jump up so that you're at the end of a chin up position, and lower yourself down slowly. It's the best exercise for the upper back that you can do when you're flat ass broke and can't do a chin up. Eventually, you should be able to become strong enough to do chin ups, and after that, pull ups. When you can get to where you can do a bunch of pull ups, it's safe to say that your upper back and bicep muscles are in full-on beast mode. No other equipment for that muscle group is needed.
2. For the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash
So you're pretty broke. You want to improve on your fitness, but you work a lot of hours and have responsibilities with the family that keep you from being able to join a gym. You have a little bit of cash to spare, but not much.
For you, you need to build a home gym so you can work out on your off time. You also need to do this cheaply.
You might need some new home workout equipment. If that's the case, it's important to know which brands you can buy on the cheap, as opposed to the brands that are insanely expensive.
I'm not kidding when I say this. Plenty of home gym equipment is the same, but the brand of said equipment can be the difference between spending a couple of hundred dollars on equipment, and spending nearly a thousand on building your home gym. For example, Weider makes great home gym machines for a few hundred dollars, while Marcy sells similar equipment for more than double or triple the price.
But if you're pretty broke but have a few dollars to spare AND you've been following my blog for any decent amount of time, you don't want one of those fancy machines that they call "home gyms". You want to start off with a weight set.
Weider is great for new weights, but so is CAP.
My first olympic weight set was a CAP 300 pound set. I bought it when I was 20 years old, having no other gym equipment. One 45 pound barbell, a set of 45s, 35s, 25s, 10s, 2 pairs of-5s, and 2.5s, I bought it at a local Dunhams for $200.
I still use it to this day, sixteen years later. They have more than showed that they can go the distance. These weights are built to last. The best part is, the price on those brand of weights hasn't changed much. A CAP barbell and weight set are still $200 retail price.
But maybe you're still pretty broke and need to buy a bench or some other equipment on the cheap. For this, Craigslist and the Facebook marketplace are your best friends.
Weight equipment, regardless of the brand, is really built to last. That's why second hand gear is the best way to build your home gym slowly on the cheap.
To paraphrase Henry Rollins, prices come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.
I spent years building my workout room on the cheap. I started out by buying my CAP barbell set. I bought a heavyweight bag on Craigslist so I could practice karate on it. I bought my bench on overstock.com. I bought my squat rack on WalMart's website. My mom (god bless her) bought my extra weights secondhand on the Facebook marketplace.
Yeah, prices may come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.
The pros of developing your home gym on the cheap:
You have plenty of time to lift.
You save a shitload of money on gym memberships.
The cons:
It takes a very long time to build your gym cheaply.
You probably won't have enough space for any cardio machines.
3. FOOD!
Regardless of whether you're flat ass broke, or kinda broke but can afford a few extra dollars towards fitness, you need food to fuel the machine that is your fitness craving body, and you need to do it for as little dollars as possible at the grocery store. For this section, I've broken it down into two sections: Protein and carbs. I won't discuss fats here (as much as they are needed in any diet), because it's inevitable that you're going to eat fat one war or another.
For protein, chicken breast is the champion food of broke people. At one of the stores in my hometown, boneless skinless chicken breast runs at $1.99 per pound. You can buy it in the tens of pounds for dirt cheap prices.
But maybe you're not a fan of eating meat. Maybe you're a vegetarian or vegan. For that, I offer lentils. They're pound for pound, cheaper than chicken breast and one of the best protein sources for those that don't eat meat. As a meat eater, I don't know of all the recipes you can create with lentils, but I'm sure that you do, and you can use them to build muscle while not having to eat anything that has a face.
For cheap but healthy carbs, rice and noodles are the way to go. One of my favorite meal prep recipes uses both chicken breast and rice. There's also a meal prep recipe that uses really lean hamburger and spaghetti noodles. Go nuts with it if you're tired of eating chicken breasts. Those are just two examples of how you can meal prep cheaply, but keep your diet healthy at the same time. There's multitudes more than this. You just gotta use your good friend, the Google.
So that's all my advice for achieving fitness greatness on a budget. I still have to provide some sort of image here so I can post this on my Facebook feed and attract attention, so here you go:
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