5 Home Gym Safety Essentials

Over the past 12 months, there has been an explosion in the number of people exercising at home. Much of it has been driven by need as commercial gyms around the world have been locked down. Working out at home is more convenient and generally safer than doing so at a gym. However, it does carry its own unique risks. In this article, we identify 5 essential steps you need to take to keep your home gym safe.

Keep It Tidy

Commercial gyms plaster signs all over the place telling their members to put their weights away. You need to be just as diligent in your home gym. A messy gym is an unsafe gym. When you have weight plates littering the floor and dumbbells rolling around then you are increasing the likelihood of someone tripping and injuring themself.

Keep your home gym tidy by investing in a barbell, dumbbell and weight plate racks. When you buy a rack or a power tower, look for a model that has built-in weight plate holders. As well as providing you with safe, smart storage space the extra weight of the plates will reinforce the stability of that piece of equipment.

Once you have your home gym equipped with racks, make sure that they get used. Set the example yourself and don’t be shy to remind others to do so also. You can even follow the example of commercial gyms and put up a sign.

Keep it Clean

While you may not have to contend with the bacteria build-up that results from hundreds of people using your gym gear each day, your workout space will still accumulate nasty bugs that could lay you low. That’s why you need to follow a regular cleaning schedule of your workout space.

We recommend that you go through and wipe down your workout gear after every workout. Use an all-natural cleaner and wipe down the handles of your barbells and dumbbells along with all of the upholstery that is built into the machines. Be sure to air out your gym space so that the air can circulate readily.

If other people are going to be using your training space, you should make it available and encourage them to use wipes and cleaner once they have finished with every exercise. This is especially important in the current Covid environment.

Clean Yourself

Gym safety must include keeping yourself clean after your workout. Getting into the habit of rushing from your workout to the next thing in your life without showering and grooming yourself is not a good idea. Buy out the time to shower after every workout. When you do so, don’t just allow the water to run over your body. To remove sweat and germs that have accumulated, you need to use soap. We also suggest washing your hair after every training session as perspiration tends to accumulate there.

As well as showering after your workout, make sure that you completely change your clothing. We also suggest giving your skin some love by applying products like athia retinol night cream before you go to bed.

Clean Up Your Technique

When you are working out at home, there is no gym instructor or personal trainer around to help keep your form on point. In order to prevent long-term jointly, muscle or spinal injury, it is imperative that you learn what exercises are and are not good for you and how to do the good ones properly. Never sacrifice exercise form in favor of weight lifting as this will inevitably lead to sloppy form. Make use of the many exercise technique videos available online, even watching them right as you do the move.

Invest in a Power Rack

One of the biggest safety issues that home gymers face is that they are more likely to be working out alone than their commercial gym counterparts. They generally also train on less rigid equipment that is likely to fail them if they miss a lift. That is why you need to seriously consider investing in a power rack. This is especially the case if you regularly perform such heavy compound exercises as squats, deadlifts and the bench press.

A power rack is a cage frame that includes j-hooks and a pair of safety bars that will catch the barbell if you fail on an exercise.

A power rack will probably be the most expensive piece of equipment in your gym. However, if you are a serious home gym weight trainer, it is an investment well worth making. A good rack will allow you to train at your maximum weight capacity safely and confidently. Most power racks are also fitted with a range of accessories such as a pull-up bar and a dip bar. Some of them also allow you to attach a lat pulldown cable system.