Can a Home Gym Nurture a Fit Fam? Since the pandemic lockdown, home gyms have become fairly commonplace with homeowners carving out their own fitness studios in spare bedrooms, basements or garage spaces.
Having an at-home fitness area comes with huge advantages from flexible workouts and saving on gym memberships to having the freedom to switch up exercise routines and sample different methods of training.
Regardless of these perks there’s a less transparent motivation behind creating a home-style exercise space.
Can home gym’s be the perfect breeding ground for fostering a positive fitness mentality within the family unit? The driving force, perhaps, towards a progressive and more sustainable relationship with fitness among households.
In this article, we’ll explore the ways in which a home gym can nurture personal self-care, create healthy attitudes to exercise and help families build deeper connections through fitness and activity.
Training Together
The ‘group effect’, a term coined to describe the powerful role of social exercise in maintaining motivation levels, isn’t exclusive to commercial gyms or bootcamp classes. It can also be a game-changer for those working out at home.
A home style gym provides the physical means for multiple family members to practice their favourite workouts together. It allows for a category of family scenarios from parent and child partnerships to sibling groups and offers the autonomy to personalise exercise in terms of individual needs and routines.
Community exercise has been well documented (APA PsycNet 2019) as one of the main drivers in keeping people consistent and accountable in their fitness goals. Similarly, this principle can be adopted in-house, with group exercise being practiced within the family dynamic.
Family work-outs can set a benchmark for both adults and children to engage with regular physical activity, explore what exercise they enjoy and be more disciplined in their approach to fitness continuity.
Perhaps most significantly, it enables family units to experience the very best of what regular exercise can bring. From yielding physical results and self-realisation to overcoming barriers and thriving within a consistent fitness routine, families training together can share in the natural exuberance and vitality that regular activity delivers.
Promoting Lifestyle Fitness & Self-Care In Children
Aside from a financial investment, creating a dedicated work-out space at home is an investment in one’s self. This acts as a great foundation for which younger family members can shape their own commitment to exercise and self-care.
Observing parents or siblings embracing an active lifestyle can strongly impact on how children perceive fitness in general. As well as incentivising young ones to take part in physical activity, it also allows children to appreciate good health and wellness in its entirety and can influence how they position fitness in their lives going forward.
Homemade gyms don’t need to be solely about fitness. They can be aligned with other wellness activities such as meditation, relaxation and yoga which help to reframe the idea of fitness being purely about physical output and more about self-care, mental wellbeing and taking time for yourself.
Education
Training at home is not only physically rewarding but it allows family members to learn more about the complete picture of fitness in a much broader sense.
Specifically, it educates younger children on the relationship between physical exercise and health and how it contributes to the everyday functions of daily life, from cardiovascular and bone health to flexibility and cognitive function.
Learning about different methods of exercise and the finer points of movement and mobility teaches children the importance of taking care of their bodies from a young age and how valuable good health is as they get older.
Quality Time
Busy work and social schedules can make it difficult for families to spend quality time together. With factors such as varying age groups, irregular working patterns and financial impact, family groups face different challenges in looking for entertaining and rewarding ways to enjoy time with each other.
A Home gym space opens up opportunities to be creative with exercise and integrate valuable family time in a much more efficient way.
(Image – Heidi Powell)
Combining fitness with play or gaming is an interactive and fun way to experience physical activity that allows both children and adults to take part. Likewise, experimenting with different sports such as Boxing or Gymnastics can keep younger children engaged and off-set new interests and hobbies.
With so many interactive fitness equipment and apps available, parents and kids can explore healthy family competition by setting up a league table, creating events and using a home gym as a place for indulging in entertaining activities that include movement and play.
Fitness studios can easily be fitted out to accommodate both gym and play activities using multi-purpose, protective rubber flooring and incorporating gaming equipment, music resources and a stimulating, aesthetic decor that will retain children’s interest.
Goal Orientation
Setting goals and tracking progress is an important part of any fitness routine. Without a clear target or monitoring development, fitness routines can become less effective with reduced motivation and a lack of structure.
Family gym’s can allow for better management of fitness goals and the ability to measure and regulate performance. With the added benefit of a flexible workout routine and having greater ownership of regular, accessible exercise content, families are able to work together, setting common goals, tracking headway and celebrating victories.
Goal-setting is also a vital skill for young people to adopt as they navigate towards adulthood. Armed with the ability to visualise and determine desired outcomes in fitness and in other areas of life, goal-orientation can help to shape how children prioritize self-needs, aspirations and future ambitions leading to a more balanced and healthy mindset.
Final Thoughts
At-home fitness is a growing phenomenon since the 2020 pandemic and the positive upsurge of home gyms can only be an optimistic movement in the UK’s journey towards improved fitness.
With a committed exercise area at home, families have the opportunity to invest time and energy into what an active lifestyle is really all about. They can share quality time together by connecting through fitness and inspiring each other to maintain healthy habits while making solid life enhancements both physically and mentally.
Households with dedicated workout facilities, can not only benefit from better continuity with their goals and greater control in how they manage and maintain their active lifestyles, they plant the seeds for younger children to follow a similar path.
Children surrounded by active adults have a better chance at adopting a more positive relationship with fitness, and this ultimately begins at home.
Whichever way you channel fitness throughout the family, good physical health and long-term wellness is worthy of being at the heart of every household.
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