Tips on Working Out with Household Items

by Molly Rausch L1 Certified Personal Trainer and Certified Athletic Trainer

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness tip of the Week” is about getting creative with your workout using household items. Our world has been completely turned upside down. Routines are altered, gyms are closed, and we all have had to adjust everything in a matter of days. It’s hard enough staying on track and motivated with our fitness goals when we have full access to everything we need. Being stuck at home and having many of the resources stripped away adds an additional challenge to fitness. A lot of us don’t have extra money to buy all the equipment we need. Even if you could purchase gym equipment to stock up your home gym, many online stores are having shortages or delays. Luckily in this digital age, a lot of fitness professionals are willingly sharing tons of information on how to do small space, no equipment workouts to help people stay active and sane. Even just googling “at home workouts” produces literal thousands of websites and pictures on generalized workouts for you to do.

Just because the gym is taken away, doesn’t mean you need to switch your fitness goals or completely change your entire program. Your home has a lot of hidden treasures that can serve a double purpose. Talking with my clients, the biggest hurdle has been figuring out how to keep their strength up. How do you strength train when you have no weights? I want to share tips on items around your home that can help you.

Indoor Household Items

You have plenty of items within your home that can provide plenty of weight. The actual weight you are using will vary, so the best way to know how much you are lifting is by weighing it yourself. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, the “package shipping weight” trick is a good way to see exactly how heavy your household items are. If you weigh yourself, then reweigh yourself holding the item, the difference in weight will be your item’s weight. Just remember: SAFETY IS KEY!

• Milk Carton, Water Jug, and Laundry Detergent Jug
  • These items are very popular for demonstrations online. Depending on the size, they can weigh anywhere from 5 pounds to 25 pounds (if you get a 3 gallon jug). These are great substitutes for dumbbells or kettlebells.
• Soup or Vegetable Cans
  • These will provide you with a pound or so of extra weight. Great for upper body work or any long, isometric holds or pulsing exercises.
• Buckets, Backpacks, and Laundry Baskets
  • These items you can fill with anything from sand, rocks, books, or shoes to add more weight. You can perform bench press, squats, lunges, and deadlifts with these heavier items.
• Flour, Rice, and Sugar Bags
  • Place the bags in a ziplock or plastic bag to reduce mess. These will provide you with lighter to medium weight if you get standard sizes. They are great dumbbell or sandbag replacements.
• Towels or Paper Plates
  • You can use these items for any slider exercises you would do in the gym. It increases stability and control through any strength movement.
• Broom and Mop Handles
  • You can use these for exercises that require dowel or a barbell. Dowel exercise like hollow holds, hinge hinges, or birddogs can all easily be done with a broom or mop. To use as a barbell, you can hang an equal weighted bucket or backpack on either end, tape it in place so it’s secure, and lift away.
• Rope
  • You can tie knots on either end, loop around something anchored and solid (i.e. tree branch) and use for a TRX replacement. You can do inverted rows, assisted squats, standing hip drops, etc.

Using Your Environment

It’s not just containers you can use to help assist your home workouts. There are plenty of items within your environment that can assist you. If you desperately want to get out of your house, there are plenty of items to help you get a great workout.

• Stairs or Benches
  • Using stairs or benches within your environment are great items for cardio or strength exercises. Step ups, triceps dips, elevated push ups, and decline push ups are all examples of movements using just a bench or stair.
• Rocks
  • It may seem silly, but a big rock is great for strength building. Just the core control and grip strength to get it to your shoulders to do an offset squat will wear you out.
• Old Tires
  • I am aware not everyone has an old tractor tire to just flip over or hit with a sledgehammer. If you do, fantastic. If you don’t have a tractor tires, but do have a spare car tire, use it to your advantage. It would be a great piece of equipment to do weighted or BOSU burpees with!

If you are stuck inside and have no safe outdoor area to workout in, I wanted to also provide a list of items within your home to use to complete those workouts.

• Couch or Chairs
  • Great for box squats, single-leg sit to stand, rear-foot elevated split squats, or several different elevated or decline exercises.
• Cushions or Bed
  • Taking the cushions off the couch or a chair is a great substitute for a foam pad or BOSU ball. The bed can be used as an unstable surface to help with balance and stability.
• Wall
  • Don’t forget to do those wall sits for isometric strength building! Find any solid wall and start that timer! Walls are also great tools to work on inverted exercises, like handstands.
• Children
  • Need to multitask? Use your children to increase your exercise difficulty! Piggy back walking lunges or squats, weighted plank, or bear crawls with a passenger are fun and challenging!

If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to contact me at mrausch@healthworksfitness.com or leave a comment below!