Lets face it, having a home gym comes with tons of advantages and benefits. For those who follow an active lifestyle, these benefits and advantages are quite obvious. One of the biggest is travel time. Having your very own personal gym right in the comfort of your home allows you to slip away at any time of the day to complete your workout ritual. No long lengthy drive, no traffic, no stress. Its absolute bliss. The feeling of control and satisfaction that it gives you flows out into the rest of your day setting a great foundational feeling of wellbeing that goes beyond just the great feeling you get from working out.
Besides all the great side effects there are to having a gym at home, there also are a few things that need to be taken into close consideration, especially since there is no one else to make sure these things are done. Im talking about safety. Gym safety. According to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, in 2009, 1500 emergency room visits were the result of accidents caused by or related to accidents involving people in home gyms. That is quite a large number.
They (The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission), went on to say that they recorded over 50 000 emergency room visits due to home exercise equipment accidents including accidents while operating treadmills, exercise ball falls, dropping weights onto feet, elastic bands hitting faces. One of the biggest causes of injury was, slipping and falling.
Most of these can easily be avoided. For example, to avoid exercise ball falls, always make sure that while you are still learning, always only stand on the ball while in between an under a squat rack or pull up tower to support you in case you fall. To avoid treadmill falls, avoid high speeds while you get used to what it feels like to run standing still. To avoid dropping weights on your feet, in the beginning, while you learn to manage the weight of the dumbbells, do the exercise seated on a bench so if you lose grip then the weights dont fall on your feet.
Those are some of the things one can do to avoid injuries when learning how to do exercises on your own in the gym. One of the harder issues to avoid is slips. We sweat a lot and sweat on the floor can cause us to slip. The obvious thing to do is to have rubber mats on the floor, the issue is that some people prefer to not have rubber mats. In this case, making sure that you are quick to wipe up any sweat is the easiest thing to do. The quickest and easiest way to do that is with a Dredge flat mop, the microfiber type. They get the job done really quickly which is a bonus since you will be doing this in between sets.