Bench | Losing Your Weight

A weight bench can be used for your strength training or resistance training workouts to build more muscle, strength, and even lose weight. You can set up a home gym easily with a weight bench. It only takes a single piece of this type of equipment, an olympic barbell set of 300 pounds, a set of two of dumbbells, and a squat rack to have a fully-equipped gym at home. The weight bench is the central piece of home gym equipment for doing a variety of free weight exercises. The free weight exercises that you can do includes all the compound movements. Compound movements are lifts and exercises that involves more than one major muscle group at the same time.

Often, they work more then three muscle groups at a time. These are all free weight movements because they use barbells and dumbbells for form. The weight bench allows these exercises to be done safely and efficiently. This is why they are the central element of a well-equipped home gym.

The compound lifts include squats, bench press, dumbbell press, bench rows, elevated tricep extension with body weight only, barbell or dumbbell tricep extension, db shoulder press, db arnold press, sitting db curls, and more. The weight bench is extremely versatile in this case. A typical bench costs around $ 200 for a sturdy and stable one that can accomodate and handle a heavy person.

An olympic bench might set you up at an average of $ 300. Some benches are much cheaper but they’re not olympic grade material. They are less tougher and stronger than the olympic varieties. They are standard grades that might not last long. In fact, they often fall apart easily since many are made of plastic and not steel or iron. When picking a weight bench for weight training, I recommend buying one that’s a bit more expensive than stardard benches because you do get what you pay for. Value is based on money in the case of home gym equipment.

For more information on selecting weight benches for your weight training workouts, check out our weight bench guide.