The Ab Wheel: Great Ab Exercises for Skinny Guys

Another inexpensive piece of equipment that's great when you're starting a home gym on a budget: an ab wheel.

The ab wheel isn't hard to use. Basically, you start with your hands on the grips, kneel down with both knees together on the floor, lock your arms, and hold the wheel on the floor, at your knees. Then you roll it out, away from your knees, and keep going forward with it until your hands are beyond your head. You shouldn't touch the floor; keeping your body 3-6 inches above the floor is ideal. Then, you return to the starting position by pulling in with your abs and arching your back.

Then do it again, 7-10 more times.

Your abs will be hurting the next day, I guarantee it.

The nice thing about ab wheels is that they're dirt cheap, small and easy to store, and give you a fantastic and surprisingly difficult ab workout.

The one I used: Valeo Dual Ab Wheel

Starting a home gym

A little background info on the reasons for this post: I was once a poor college student.  I had very little money and time, and going to the gym got very, very hard.  As someone who lives in an area where it gets pretty cold in the winter, that made it that much harder to get my butt in gear when it was time to work out.  The easiest and most affordable solution was to start up my own home gym by investing in a few pieces of equipment. I had no idea where to start, but after going online and doing some research on how to start your own home gym, I found the pieces I needed, threw down a little money, and suddenly had convenience, ease, and privacy.  I have to say, nothing beats being able to go into your basement to work out instead of having to drive or walk there.

You might think it's going to be really costly to start up your own home gym. Truth is, I spent more on my own gym memberships over the course of two years than I did when I bought my first few pieces of home equipment.

However, there are a few important things to know when you get started.  First of all, you need to figure out your fitness goals; for most of the people reading this blog, bulking up is probably one of the big ones.  Weights are going to be your priority.

In the next few posts, I'll detail the equipment I used to start up my home gym.  The first thing I recommend is dumbells.  My favorites are the Bowflex SelectTech series; these are inexpensive, easy to use, last a LONG time, and have a nifty selection dial adjustment system so you can easily increase or decrease their weight.  I bought these a couple years ago (2006, I think) and they've lasted me til today.


I wrote a more in depth review of this set which you can see here.