Treadmill, static bike, or something else?

GEMMA WILKINSON

Before GaGu gives you a proper answer, let him be uncharacteristically motivational (or justifiably demotivational). If you’re buying an exercise doodad because you’ve piled on the ol’ Covid-19 kilos, don’t. Just don’t. There’s plenty of time to work on diet and exercise once the world has stopped being a hideous daily nightmare, and you are entirely forgiven if hooking takeaway curry sauce up to your veins is the thing that gets you through. Particularly if you’re the type to gaze upon a dusty bit of home gym kit and wonder quite why you decided to spend a month’s wages in order to lose a third of your room’s footprint.

It would be great if Guru could just get on and answer your question, right? Yeah, it would, but you’ve asked a question which completely eliminates the factor that inspired that first paragraph rant: you. GaGu doesn’t know if you like to hike, bike, run or whatever. He doesn’t know your levels of motivation, and he doesn’t know what space you have. You could go for, say, a Peloton, with its pricey instructor-led subscription acting as a fairly decent driver, but if cycling isn’t for you, or you don’t have the floor space for the (admittedly compact) bike, that’d be no good.

So let’s take a more 2am infomercial tack, and fulfil GaGu’s legal obligation to give at least a partly satisfactory answer by suggesting some kind of weird looking multi-exerciser. New Image’s FITT range covers a load of different HIIT workouts and it’s a BIIT good; the FITT Cube (currently on special for $50) covers you for all kinds of resistance and joist-loosening leaping actions, while the FITT Gym gives you a bunch of incline and flat sliding actions with which to torture your abs. Neither is super expensive, both are small enough that you won’t curse them.