You need to give the folks over at ESPN a great deal of credit. Over 20 years ago, the cable channel would run a number of classic home exercise programs designed to help people get in shape and lose weight. In a way, they encouraged the development of home exercise gyms as an alternative to traveling to a local gym to workout. (Keep in mind, depending upon where people live, access to a gym may be prohibitive due to distance, weather, etc) These cable programs understood that their viewers were primarily work at home moms and dads who were unable to get away from the house for 90 minutes but still had the desire to workout. Additionally, these moms and dads had the desire to embark on a COMMITTED workout. They were, after all, tuning in every day! As such, they were ready, willing and able to convert their living room or basement (or both) into home exercise gyms.

Cable TV and the Simplicity of Home Exercise Gyms

To the cable programs' credit, the producers understood that the average person watching such a program was not interested in packing on 30lbs of raw muscle and develop a contest winning physique. The viewers of the program simply wanted to get into better shape and make their home life a little bit more active. As such, the programs did not stress overly strenuous workouts designed to push the viewer to the limit. Instead, they prescribed a number of low to mid-level impact cross training programs that anyone could benefit from with the difficulty level raised or lowered depending on personal athletic ability.

Also, in order to work out properly, the viewer would need to invest in putting together one or more of the home exercise gyms the program would prescribe. Expensive and elaborate equipment would be totally prohibitive to most viewers. While some could afford the expensive $3,000 home gyms sold on infomercials, for the great majority of the viewers such a price was so far in the stratosphere it could seriously be considered. Instead, most home exercise gyms consisted of a weight bench, dumbbells and, in some cases, bungee cord resisters. While not the expansive equipment found in a commercial gym, these items were perfectly fine for most makeshift home exercise gyms.

When it comes to exercise, something is better than nothing and the low impact workouts that these programs advised were far better than doing nothing. In fact, there were great for getting people into better shape and starting them on the path to a much healthier lifestyle.