blacKandi Fitness

I said in my last post that I will be posting some before pics of my home gym which is located in my basement. The space is small enough for one person so that’s even better. There is a lot more to the basement, but everyone decided that we should have a family room in the house so we’ll be making a second living area. Grrrrrrrrr! A few years ago the basement was newly renovated with new materials and it came out very nice and clean…well, we filled it up with junk, as the years went by, that we should have tossed a long time ago.

After clearing the space out we found that the bottom of the walls were tarnished and the flooring was damaged and discolored. The flooring is linoleum and now it sucks! Underneath that is concrete of course. I cleaned down the walls and the flooring to the best of my abilities and it still looks a mess. Some of the flooring is even coming up.

So, what I’m going to do next week is go out to Lowe’s and buy some rubber puzzle mats and put the gym floor down myself without having to pick up the linoleum and having to deal with the concrete. This going to have to work because I don’t have the moolah to fix the floor properly right now. The floors are not that bad…just some chipping.

I am also going to leave the walls as is because they are the least of my worries and I’m going to get some big framed pictures made up of my She-ros and my Hero (Serena & Venus Williams, Jillian Michaels, Garcelle Beauvais, Flo Jo and Rocky Balboa) and I’m going to hang them on the walls along with a few mirrors so I will be able to watch my form as a workout. I’m also going to by a smaller TV so I can mount it up in the one of the corners to conserve space and it’s just easier to look up when working out than it is to look down. What I’m doing now is hoping (which is totally unreliable), as I do my exercises, that my form is on the money.

I also received my Cathe High Step in the mail two days ago and I received all of the Hardcore Series plus Hardcore Extreme AND my Butts and Guts DVDs that I ordered from her too. My rotation starts on March 2nd, but I decided to try out Gym Styles: Chest, Back and Shoulders today…I was only able to get through a little bit of it because my oldest started acting a fool and didn’t want to watch her little sister. We are NOT on speaking terms at the moment. Grrrrrrrrrrr! The trials and tribs of being a mom of a teen!!!! Right now, when I’m supposed to be working out, I’m feeding the baby grapes. Ha! She’s too cute! I’ll wait for her to fall asleep and then I’ll sneak back to the home gym to finish it up.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say tonight because I have lots of emails to read so here are the pics I promised.

Here’s the entire space. My hand-me-down bench (that doesn’t incline/decline there in the back holding my 55lb aerobic barbell.

This is the other side of the space you don’t see in the first pic.

My bands and dumbbells – will install hooks of course. One of my 25lber was a hand-me-down (see if you can spot it), but all the others are new.

My desk up close which also houses my DVD player temporarily. All of the Cathe DVDs I own are there too and some The FIRM VHS tapes that my best friend gave to me from way back. I’m going to get a book shelf for all of that and plus my fitness books that I keep in my bedroom at the moment.

My stability ball, my Cathe High Step and The Step AND my hand-me-down barbell that needs new clips.

Here are the hand-me-down plates that I have. I’m grateful for all of the hand-me-down stuff that I have just so you all know. I appreciate that people are doing their best to help me out. Fitness equipment is not cheap. Trying to figure out how to de-rust them. Is there such a word? De-rust? Probably not, but I tried cleaning these, but I didn’t do a good job. They just sit on the floor because my fellow Iron Maidens say to just keep them until we all figure out how. They shall stay. I need a plate rack so bad!

And here I am standing in my empty home gym before I moved everything into it – it took forever to clear out – something like four Saturdays. This is my progress pic for the month of March 2009 taken early (today is February 26, 2009). So this is before my 12 week Cathe rotation. I’m curious to see how I will look after. Aren’t my sneakers cute?

And that’s it for the grand, royal tour of my home gym. Ha ha!