A hip belt is one of my favorite pieces of weight lifting equipment.
I HIGHLY recommend a hip belt for your home gym.
I use it for so many different weight lifting exercises that it's one of the most used pieces of equipment in my gym. I use it during most workouts.
Even the World's Strongest Man winner, Magnus Samuelsson, loves using this belt to help him increase strength on his squats.
I absolutely love the hip belt.
Takes Stress Off Your Lower Back
The belt takes so much of the beating off my lower back when using it in the place of barbells and dumbbells for certain exercises.
Easing the stress on the lower back is one of the most important things you can do for any weight lifting program.
Less lower back work on other exercises means you can use your lower back more on the big compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, and rows.
For example, if you do standing calf raises with heavy weights on your back you are going to stress your lower back greatly. If you instead use the hip belt with the stress taken off your lower back, you will be doing much better overall.
If you use too many weight lifting exercises that stress your lower back, you will end up hurting your lower back and you'll need to take a break from weight lifting until your back recovers.
It's best to use the hip belt on as many exercises as possible to keep the stress off your lower back.
Adds a HUGE Amount of Exercise Variety
You can actually add a HUGE number of weight lifting exercises with this hip belt.
You can do different types of squats, several calf exercises, and you can even use it to add weight to upper body exercises.
Adding weight to pull ups, chin ups, and dips is really easy with this belt.
Did you know you can even use this belt to drag a sled? Dragging a sled is one of the best cardio and conditioning exercises in existence and this belt makes it possible.
I highly recommend sled pulling exercises if you need to improve your conditioning.
Exercise variety is something you need with a home gym and the hip belt provides you with a huge number of additional weight lifting exercises.
What Exercises Can I Do With This Hip Belt?
I like to use my hip belt for squats, donkey calf raises, standing calf raises, weighted dips, and weighted chin ups or pull ups. I also use it with my cable system for additional calf raise exercises.
I'm sure you could use it for even more if you are creative.
I especially love it for all of my calf work because it adds no extra stress to my lower back.
Heavy standing barbell calf raises put a lot of extra stress on your lower back, but substitute the hip belt for the barbell and you've got no lower back stress at all. Works so much better!
The hip belt is a great tool to add to your weight lifting equipment. I really can't more highly recommend this piece of equipment for your home gym.
This belt really allows you to do so much more with your weightlifting program.
Where Do You Get a Hip Belt?
I have actually had my hip belt since the year 2006 so it's been many years.
My belt looks like it's brand new too even after all of the times I have used it during workouts. As I said, I use it for almost every workout I do and not just weight lifting workouts. I also use it for conditioning workouts when pulling a sled. So mine gets a lot of use.
And it still looks brand new.
You can get your new hip belt here: Hip Belt from Amazon.
The hip belt is made by a great company (Ironmind) that makes amazing products. Anything you get from them is very high quality.
I am still amazed at how great my hip belt still looks and functions after all these years. It was a great investment for me, and one that has really helped me get even better results.
The biggest advantage of the hip belt for me has been the reduction in lower back stress. This is huge.
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