With more covid-19 lockdowns, and gyms closed once again, more of us have been turning to home workouts. We all know of people who have bought exercise bikes and rowing machines, used them a few times and then consigned them to the garage. There they stay, wedged behind unused bicycles and covered in old compost bags.

The secret is to make your exercise area more appealing – more like the gym. To work out properly you need plenty of space, somewhere that is well lit and not too warm. Trying to exercise on a small rug between the ironing board and the TV – with the family dog leaping all over you and licking your face – is bound to fail.

Time for a bit of furniture moving

Not everyone has limitless space to build their own gym or workout area, but maybe just moving a few pieces of furniture around will allow you to create an “exercise space”. You might just want to position your yoga mat with enough room to floor angel. If you don’t have to search for space each time you want to exercise, you will be less inclined to put it off!

Instead of moving the exercise bike to the garage, move that old two-seater sofa or the pointless cupboard full of things you hardly ever use. It is more important to get that body moving and your heartrate up than to have easy access to your old photos, some egg cups or flower vases.

Household items and pieces of furniture can be useful when setting up a makeshift gym – a chair as a balance bar, books and baked bean cans as weights, or your kitchen broom as a muscle-building prop. If you really want to show off, you could perform your yoga “high plank” against the living room wall and walk your feet up it!

Get help from the experts

• If you want to make your exercise programme into more of a game, the Zombies, Run! app has created a challenge called The Home Front .
• Joe Wicks has taken the nation by storm this year with his home workouts. Go to YouTube to find all sorts of free sessions for every age group and ability.
• The NHS has come up trumps too, with free online fitness videos covering all sorts of exercise from yoga and Pilates to aerobics.

Making your exercise space more permanent

Once you are taking regular exercise at home, you may decide never to go back to the gym! In any case, it’s likely you will have some furniture and belongings which have been ousted to make space. If you are lucky enough to have garage space, then that would do as a temporary solution – or in the future you might want to investigate putting some of these things into storage. So do you have to have insurance at public storage? The answer is yes, but you should shop around, not just agree to the insurance suggested by the storage facility. At Store and Insure , you can get a competitive quote quickly and easily online.