Health and Fitness

Is Your Fitness Routine Breaking the Bank?

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When you’re working out, you don’t want to put too much strain on your muscles. If you’re not careful, you could injure yourself. 

Your finances are no different. Putting too much strain on your finances could do some serious damage. Find out how you can stop straining your finances and reduce your fitness costs this year. 

Straining Your Finances

What happens if you keep pushing your finances when they’re strained? Financial damages. You could put your checking account into overdraft. You could miss a bill payment or bounce an important check. You could run out of funds for monthly essentials, like groceries or gas.

At the very least, you could have no wiggle room in your budget for additional expenses, including emergencies. You won’t have any savings to handle an urgent home repair, car repair or dental appointment that you can’t ignore. 

If you’re ever in this situation, don’t panic — you still have options for covering an emergency expense. You could use your credit card and then pay down the balance later. Or you could look into your options for online loans accessible in your home state. If your online loan application gets approved, you can use the borrowed funds to manage the emergency expense quickly. Then, you can focus on repayments. 

One way to avoid straining your finances is to cut down your fitness costs. But how?

Stop Booking Boutique Classes:

Studios typically charge between $20-$40 per boutique fitness class. That cost may not seem like much at first glance, but if you’re signing up for several days a week, you’re going to put a big dent in your finances by the end of the month.

Find the Right Gym:

Gyms allow you to use their equipment to work out, and many offer boutique-type classes like yoga, Pilates and boxing for their members. So, if you want to get your money’s worth, a gym membership could be a good choice for your fitness routine.

However, not all gyms are budget-friendly. Avoid signing up for a gym that highlights its exclusiveness and luxury amenities (spas, saunas, juice bars, etc.). These will have high price tags. Choose an affordable gym that offers the basics to a wide audience.

Quit the Gym:

If you want to save even more, you should consider quitting that gym membership. But where will you work out? Now that the weather is warming up, you can do plenty of your workouts outdoors. You can go for a run instead of hitting the treadmill or go for a hike instead of using the stair-climber. When the weather isn’t nice outside, you can do your workouts at home. You don’t even need to buy equipment — you can do bodyweight exercises without using any weights, balls or bands.

Skip the Trainer:

Physical training sessions are expensive, especially when your budget is tight. To save money, you should skip their training sessions and rely on friends or free fitness apps to push you to meet your exercise goals. 

Rethink Your Workouts:

You can get your heart rate up and sweat up a storm without having to set foot in a gym! There are so many activities that you can do to replace your standard workouts:

  • Go for a bike ride
  • Garden
  • Go to the park with your kids and play
  • Take your dog on walks
  • Do household chores 

Don’t let your fitness routine hurt your finances. You and your bank account need to stay in good shape.