At home is best. The Americans call it  "home fitness": organising a mini-gym in your own home is a useful way to achieve wellness. Invest the time you would normally use to go out (including the stress of driving in traffic or finding a parking spot) by dedicating it to well-being, accompanied by listening to a good CD or watching your favourite TV programme. 

Go for quality. More and more people are buying equipment for working out at home. However, too often the wrong kind is bought, and then used incorrectly. Equipment should be chosen that is effective, guaranteed by an international-standard brand or recommended by expert staff. Another problem is the lack of instruction booklets with many sales of equipment. Let's take the bike, the most well known machine. It's not enough just to get on and start pedaling: to establish a safe and effective wellness programme you have to know how long to pedal and at what speed, and what kind of resistance to set up. If all of this is missing then there is the danger that the beginner could make mistakes and run the risk of actually doing more harm than good.

A customized trainer. For this reason it's a good idea to turn to a personal trainer for help. He or she is a personal instructor who comes to your home, assesses the room destined to house the training equipment, listens to the needs and goals of the client, rents the right equipment or helps in its purchase. A personal trainer's skills are also extremely useful once you've got the equipment, to decide the exercises to be carried out, correct any mistakes in performing them and change the quality and quantity of the programme after a certain period.

Heart and muscles! To keep in shape - at home as well as in the gym - we need equipment both able to stimulate our 'engine' (cardiovascular and circulatory apparatus) as well as the 'bodywork' (muscles, tendons and joints) of our bodies. To work out our 'engine' choose between an exercise bike, rowing machine, treadmill, step machine or skipping rope etc. For the 'bodywork' you are able to do quite a lot to tone up muscles with a pair of dumb bells, a bench and pulley. A safer, more pleasant and comfortable option to extend the entire trainable muscle fascia is a compact, multi-purpose machine specially designed for home use.

OK, the space is right. Which features are needed at home in the space put aside for exercising? Given that for most people it means a small corner of the room and not a ready-made area, here are a few useful tips to improve the quality of working out at home:

• Turnover of air. Working out muscles means that the consumption of oxygen goes sky-high, so it is essential to train in a room where the air turnover is good and therefore the actual quality of the air.
• Dampness under control. Not recommended is either excessive dryness created in certain environments by heating or the exaggerated damp atmosphere of a bathroom or kitchen with poor air turnover.
• Light. Dark or shadowy environments are not recommended for carrying out physical exercise.
• Peace and quiet. To avoid dissatisfaction with home fitness leading to giving it up it's best to create a quiet, private, tidy space to work out muscles and soothe your mind.
• Entertainment. It's a good idea to have a TV or stereo/radio near the equipment to pass the time enjoyably.
• Mirror. Only by looking at yourself are you able to check that the movement carried out in certain exercises is correct and symmetrical. 
• Hygienic flooring. Ideal for losing sweat is plastic flooring treated to repel fungus and bacteria, is easy to clean and able to absorb dropped weights.
• Inside or outside. Every so often it's not a bad idea to add a little outdoor training to your indoor workout. A public park, for example, can be transformed into a potential open-air gym containing numerous ideal elements including trees, benches or pavements that can all be used to help work out or stretch various muscles.