The popularity of home-exercise machines has soared over the past decade as people have felt the crunch of expanding work schedules and declining health and fitness. These machines vary widely, both physiologically and structurally. Some offer a total body workout, while other focus on developing specific parts of your body, such as your midsection. Some machines use “elastic bands” as a form of resistance, while others rely on your bodyweight like treadmills. Some are built to last a lifetime; others disintegrate within months.

The potential benefits of home exercise machines, however, is unquestionable: the primary advantage is one of convenience. In terms of long-term exercise compliance, convenience means a lot: you‘re more likely to do a workout thats “sitting right there in front of you” than one that is a 20-minute drive away.

The primary drawback of home fitness machines is the potential boredom they can exact on their owners. Fortunately, this boredom can be mitigated by challenging yourself to set new “benchmarks of performance” such as a mile-for-time run on a treadmill and in exercises.

If you are trying to decide if a weight machine is for you, begin with these questions:

• Do I like this activity/motion enough to do it for months on end?
• And how much time will I realistically dedicate to this device each week?

Studies show that most people don‘t use home fitness machines nearly as much as they believed they would when they bought them.

The drawback of making an impulse purchase on a home fitness machine like Rowing Machines ellipticals and weight benches is that we end up with these big, shiny, monolithic testaments to consumer gullibility in the corner of our bedrooms that, after a period of five to six weeks, are demoted from “fitness machine” to “clothes hanger.”

As long as you know what your goals are and what you hope to achieve, your choice of exercise equipment will be more focused and the machine you purchase will be far from becoming just a piece of furniture.