Buying Guides
Functional Training at Home: What Each Piece of Kit Actually Does
Functional training kit is the easiest category to over-buy. Everything is relatively cheap, everything looks useful, and none of it takes much space individually. Six months later there is a box of bands, two medicine balls and a skipping rope nobody has touched.
The fix is knowing what each piece actually trains, so you buy the two or three that fill a genuine gap rather than the ten that look versatile.
Resistance bands
What they train: everything, badly, and a few things brilliantly.
Bands are poor at building maximum strength — the resistance is lightest where the movement is hardest, which is backwards for most lifts. What they are genuinely excellent at is shoulder health, hip work, warm-ups, and adding accommodating resistance to a barbell for people who already lift.
They are also the only serious training tool that fits in hand luggage.
Buy if: you travel, you want a warm-up tool, or you have shoulders that complain about pressing. Skip if: you already own dumbbells and want to get stronger. Bands will not do that job.
Medicine balls and slam balls
What they train: power production, and the ability to generate force quickly rather than slowly.
This is the gap most home gyms actually have. Barbell and dumbbell work trains you to move heavy things slowly. Throwing and slamming trains you to move light things fast, and that quality declines with age faster than strength does.
The distinction matters when buying: a slam ball is dead-filled and designed to be thrown into the ground without bouncing. A medicine ball is firmer and bounces, which makes it right for wall throws and partner work but genuinely dangerous to slam indoors.
For a home gym with a hard floor and a normal ceiling, a slam ball is almost always the right one.
Buy if: you want to train power, or you want twenty-minute conditioning sessions with one object. Skip if: you train in a room above someone else. Slamming is loud through a floor.
Browse medicine balls · Browse slam balls
Battle ropes
What they train: upper-body conditioning, and grip endurance, with essentially zero impact on the joints.
The catch is space. A rope needs to be anchored and then laid out at length — realistically 6–8m of clear floor, which is a garden or a long garage rather than a spare bedroom. People buy them for indoor gyms and discover there is nowhere to put them.
Buy if: you have outdoor space or a long garage, and you want hard conditioning that does not involve running or jumping. Skip if: your gym is a room. It will not fit.
Plyometric boxes
What they train: jumping, landing mechanics, and single-leg step-up strength.
A box is more useful than it looks, and not only for jumping. Step-ups, split squats with a rear foot elevated, box squats to a consistent depth, and incline press-ups all come from the same object.
Height matters more than people expect. A box that is too tall stops being a jumping tool and becomes a shin-barking hazard; most people should jump considerably lower than ego suggests. A soft-sided box is worth the premium if anyone in the house is new to jumping.
Buy if: you want lower-body power, or you want one object that unlocks several exercises. Skip if: you have knee or ankle issues that jumping aggravates — step-ups still work, but a bench does that job.
Sandbags
What they train: awkward, shifting loads — the closest thing in a gym to picking up a real object.
A sandbag does not balance. The load moves as you move, which forces the trunk and the grip to work in a way a barbell never does. For carries, cleans and squats where the point is robustness rather than a number, it is excellent.
It is also the most forgiving heavy object to drop, which makes it a good choice for a garage with a hard floor and no platform.
Buy if: you want strength that transfers to lifting real things, or you want a heavy object you can drop safely. Skip if: your priority is measurable progression. Sandbags are hard to load precisely.
Skipping ropes
What they train: cardiovascular fitness, calf and foot resilience, and coordination — for the smallest cost and space commitment of anything in this list.
The limitation is ceiling height and impact. You need roughly 2.5m of headroom to skip comfortably, and it is a repetitive impact activity, so it suits people whose ankles and calves tolerate that and not people returning from a lower-limb injury.
Buy if: you want cardio without a machine and you have the headroom. Skip if: low ceilings, or a first-floor room above a bedroom.
Foam rollers
What they train: nothing, strictly speaking. What they offer is a tolerable way to spend ten minutes on tissue quality and a routine that makes people more likely to warm up at all.
The evidence on foam rolling is more modest than the marketing suggests — the reliable effect is a short-term increase in range of motion, which is genuinely useful before training. Treat it as a warm-up tool rather than a treatment.
If something hurts consistently rather than feeling tight, a foam roller is not the answer and a physiotherapist or GP is.
What to buy first
If you have a barbell or dumbbells already and want to fill the genuine gaps, in order:
- A slam ball — adds power training, which nothing else in a typical home gym covers.
- A set of bands — adds warm-ups and shoulder work, costs very little, stores in a drawer.
- A plyo box — adds single-leg work and jumping from one object.
That is roughly £100–£150 of kit across our range and covers the three qualities most home gyms are missing. Prices checked August 2026.
Everything else on this page is excellent for the specific person it suits and dead weight for everyone else. Buy against a gap you can name, not against a category.
Common questions
What is the difference between a slam ball and a medicine ball? A slam ball is dead-filled and does not bounce, so it is designed to be thrown hard into the ground. A medicine ball is firmer and does bounce, which makes it right for wall throws but genuinely dangerous to slam indoors. For a home gym with a hard floor, a slam ball is almost always the correct choice.
Can resistance bands replace weights? For warm-ups, shoulder health and travel, they are excellent. For building maximum strength they are poor, because the resistance is lightest exactly where the movement is hardest. Treat them as a complement to weights rather than a substitute.
How much space do battle ropes need? Realistically 6–8 metres of clear floor plus a solid anchor point. This is the most commonly under-estimated requirement in the category, and it rules them out for most indoor home gyms.
What should I buy first if I already have dumbbells? A slam ball. Power production — moving something light quickly — is the quality that a dumbbell-and-bench setup does not train, and it is the one that declines fastest with age.
