No gym? No problem – here’s how to build strength anywhere

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The article below is an excerpt from my newsletter: Well Enough with Harry Bullmore. To get my latest thoughts on fitness and wellbeing pop your email address into the box above to get the newsletter direct to your inbox.

I love movement and the many benefits that come with it. My aim is to make it as accessible and enjoyable as possible for as many people as I can.

However, through my work as a fitness journalist and coach, I also know that movement isn’t always accessible or enjoyable for everyone. Part of this newsletter’s mission is to help change that.

Which brings us to this week’s theme: fitness can take many forms – and success often comes from finding the one that works for you.

I like to think of physical training as a conversation with your body. We train to trigger some form of adaptation, whether that’s improving how we look, feel or function. The type of training we do determines what message we send. If we want our heart and lungs to become more efficient, we do something that raises our heart rate. If we want a muscle to become stronger, we ask it to move something heavy. If we want to become more mobile, we do something that moves our joints through the widest range of motion we can safely access.

But there is more than one way to send the same message. This is why you don’t need to lift weights to build a fitter body – good news for anyone who finds the gym intimidating or can’t afford a gym membership.

Your body, and your nervous system in particular, doesn’t know whether you’re lifting a dumbbell, kettlebell, barbell, resistance band or your own bodyweight. It only recognises that it is being asked to overcome some form of resistance.

If this task is sufficiently challenging and you do it often enough, you will present a strong business case to your body, asking it to become fitter and stronger. With appropriate fuelling and recovery, it will respond with a handy upgrade.

With this knowledge and a few fundamental exercises in your back pocket, you can build strength from the comfort of your own home using just your bodyweight or a resistance band. For ideas to help you get started, try our beginner bodyweight training plan, guide to strength training outside the gym, or resistance band workout programme.

Hopefully that tip can save you some time and money. Fingers crossed this next lesson can too: “Health and fitness are rarely revolutionary.”

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You don’t need to exhaust yourself – or your bank balance – keeping on top of trending workouts, diet plans and recovery protocols. The inner workings of the human body haven’t changed drastically since the advent of social media – the same basic principles that have always worked continue to do so.

This line of thinking inspired “the most boring fitness article you’ll ever read – but also the most useful”.

For better health, we want to move regularly, eat nutritious whole foods where possible, and aim for the best sleep that life allows. If you can occasionally lift something challenging and get a bit out of breath, you’ll have ticked most of the boxes for a healthy, active lifestyle.

The Independent’s senior fitness writer Harry Bullmore believes resistance bands are an excellent, accessible and affordable muscle-strengthening tool for beginners (The Independent/Harry Bullmore)

This approach might still sound unattainable for those with busy lives. If that is the case for you, but you still want to improve your health, start simple: make one positive change and stick with it.

To understand why this works, consider Newton’s first law of motion: “An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line, unless acted on by an unbalanced force.”

If you continue living life as you do, you will likely continue on your current health and fitness trajectory. If you want to trigger change in your body, you need to make a consistent change in your life. Small tweaks can have a significant cumulative impact.

A 2025 study from the University of Sydney found that, among people with unhealthy routines, an extra 15 minutes of sleep, 1.6 minutes of exercise and half a serving of vegetables per day lowered all-cause mortality risk by 10 per cent.

Bigger changes invariably led to more dramatic results, but these small, sustainable wins still delivered impressive benefits. Moving from 3,000 to 3,500 steps per day amounts to roughly 15,000 extra steps each month, while introducing one 20-minute full-body strength training session each week, where before there was none, can have a transformative effect.

So what have we learned? Fitness isn’t uniform – far from it – and that’s a good thing. It takes many forms, giving you plenty of freedom to find one that works for you. As long as you’re able to do something, and do it consistently, you are on the right track.