Alex Reed
Alex Reed writes and edits FitVilo, a site about training in flats where the floor is shared, the storage is tight and someone lives below.
What he builds for the site: four planning calculators (clear-floor fit, apartment impact-risk planner, home-versus-gym break-even, foldability time cost), a hand-compiled dataset of 31 walking pads and treadmills with a linked source on every row, and the diagrams inside the guides.
How he works: every figure is read off a named source on a stated date and listed at the foot of the article. Where a manufacturer publishes no number, the field stays blank. Where a consumer laboratory such as Stiftung Warentest or Consumer Reports has tested a machine, the result is credited to that lab.
Areas of focus
- Compact home gyms
- Apartment fitness
- Walking pads and treadmills
- Small-space fitness equipment
- Workout noise and shared-building constraints
- Equipment storage and fit
- Everyday movement for desk-heavy schedules
Contact
Corrections and questions go to the address on the Contact page. Space-planning visuals are on FitVilo's Pinterest.
Written by Alex Reed
32 guides on FitVilo
A Small-Space Mobility and Recovery Routine
A ten-minute post-workout routine for a small flat, with each technique ranked by what the published research shows about it.
Ventilating a Home Workout Corner With No Window
How to move air through a windowless workout corner with the door, a fan and an exhaust, and the published ventilation rates that apply.
Walking Pad and Treadmill Maintenance in a Small Flat
Lubrication intervals from six makers compared side by side, plus a simple belt check for when the manual is gone.
A 5-Minute Small-Space Warm-Up With No Equipment
Five minutes, no equipment and nothing that leaves the floor: a warm-up for a studio flat where only the deep lunge needs more room than you take up standing.
Anchoring Resistance Bands in a Rental Without Drilling
Anchoring resistance bands in a rental without drilling: a door anchor used within its maker's stated conditions, a weighted floor anchor, and the fixtures and furniture not to loop a band around.
Folding Bench Buying Guide for a Small Apartment
What to check on a folding bench before buying for a small flat: its own weight, folded size, rated load and how it stows.
Why a Thicker Exercise Mat Is Not Always a Better One
Under a kneecap, a dense 6 mm mat holds more cushion than a soft 10 mm one does.
Under-Desk Walking Pad Setup: Height, Belt Width, Cables
If the belt is 19.5 inches, setup is easy. If it is in the 14 to 16.5 inch band the rest of the tested field shipped with, the answer is a slower speed, not a handrail.
Home Gym Running Cost: What Each Machine Adds to Your Power Bill
What a treadmill adds to a US bill at 18.34 cents a kilowatt-hour is about $2.38 a month, walked an hour a day for twenty days. Every wattage behind that figure is an assumption, because no manufacturer checked publishes a consumption spec.
Measure Your Space Before You Buy: a 10-Minute Room Audit
Sole's manual asks 3.5 feet of clear floor behind an F63. Every other margin on this page is an editorial cutoff, labelled as one.
Walking Pad or Treadmill: What Decides It in a Flat
Which is right for a flat depends on three things: whether someone lives below you, whether you want to run, and whether the machine has a proper safety stop. Stiftung Warentest's 2026 test and a 31-model dataset help settle it.
Workout Routines for Apartments With Thin Walls
Impact ratings in the building codes belong to floors, never to the wall you share.
Best Places to Put Workout Equipment in a Small Room
Where each piece goes once the route is taped: the mat along the longest unbroken wall, the tray at its foot, the bench outside the door swing, and the cord never across the mat.
How to Track Daily Activity Without a Fitness Tracker
One hundred steps a minute is the heuristic threshold for moderate intensity, measured on 76 adults aged 21 to 40. An older walker has a published reason to expect a lower one.
How to Create a Workout Corner Without a Spare Room
A corner is a strip, so the tier it supports comes from dividing area by depth: at 1.1 m deep, dumbbells want 2.2 m of clear wall.
How to Set Up a Small Home Gym Without Wasting Space
Measure your clear floor and your overhead reach before buying anything. Then a mat, adjustable dumbbells, bands and, if there is room, a folding bench cover most of what a flat-sized gym needs, in that order.
Resistance Bands for Home Workouts: Beginner Guide
1.82 kg in one peer-reviewed paper and 3.0 kg in another, for the same green band at the same 100 percent stretch. A colour is a step size, never a weight.
Kettlebells vs Dumbbells for Home Workouts
Dumbbells first, one kettlebell after: an adjustable pair claims five times the floor a bell does.
How to Organize Fitness Gear in a Small Apartment
Frequency of use sorts gear better than object type does: the heap-and-date pass, four buckets, a one-handed reach rule, and two safety rules that contradict each other.
What Fitness Equipment Is Worth Buying First?
Nobody has measured how many sessions should earn the next purchase. Twelve is this page's own figure; the one published habit study puts the bar at twenty-four.
Outdoor Activities That Do Not Require Expensive Equipment
Ice underfoot and the air-quality reading are the only two things that should call off a street session.
Quiet Home Workouts for an Upper-Floor Flat
Move the session an hour earlier before changing one exercise. Footfall is 67.7 percent of South Korea's logged floor-noise complaints.
Exercise Bike vs Treadmill for a Small Apartment
With an occupied flat under you, buy the bike. An 80 kg runner at 11 km/h sends about 200 kg into the slab roughly 4,800 times in half an hour. Above an empty or commercial unit that constraint is gone and either machine is a fair choice.
No-Equipment Workout Space: Load Without Equipment
Hands on a 60 cm surface and a push-up carries about 40 percent of your body weight; feet up on the same surface and it carries 75. The pull pattern has no such dial, which is where a flat runs out.
Home Gym vs Gym Membership: Practical Comparison
With a gym on your street, four sessions a week cost about 69 hours a year in travel. With a 27-minute trip each way, the same four sessions cost 189.
Storage Ideas for Home Fitness Equipment
Folding a WalkingPad A1 Pro takes 61 cm off its length and nothing at all off the 12.9 cm height that decides whether it goes under a bed.
Home Gym Lighting and Ventilation: A Beginner's Guide
The 1,000 ppm CO2 limit attributed to ASHRAE: Standard 62.1 dropped it almost thirty years ago and no current standard has one.
Compact Fitness Equipment for Small Apartments
Compact is free on a bench and costly on a motor: the faster pad in WalkingPad's own under-bed range carries 60 lb less user weight.
How Folding Gym Equipment Fails: Hinges, Struts and Pins
On a folding bench the hole wears out before the pin does, which inverts what you inspect on a used one.
Home Gym Flooring for Apartments: Density, Thickness, Load
For an apartment gym, buy flooring on density and stiffness, not thickness. Here is what a rubber tile can and cannot do for the neighbour below, which numbers on the box are comparable, and a worked build for a 6 m² corner.
Adjustable Dumbbells vs Regular Dumbbells: Apartment Guide
Priced from named retailers on 29 August 2026: $354.96 of fixed iron, $219 for the adjustable block, and a 3.8 million unit recall.
How to Build an Active Routine Without a Gym Membership
A no-gym week is built out of slots a weekday already contains: the commute, the gap between calls, the camera-off call, lunch, and the errand you would have driven.