While regular gym membership fees aren’t that high, the very commute to the place and the fact that you have to purchase appropriate clothes add up to it. At the end of the day, with the amount of money you spend on these three expenses alone, you might be able to afford your own gym. Moreover, beginners sometimes aren’t comfortable working out with others, especially those who are self-conscious about their body. For them, building a home gym may seem like an ideal solution. Still, how does one make a home gym and how much does this entire ordeal cost? Let’s find out!
Preparing the floor
The first thing you need to do when making a home gym is – prepare the room for the task. Here, you need to start by answering one question – will you be doing cardio indoors? If the answer to this question is yes, what kind? If you plan to use skipping rope as a main source of cardio, you need a soft padding like a wall-to-wall carpet or a soft mat. In this way, you will protect your feet and stop your skip rope from thinning out so quickly. Furthermore, jumping and dropping weights on the floor causes a lot of noise. This is why you want to choose a downstairs room, especially if you’re not living alone.
Prioritize
The truth is that the size of your budget doesn’t actually matter that much when it comes to designing a workout space. Sure, it may prevent you from equipping your gym with some advanced fitness machinery but all you really need is a skip-rope, a mat for sit-ups, a bar for pull-ups and enough space to do some push-ups. Squats can be done with a barbell but, then again, doing them without a bar can also give you some effect. In other words, in order to exercise properly, you don’t even need a gym.
Needless to say, this makes your job a lot easier, seeing as how you can start the entire project by simply emptying out the room and installing a pull-up bar. Moreover, you can get just a barbell (Olympic if possible) and work out without adding any weight plates for the time being. As you grow stronger and your budget increases, you can gradually purchase more and more weight plates. In other words, those who are working with limited resources can start minimal and then scale up. In a couple of months or years, you can have a fully-equipped gym.
Ambiance matters as well
When it comes to building a home gym, some people are simply too preoccupied with equipment that they forget about anything else. For instance, working out without a proper soundtrack can be a true disaster. Therefore, you might want to think about investing in a solid stereo system.
As for your athletic performance, it can be diminished quite a bit by a bad airflow or a too high temperature. In order to avoid this, you might want to look for an appropriate airconditioner or airconditioning system.
Apart from this, you also might want to get some mirrors to complement the room. The mirror is the most important accessory in the gym but not for all the obvious reasons. To some, this may appear as a tool of boosting one’s self-confidence but this is not the real reason why they’re there (although, this too, helps). Assuming an improper stance while working out may slow down your progress and even be a cause of an injury. By simply looking at a well-placed mirror you will be able to immediately spot if you’re doing something wrong.
Find the right program
Earlier on, we mentioned that you don’t actually need the weights in order to work out. Well, that’s not necessarily true. You see, some people have specific goals in mind, goals that require specific equipment. Therefore, you should always look at the physique you want to build as a beacon. Then, you need to explore all the exercises necessary to develop these muscle groups and plan your home gym layout accordingly. Push-ups are a great exercise but they aren’t exactly capable of replacing a bench press. As for your cardio, skip rope is definitely the most frugal option but you might want to complement it with a punching bag, as well.
In conclusion
At the end of the day, it is impossible to give a straight answer to a question of how much does it cost to build a home gym. Getting a treadmill, VibroGym diamond and Expresso Fitness S3 Novo can cost a small fortune, while you can get a skipping rope for as little as $5. Overall, it all depends on your ambition, your plans, and your personal preferences. As we mentioned before, the greatest advantage of building your own home gym lies in the fact that you don’t have to get everything at once.
Guest blog by Neil White