Designing a home gym: top tips for equipment selection
Why create a home gym?
The biggest advantage here must surely be convenience. If time is tight and you only have a half hour for training in the morning or evening, or perhaps even want to squeeze in mini 5-minute movement snacks during your day if working from home, having a home gym facility at your disposal is a real gift.
Being able to pop downstairs into your basement or go outside to your garden gym and get something done, whether it be a full workout session, or much less than that, such as jumping on a rower for ten minutes or. doing ten minutes of core exercises, it’s all good! Remember, these things are cumulative.
Having a gym at home is about making the most out of the time available to you after all.
Training styles and home gym design
Having your own mini home gym gives you the opportunity to tailor the experience, primarily but not exclusively through the equipment selection, to the type of training that you enjoy most. Everything else is superfluous. Think about how much floor space is given over in a normal gym to equipment that you will probably never use.
Our home gym design process
Our first question whenever we are approached for consulting help on creating a home gym for a client, the first question we always ask, after finding out how much space is available and whether there is any. budget at all for the project (!), is “how do you train?’
We want to know the. client’s training background, how they train today and what they are looking to add to their regime in the future. This information should be the fundamental building block at the start of designing any home gym.
Eco-friendly & natural home gyms
For many amateur fitness enthusiasts, they may want a fairly broad range of equipment at home, covering cardio, strength and movement but their interest is in creating a space that is nature-inspired, or eco-friendly. Here we might consider a treadmill or standing bike by a manufacturer such as Nohrd for example as they create aesthetically pleasing yet low-tech machinery with a lot of sustainable wood in the design.
flooring options for a home gym
When budget is tight, we recognise that putting in new flooring tiles may not be a priority over buying equipment but in the case of a movement enthusiast for example, or a martial artist, the flooring effectively becomes the training equipment because of the time spent in contact with the floor. In the case of wrestling, BJJ or natural movement enthusiasts I’d focus on this first. Adding a heavy bag (striking) or a balance beam (movement challenges) is a comparatively easy win.
High quality MMA mats are a solution we used in our fitness studio design for Natural Way Chiro in Calgary, Canada and they proved to be easy to clean, comfortable to train on (barefoot) and in tune with the overall style of the space (a grassy green colour).
For those more interested in strength work, eco-rubber tiles. can be a solid alternative with acoustic, sound absorbing properties and, if you know where to look, are available in a range of nature-inspired patterns. They also score highly on the sustainability front as many are made of off-cuts of rubber anyway, which we approve of.
should you buy a treadmill for your home gym?
Whether you are looking at a Woodway Curve or a Technogym Skillmill,or a more high-tech version complete with entertainment system etc, the prices for a quality treadmill are high. It then comes down to factors such as the available space (consider that a treadmill is about 2metres long by 1metre wide), budget and priorities.
If running outside all year is an option weather-wise, then that space may be better reserved for other equipment. If running is your main activity and it is impossible for six months each winter, then that would make more sense to invest for the long-term.
choosing dumbbells for a home gym
There is a lot to be said for buying a few pairs of hex-shaped dumbbells for your home gym. More luxurious options do now exist and, to be fair, if you want to upgrade the designer credentials of your space then something from Fysik in Thailand can make all the difference. There are not many eco options here, we have seen a few gyms such as the Tulum Jungle Gym make their own weights from local Mexican hardwood but that is a huge amount of work. Nohrd make their swingbells in leather and wood that can be a viable alternative for many home gyms too.
do you need a functional rig in your home gym?
Again, this comes down to the type of training you are into and the available space but, let’s say you are big on functional fitness or Olympic lifting or CrossFit style training, then a rig is going to be heavily used in most of your workouts. Be sure to consider how it will be attached to a wall / the ground, especially if you like to throw around some heavy loads. Alternatively, a wall-mounted pull-up bar can be a simple alternative, especially when combined with a barbell or hex-bar and weight plates. If heavy back squats are your thing though, you had better invest in a rack, or practice your snatch!
home gym bodyweight training equipment
For gymnast rings or a TRX you’ll need somewhere to attach to, either in the ceiling or on the wall, and it should be load-bearing obviously! A set of push-up bars or parallettes can. be useful not only for full range of motion pressing movement but for core exercises too.
low budget home gym design
When budget is really tight I usually recommend spending on gym flooring tiles and then focusing on functional training equipment such as sandbags, medicine balls, rings, TRX, push-up bars, kettlebells and a few dumbbells. This way we avoid all the big ticket items such as cardio equipment and work around the barbell / weight plates investment as well by using kettlebells or a sandbag. A little creativity can go a long way in other words!
home gym design consultant
If you are interested in our home gym design consultancy service please contact us via email on info @ biofit.io