Top 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Your Home Gym
What’s up everybody? The best time of the year is here. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but if you’re planning on building a home or garage gym it’s not too late to get in on some deals…and possibly correct some mistakes you may have made.
Don’t stress, I made some of these same mistakes when building my garage gym! Some fixes are easier than others, but think about these things before you start installing your equipment:
1. Space
Understand the space that you intend to use for your gym. Measure your room or garage and keep those dimensions handy. Of course you can always measure again if you forget, but you need to understand the size of space you’re playing with. This is really important when you’re thinking about the layout of your new gym. You don’t want to mistakenly buy equipment that doesn’t fit.
Bonus Tip: Check doors leading to your home gym. You have to be able to get the equipment and all it’s pieces into the room!
2. Buy Good Flooring
Buy good flooring and get it down before you install equipment! You want flooring that is durable and able to protect your floor underneath. Don’t cheap out and buy the cheapest foam flooring you can find on Amazon, go out and shop it. There are some pretty cost effective solutions. Tractor Supply’s Stall Mats are pretty common among the garage/home gym community. It can take a beating obviously, and it will protect your floor.
And in case I didn’t say this before, I did, but put the flooring down before you install the equipment. You don’t want to have to install everything and then move it to put your flooring down. Trust me.
3. Make Your Gym Enjoyable
I’ve always gone to big box or local gyms. When I made the investment to start my garage gym something became very clear very fast. The gyms I used to go to were comfortable. These gyms have AC, heat, TVs, speakers, and different amenities. That’s something I didn’t have and I wish I would’ve thought about while I was planning my garage gym.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have to have a TV in my garage gym, but heat would be nice. If you’re planning on building a gym in your garage, you may need to think about that. Otherwise, you’re not going to go workout because it’s too cold and let me tell you, barbells get very cold.
4. Get Storage
This was another thing that wasn’t so obvious to me until my lovely fiance asked, “Where are you going to put all this stuff”, when referring to my dumbbells. It became very obvious at that moment that I should’ve thought about storage for my dumbbells, plates, barbell, trap bar, and EZ curl bar.
Think about storage when you’re planning your gym! You need it! It was very annoying to have all I mentioned before just lying around the garage, not to mention I just spent all this money to not take care of it. I told myself that this gym wasn’t a bad idea and that the equipment would last a long time, but I wasn’t treating it how I should.
Get a plate tree, dumbbell racks, whatever to take care of your equipment. You just spent your hard earned money on it, you likely don’t want to have to do it all over again.
5. Look At Used Equipment
This is something that you can’t necessarily fix now if you’ve already bought a bunch of stuff, but could be useful in the future.
Look into Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, wherever to go buy used equipment and save yourself some money. You may not always find what you’re looking for but what I’ve found is that there are a ton of home/garage gym enthusiasts that buy a piece and don’t use it as often as they anticipated and then they sell it. You can find some lightly used equipment and get a good deal on it.
Rogue has a program for “defective” equipment as well called the Boneyard. “Defective” as in there might be some blemishes, inconsistent finishing, whatever on some equipment. These are not “defective” in that the performance of the barbell or whatever it is compromised.
Remember
If you made one of these mistakes, it’s ok. You just might have some work to do. Most of these mistakes can be fixed.
If you plan on building a gym and haven’t yet, keep these tips in the back of your mind. You might be thanking me one day.
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