Building a home gym is one of the best investments you can make. There are many advantages in having a gym at home but it’s not always viable – or even desirable for everybody and even has a few disadvantages to a commercial gym, so let’s look at a few of the pros and cons.
Home gym vs commercial gym
Convenience
Having a gym in your garage, shed, basement, spare room or even garden is a lot easier to get to than having to walk, cycle, drive or use public transport to get to a commercial gym. A home gym is a few seconds’ walk from the sofa and unlike commercial gyms, is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year round.
Home gym 1 / commercial gym 0
No waiting around
Commercial gyms can, at times get very busy and waiting around for machines can be very tiresome and annoying, especially if your time is restricted. And imagine having to compromise with an alternative, like a smith machine squat instead of a barbell squat because there’s no way in hell you can get into the squat rack (which are uncommon in commercial gyms these days anyway, but more on that later). At home the equipment is ready for you whenever you want it.
Home gym 2 / commercial gym 0
Hygiene
In your gym you know whose sweat is on the bench.
Home gym 3 / commercial gym 0
Music
After waiting around for half an hour to start your bench workout, you’re raring to go and smash out a long overdue personal record with Katy Perry or Coldplay blaring in your ear. If you were training at home you could be grinding out that PR to music you actually like, or in complete silence.
Home gym 4 / commercial gym 0
Distractions
Minor distractions at the gym such as people talking to you, or that hot lady on the abductor machine – which isn’t a bad thing if you enjoy socialising, or enjoy being a pervert. But you’re not there to socialise or to perv, you’re there to work. Also, you drooling over that hot lady might also be distracting for her which isnt very fair, is it?
Another dangerous distraction could occur when your spotter is watching abductor girl while you’re getting crushed under a barbell! Not good. And the worse distraction of all is to take notice of what other people are doing – or even worse is to ask other members for advice! and copy what they’re doing! To quote Wesley Silveria on training at home “…there is less exposure to the techniques of the masses and thus less potential to get involved with the techniques of the masses that usually fail the masses…”
Home gym 5 / commercial gym 0
Primativeness
At home you can train shirtless, in your pants or even naked. You can spit, shout, swear, flatulate, and there’s no one there looking at you like you have just escaped from the local mental unit when you’re talking to yourself in between sets.
Home gym 6 / commercial gym 0
No memberships
Commercial gyms have memership fees. The better independent gyms usually allow for pay daily, weekly or monthly and even offer discounted rates for 3 month, 6 month, 1 year and even 2 year memberships. While this can save you money in the long term, if you stump up for a year’s membership and a month later the gym goes skint (which sadly can happen), you have just lost a load of money that could have been better spent on setting up your home gym.
Some independent commercial gyms and most commercial chain gyms, like fitness centres and health spas, insist on monthly contracts by direct debit. Some can be cancelled at any time; some are for set periods like 3 months or a year and some are rolling contracts. Cancel your contract early and in some circumstances, you may recieve a letter demanding money and threatening court action. After all, gym contracts are legally binding agreements and if you have agreed to pay the contract for a year you legally must pay it. Getting out of it might be doable but could be a right pain in the arse.
You have signed up for a year and, two months into your contract, the squat rack has been replaced with a shiny horizontal leg press with a tiny weight stack. You have been busted for using chalk, everyone is giving you funny looks because you’re not using the personal trainer’s special cookie cutter program that is responsible for building 70 kilo stickmen and you are now bored of abductor girl. You have 10 months left of your contract. In the UK, gym contracts can vary from £30-£90 a month that’s £360 – £1,080 down the toilet! With a bit of shopping around, £1,080 can buy you a decent rack, bench and olympic weight set. Go the ebay route and you could even get more for your money.
Also, iron lasts forever while all but the cheapest of equipment will last you a very long time. After a year, that £500 gym membership is gone forever, while all those olympic plates you just forked out £300 for will still be with you in 20 years’ time and probably would have actually gone up in value aswell! Invest your money in iron – you can’t go wrong.
Moral of the story: home gyms don’t have membership fees or contracts.
Home gym 7 / commercial gym 0
No machines
Training at home usually involves using the standard freeweight equipment, which means only the standard exercises are used, like the squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, rows, pullups, dips etc. Ask any reputable trainer which exercises they use on their trainees and you can be sure it will be mainly freeweight exercises. Go onto youtube and look at Ronnie Coleman’s videos and ask yourself what did the 8 time Mr Olympia winner mainly use? Youtube crossfit ladies – what are they using, machines or freeweights? What do they look like? Nothing beats the basic freeweight exercises.
Not that there’s anything wrong with machines, there isn’t. They have their place and can be used effectiveley along with freeweights. In an ideal world we would all have a decent gym on our doorstep with decent free weight equipment and decent machines., While gyms like this do exist in the UK, sadly there’s only a few of them. Not everyone has one near enough to train there regularly.
Most of the gyms in the uk are the fitness type centres or health clubs. This is where the money is and that’s why there’s more of them around than the old school freeweight type gyms. These fitness centres usually have lots of cardio machines, a small selection of freeweights (you will be lucky if they have a squat or power rack) and a selection of machines sitting on top of their posh polished wood floors.
Go into one of these places and try deadlifting with chalk on their posh floors and see what happens! Deadlifting is commonly frowned upon in these places and actually discouraged. Anyway, this can prove futile because they usually only have a very small selection of plates, not enough for proper deadlifting.
The home gym gets a point here because at home you’re going to be using the basic barbell exercises and not basing your training around machines. Although here, the home gym is at a disadvantage because there are few or no machines that can be incorporated (if needed), so the commercial gym gets a point here aswell.
Home gym 8 / commercial gym 1
Everything’s perfect
You can set up your own equipment exactly how you want it, while at a commercial gym you have to use the equipment as it is. For example, when you bench in the power rack and the bar touches your chest, it slightly hits the pins as well, which can mess up the lift. This is annoying and counterproductive; ideally you need the pins an inch lower, so this way when you’re arched the bar touches your chest but not the pins. If you fail, you unarch and the bar rests on the pins, while you safely crawl out from under the bar.
But what if the next setting down on the rack is 2 inches lower? so if you go to this setting and fail you will get pinned with no escape. At the commercial gym you could try and find a spotter. At home you could simply raise the floor by an inch using plywood or chipboard, so it’s at the perfect height. An ideal solution would be to get a rack from the start with small 1 inch pin settings.
One task you should do at home is verify the weight of your olympic plates – why would you want to do this? Because believe it or not, the weight of plates can vary dramatically! I own 10 x 20 kilo olympic plates; the lightest one is 19.5 kilos while the heaviest one is 21.5 kilos. Load up 3 plates a side to perform a squat when there are lighter ones on one side and heavier ones on the other, the difference could be 2-3 kilos a side. Your squat is going to go to shit and once fatigue starts setting in, you will be pulled to one side, this can also increase the chance of an injury.
Weight difference does exist and this is true of all plates no matter how much they cost. I have heard reports of the expensive calibrated plates (which most gyms and people don’t have anyway) being inaccurate. Some days you could load up 3 plates a side with lighter plates and the weight will feel light and good; you will feel strong. Next session in the commercial gym you load up 3 plates, again unknowingly picking up heavier plates and this time, the weights will feel heavy, your form will be worse, you wont get your reps and youll be wondering what the hell has gone wrong. You might even start questioning your program, or even worse change your program! The home gym user doesn’t have this problem – he/she simply weighs all his plates, marks them up so he knows what they really weigh and matches them up, so when they’re on the bar, the bar weight is pretty equal each side.
Also at home, if need be you can make up your own equipment. So you want to do gluteham raises? The commercial gym doesn’t have a gluteham raise machine or anything else you can bodge a gluteham raise on. Your home gym doesn’t have a gluteham raise, so you make a device out of wood to wedge your feet in, screw it into the floor and now you can do gluteham raises.
After a while everything in your home gym will be customised exactly to your requirements and will be absolutely perfect for you.
Home gym 9 / commercial gym 1
Chalk
Chalk is essential! Only the most hardcore of commercial gyms allow it. Use chalk in a standard commercial gym and you will probably get a reprimand, you can smuggle it in and try to use it on the quiet, but you’ll be looking over your shoulder all the time. At home you can use as much chalk as you like and make as much mess as you like.
Home gym 10 / commercial gym 1
Intimidation
You’re lucky – your local commercial gym is a proper hardcore bodybuilding gym, with all the freeweights and quality machines anyone could want and is full of big musclebound monsters (the sort that fitness centres and health clubs discourage!). The commercial gym would be a great place to train but the big boys scare the life out of you! Train at home and there will be no one there to intimidate or scare you! Home gym = 1 point but, in all honesty by training alongside big strong men you would learn more and probably progress more quickly, which would be an advantage. So in this instance, you could be missing out. We will give the commercial gym a point as well but as stated above, these sort of gyms are uncommon.
Home gym 11 / commercial gym 2
Safety
Training in a commercial gym is safer than training at home because there’s people on hand to rescue you if something goes wrong, but as long as your home gyms set up properly and you’re sensible, accidents shouldn’t happen.
Home gym 12 / commercial gym 3
Space
A home gym requires space – a minimum would be around 12x12ft. If you don’t have a spare room, garage, shed, basement, yard or garden your going to have to join a commercial gym unless you want to rent some space somewhere, which could be costly.
Home gym 12 / commercial gym 3
Outlay
Although a home gym is a good investment, starting one up is going to cost a few hundred quid – there’s no getting away from that. A commercial gym membership will usually include a small admin charge. Sign on the dotted line and the rest is monthly installments.
Home gym 13 / commercial gym 4
Solitude
Some people enjoy the social aspect of the commercial gym and may not like training alone, so the gym gets a point here.
Home gym 13 / commercial gym 5
And the winner is the home gym! Right that’s decided – home gym it is. In the next installment we’ll look at starting up a home gym from the ground up.