Home Gym Designs

Designing a Home Gym That Delivers Results

Critical for success, home gym designs make a difference with your home fitness goals. There are three things to consider when designing a home gym layout. They will determine your designs, layout and setup.

Determine Your Goals, determine your budget, and choice of weapons.

 

Determine Your Goals

When I sit down with a new client, I must be able to help them set realistic goals. The best home gym designs in the world won’t matter without planning. Goals are good, realistic goals are best. I can’t stress this enough, your goals should be specific, well thought out and written down.

 

 

 

You must factor your goals into your home gym designs or you won’t succeed. Have you ever tried to get somewhere when you didn’t know where you were going? Sounds kinda silly, doesn’t it? That’s home gym designs with no end in mind.

Why not make success easier to achieve than failure?
(Always avoid making failure easier than success.)

 

Your goals will determine what needs will need to be met in your home gym layout. Basically all home gym designs should include four elements…

• Cardio Piece (s)
• Resistance Pieces
• Specialty Equipment (If Needed)
• Sufficient Space

 

More on the specifics of these later.

These will vary a little depending on your specific goals. That’s why it’s so important to know your goals before you begin. If your goal is mainly going to be about losing weight, your home gym designs should be focused around comfort and access.

Yes, I said comfort. Meaning inviting, easy to go there and be there. Care should be given to mirror placement, motivational posters, etc. Maybe some things that will help you to stay focused on proper eating, nutritional articles to read while putting in your time on the bike.

On the other hand if your goal is about getting bigger, leaner or harder that is not such a concern. Your home gym designs should be more utilitarian. Less comfort oriented, more work oriented.

This is okay though, because you won’t be spending as much time in there as a person with weight loss as the goal. Each goal has different time requirements per day and per week. Home gym designs should take that into account.

Hopefully you’re pickin up what I’m puttin’ down. (That means, I hope you understand what I’m saying.) Lets move on.

Once you have your specific goals written down, you’re ready for the next step toward your fitness dreams…

Determine Your Budget

How Much Is Your Health Worth?

Not much you can do with this one. It is what it is, only you know how deep you’re willing to dig for a healthy lifestyle.

Designing a home gym successfully requires you to plan in advance what you’re going to be able to buy.

So as your home gym designs advisor, let me give you some things to consider before you shortchange your fitness dreams.

• If you eat out (dinner) 2 times per week,
  after 1 year you’ve spent $5200.
• The average home theater system will run you about $4500.
• 1 venti cafe vanilla frappuccino per day at
  Starbucks is $1820 per year.
• My friend’s last vacation to Hawaii (6 days
  7 nights), $5600.

 

So with that in mind, how much is your health worth to you?

I strongly recommend that you go with a budget that allows you a representative of each of the four basic elements listed above.

Remember, this is an investment in your future. I have seen far to many people put mis-placed priorities ahead of their own well-being.

As I tell people who are trying to decide if they should hire me…

 

I would much rather pay for my education, than pay for my ignorance.

 

The same holds true when trying to decide how much to spend on your home gym setup. This is not the thing to skimp on.

I didn’t come up with that little nugget, but it sure hits home.

Choose Your Weapons

The Right Ones Can Make Ya, The Wrong Ones Can Break Ya!

My favorite part. Now you’ve gotten to the point when it all starts coming together.

The ideal (by ideal I mean if your budget allows) home gym setup will include…

Major strength piece:

This can be a multi gym (like Total Gym or Bowflex), a selectorized multi gym (Vectra or Precor, select weight by moving a selector pin through a weight stack), or a plate loaded rack type setup, my personal choice

1 or 2 Cardio Pieces:

These will also be best determined by what your specific goals are. I recommend 2 of these strictly in the interest of the ideal home gym design.

Two people can workout at the same time, if you and your spouse will both be using the gym, it’s far easier to be consistent if you make it an appointment.

In addition, the body will get used to the same cardio movement eventually. At that point it becomes harder to burn calories, you have to go longer and harder to get the same results.

Having two pieces allows you to mix up the cardio schedule every workout, increasing your results and decreasing your boredom!

Dumbbells or Power Blocks:

These would be even more important than most major strength pieces. There is simply no replacement for dumbbell work.

In calorie burning, stability benefit and muscle recruitment they beat every machine hands down. People often shy away from dumbbells, especially in the home gym layout department.

They may think that bells are dangerous in a home gym environment. I don’t buy it.

For one thing, the common sense rule applies when using dumbbells. There’s no one watching you at home so there should be no reason to try more than you can handle.

No, dumbbells are just harder work, and folks don’t like that.

But now you, know the secret… HARD WORK’S WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!

Specialty Equipment:

This is the fun stuff. Designing a home gym was never this much fun. Boxing equipment, exercise balls, golf swing trainers, etc.

Actually the exercise balls would be more of a necessity, but there’s literally tons of stuff out there for whatever you want to train.

Most of it is junk, but read on and I’ll let you in on some things that only trainers know…

We’ll start with, Home Gym Review!