Is Building A Home Gym Worth It? (3 Things You Should Look At Before)

Usually, the initial kind of roadblock to people going with the home gym route is the cost. They take a look at the equipment that they’d want and see that it’s going to cost them several thousand 💸 and in response; they have to go to the gym for 20-25-30 years in order to break even. 

That being said, if you take a look at going to the commercial gym. Yes, you are paying for the access to all those different pieces of equipment and it’s probably cheaper month-to-month, but you’re not getting any of that money back. You’re probably just throwing it away. 

Depending on how you look at it, you can get pretty creative with that. 💯

⏭️ Instead, take a look at what’s your most valuable asset, and that for me is my FREE TIME. The convenience of being able to come and train at home. I want to cut down on all the fluff time as possible. 

The way I like to train, which is usually geared towards strength and weightlifting, I’d have to drive about 30 minutes each way in order to get to a gym that I would find suitable. That ends up being an hour a day, 4-5 times per week over the course of a couple of months over a couple of years. 

We’re talking about a large chunk of time and I would much rather put that time into training at home and freeing up that time to either train more, get more work done or spend time with my family. There are different things you can look at but for me, you can’t put a price on convenience. 👍

👉 Not to mention that a lot of this gym equipment, depending on what you buy, actually retains its value, so it’s more of an investment. You still were able to make about 70 to 80% back of what you paid and invested in a new gym which better fit the space. 

So this is really an investment even though initially the cost may seem high. If you ever choose that you don’t want it anymore, you can still get a good amount of your money back. 😀

A home gym doesn’t have to be expensive. Yes, it can be very expensive depending on your needs, your preferences, your wants, your desires, but you can be really smart about your purchases. Make sure you can keep it all within just a couple of thousands. 

👍 An easy way to do this is just by buying secondhand, which a lot of people are big fans of. However, given the current timeframe or everyone’s looking to buy stuff for their home gym, the markets are probably going to be dried up. 

The prices are probably to be set high and if you’re the type of person like me who wants specific equipment or wants to train on certain things, you’re going to end up having to wait for those to come up. 

Chances are if it’s a good piece of equipment at a good price, it’s going to go extremely quick. That’s why you have to be pretty diligent about building out your home gym and be patient. 

👉 Check Bullrock fitness India for products if you want to set up your first home gym.

A lot of your equipment purchasing also comes down to usability, meaning that are you actually going to use the equipment? A lot of people just buy stuff like a basic squat rack or a basic barbell because it’s cheap, it’s affordable, but chances are it’s not very good. 

➡️ In fact, I’ll usually compare it to their gym experience saying that I just really can’t get the same working at home that I could do at a gym. 

Thus they are not very apt to use for their home gym or they buy a piece of equipment like a treadmill and after a couple of uses, they realize that they don’t like doing cardio and instead this is going to become a glorified clothes rack. ❌

It’s all about buying stuff that you’re going to use and cater to your style of training. In my instance, I don’t mind paying more for certain name brands or certain pieces of equipment like milled plates or calibrated plates because those are what I want to train with.

It’s super awesome to be able to come to my own home gym and basically have every exercise equipment at home that I would want or need that motivates me to train more, versus coming to a space that has equipment that I probably don’t really find that useful or as low-quality. Therefore, usability is a huge factor. 

Some of these things do play a role in counterbalancing each other. For example, we’re talking about the budget. You could probably go and get a cheap rack on Amazon India for like 12000. 

The problem is the usability is going to be very low. And if you take a look at the specifications, the weight capacity of that rack is 300 kgs, which for most of us will easily exceed with a year or two of training. 

Thus going to likely want to UPGRADE that rack or pay for another rack. In that case, it would have been cheaper just to get a better rack upfront, 

Even though the weight rating might be like 500 or 1000 kgs, you might not necessarily ever lift that much. If you do a good job!💯

But it’s a testament to the quality of material that you’re buying and how close you get to that max threshold.

That being said, a lot of the usability also comes into the footprint meaning that if you can get a piece of equipment that’s very versatile and allows you to do a lot of different exercises on it or use it for more than just one purpose you can save footprint. 

How much space you actually have it’s going to dictate a lot of this gym equipment purchasing too. If you have a single bedroom apartment in the city, probably spend on a squat stand and not a six-post rack. 

✔️ If you have a very large open area, you might want to invest in a six-post rack because that will open up a lot of the usability features. 

There’s a lot more that you can do with that space. A big thing to consider also is not just the actual floor space that takes up but how much vertical space it takes up. So if you’re training in a basement that doesn’t have very high ceilings, your choices are going to be limited based on what you can get. 

You might have to get a shorty style rack or even get a squat stand or a combo style rack in order to make do of that. Really consider your training style and preferences. 

If you’re not buying exercise equipment that you would typically use in the gym or for how you train, you’re not going to use it.

Thus it’s going to render it pretty useless and you waste your budget, footprint, and the usability gets very LOW. You really need to take into consideration all three of these things. 

✔️ I have a Pro 50 set and I could use this dumbbell anywhere from 2.5 kg to 25 kg. They also have another add-on that bumps up to like 71 kgs, but the initial price for the Pro 50 (25kg each) set is like Rs 24000. 

A lot of people are going to say that’s really expensive, and it is. But not when you look at it in context because if I were to get separate 5 individual fixed dumbbells of weight 10, 15, 20, 22, and 25’s I’m probably looking to spend Rs 38000+ on doing that. In doing so, budgets will spill out, also the footprint.

👉 A quick adjustable set- Flexibell on the flip side of that if we want to go on the lower end side. You could also get the tried-and-true spin lock dumbbells, which are much cheaper. 💰 You could probably get a set for like Rs 8000 on Amazon.in and add on weight plates, which can fit the problem. 

With the spinlock dumbbell, although they’re budget-friendly, the usability feature isn’t very good. In my opinion, usability is very low because not a lot of people want to take the time to unscrew each end of those dumbbells and screw them back on in between weight sets. 

It’s a very timely process, and I already talked about how time is probably my greatest asset. So it’s going to take a lot of time to do that, so much so in fact where I find a lot of people just don’t want to use them because they’re a pain in the ass to adjust. 

Not to mention the spinlock style, if you’re doing any pressing movements where you typically would set the dumbbells on your knees.

Depending on the size of plates you’re using, they’re going to dig into your quads. 👉 For some people, they hurt to the point where, again, they just don’t want to end up using it. 

Dumbbells are pretty compact in size on their own, but adjustable dumbbells are more compact. It helps you replace your original dumbbell rack of 15 dumbbells with 1.

It takes up roughly like 4 square feet, so it’s like two by two worth of space. They are budget-friendly, footprint friendly.