A lot of people think that when you're building a home gym, you need to have a tradeoff between convenience and effectiveness. And that is just not the case.
Today, I'm going to share some really effective tips for building a really effective home gym with very little space.
1. Equipment: Adjustability
One of the key components to building a really effective but compact home gym is the equipment. And one of these aspects is adjustability. If we look down here, we've got two very key components to my gym. The first is power blocks. The other one is an adjustable kettlebell.
Now, a long time ago I did have adjustable dumbbells where you have to screw off the weights, adjust them, put them on. That took way too much time. These power blocks are so much better. With this, I can just take out the slider, put it back in, and now it adjusts the weight. And being able to do this, I can very effectively change the weight, do some really effective training and use up very little space. If I was using a dumbbell rack, this would take up the entire room just to achieve the same weights.
And of course, over here we have the adjustable kettlebell. Very simple. We can slide it to the unlock position, take out whatever weights we don't need, put them to the side, lock it back in. And now it's a lighter weight. When you're all done, obviously you unlock it again, put the weights back in, lock it back up. And when I'm storing it, it takes up the space of a single kettlebell.
That's a really effective way of getting some free weights in your gym whilst taking up very little space.
2. Equipment: Use of Space
The next focus for your equipment should be use of space. So over here, I've got a quarter rack. Yes. This does take up quite a lot of space in the room, but I can move this out the way. I can do all my rack training here. But then I can get my dumbbells, and so now I can do dumbbell exercises using that same space.
I can even use that same space for some bodyweight exercises. So let's say I want to do some YWTs. Or maybe even something like reverse crunches holding on to this bar here on the rack. And so while the equipment does take up the majority of my room, I can use that exact same space for many other things. This is not something you could do with a full rack in a small space like this. You'd have to have the the whole power rack there and then use areas around that in a larger room.
So for a home gym space where you're trying to utilize as much area as possible, a quarter rack or a half rack is perfect.
3. Equipment: Storability
The final aspect of equipment is storability. Sure, you can buy amazing equipment and get some really effective exercise in, but if it takes up a lot of space and you don't have extra space, especially when you use that same area for other things in your daily life, then you want to be able to store it away and keep it as compact as possible when you're not using it.
So for example, we have my home gym cable pulley system. All of the components for that fit on a single shelf. And also, I do have additional attachments hanging off on hooks, but it takes up very little space when storing it.
That also brings us to another core focus for building our home gym, and that is reuse of equipment. When you buy additional equipment for your home gym, you want it to reuse as much of the equipment you have as possible so you don't have all these additional components you don't really need. And that is something that this cable pulley system does.
I'm going to set this up so you can see what it looks like when it's set up and the difference between when it's being used and what it's packed away.
This is how I like to have my cable pulley system set up. So, for example, on the high setting, I can do things like tricep pushdowns.
And then by borrowing from the band set that I've got, I’ve used an anchor there and then I can attach the pulley to that by disconnecting this, extending the cable there with an additional cable, then passing that cable through the second pulley, now we've got an interchangeable high and low cable pulley system. On the low setting now, I can do things like bicep curls.
With this, I can do some really effective cable training. But if I left that out, that would really get in the way of daily life trying to use the door, trying to get things in through the door into the room here as well. That cannot stay up permanently, which is why it's very important when you're choosing equipment to choose things that when you're using it can be really effective, but you can easily pack it up and store it in a very compact area.
4. Shelves
And of course, I can't talk about the cable pulley system without talking about the next important point of building a compact but effective home gym: shelves. Putting up shelves here to store items, it utilizes what would have been dead space. This is area in my home gym that I would not have been able to use for anything else. By putting these shelves, I can now store items very easily. It also allows me to quickly identify and get the items I need, speeding up my workouts.
If I had a big box in the corner with all my equipment in there, sure, I could store things very easily like that. But trying to find the items I want, I'd have to sort through the box, untangle things. It's not really practical. This is much better.
And of course, you don't just have to store items on the shelves as well. If you buy some hooks, you can then attach the hooks onto the corner bits, the diagonal bits there, and then you can store additional things there as well. So I’ve got my belts up there, I've got this foam roller and I've got attachments there as well.
In addition to that, it looks really nice. When you build a home gym, your foremost goal will be how effective it is. But you should also put thought into how nice it looks. If you build a home gym that you're impressed with yourself that you're proud of, you're going to be more motivated to work out. You're also going to enjoy your workouts more, and studies have shown that the more you enjoy your training and your workouts, the more effective it's going to be.
Having shelves is a really effective way of ensuring you have as compact as possible a home gym while making it effective.
5. Storage
And that brings us to our final focus of building an effective but compact home gym, and that is storage. There's a little bit of overlapping with shelving, but it's a little bit different.
For many months, I think about a year and a half, it's a bit embarrassing to say now, but I had these additional plates here because they couldn't fit on the rack, these storage bars that are here, I just had them lying on the floor and I thought that was okay. That's fine. It's not really affecting my workouts. It's not going to damage them. But that was a big mistake.
Whenever I had the plates there on the floor, eventually they'd shift across. When trying to set up my training room, sometimes they'd be in the way for things like deadlifts. I'd have to move them out of the way. And it comes back to that other point of just not looking as nice. When you build a home gym, really focus on storage. Always think of how you're going to store everything away without leaving things out on the floor.
One of the focuses for that was, of course, this bar here on the rack, and that's one of the reasons why I bought this quarter rack. It's not just a rack, but it’s also a storage option for the plates as well. Really effective use of the equipment here.
There was no way around it. To get these additional plates and the bar stored as well, I had to buy this plate storage rack here. However, having said that, I am really happy with it because in hindsight this takes up much less floor space by doing it this way. If you look through my really old videos, you can probably see examples of it, but I used to pile up my plates in these little towers and it was not really good. With this here I've got all the plates sorted. I can easily grab whichever weight increment I need.
The bar is stored away nice and tidy. Before I did actually have it at the back there, lying on the ground behind the quarter rack. It wasn't too much in the way, but for example, if I had to move the rack there, sometimes it could be in the way. And also not so good, it did collect a bit of dust. I tried to clean that as much as possible, but it was not as good a condition for storage as it is now.
Conclusion
With smart storage methods, you can save space, but also you can save time, getting really effective workouts in a very compact area.
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