Home Gym Set Up Q & A

I was thinking about getting a home gym machine do you have any suggestions?

For a home gym machine setup my answer is absolutely NO!!!  These all end being clothes hangers and getting in the way, they don’t get used and you will sooner or later sell it in a garage sale for pennies on the dollar.  If you have your heart set on getting one, go find a used one.

First Reason

Unless you are in the top one percent of people out there you can’t afford a gym quality machine.  These things cost thousands of dollars for a machine that does maybe 2 exercises.  If you get something that does multiple exercises and has lots of bells and whistles for a reasonable price it is most likely going to be a piece of junk.  Even the expensive stuff breaks, and your home gym set up from the infomercial is no grade A piece of equipment.

Second Reason

Where are you going to put it?  The living room, the extra bedroom, if you are lucky enough to have a good place to put something like this and you can afford it congratulations, you should be able to afford a good gym membership.  Do you really what to effectively shut off an entire room in your house and turn it into a single use room that you only use for an hour a day a couple days a week?

Shall I continue

These pieces of equipment usually focus on the isolation type of muscle building moves.  This is an outdated approach that offers no flexibility of variation, these two themes are very important in building an all around healthy physique.  A machine like this will limit you and you will get bored with it very quickly, most likely before you finish paying for it.

What you should get

I am not going to go into too much depth here because the rest of the site discusses these things but here is a list of the main pieces of exercise equipment.  Dumbbells, a barbell with numerous plates, a pull up bar, an adjustable bench, a good pair of shoes, a bike, kettle bells, a jump rope, and if you really want to go big, a power rack.  These things alone can get you well on your way to a killer home gym and offer hundreds if not thousands of different exercise variations and circuits.  It would not surprise me one bit if you were able to get all of this exercise equipment for less than you would spend on one machine setup.  Spend your money wisely and get only the exercise equipment that will offer the most bang for the buck.