How To: Build a Budget Home Gym in 2021!

[Music] hey guys this is coop from garage gym reviews and today we're going to talk about how to build a budget home gym this is by far the question i get more than any other is coop how can i build a gym that is good useful and also cheap those are like the things we're looking for good useful and cheap right well today i'm going to tell you how i think you can do it very cheaply let's talk about it so before i started garage game reviews this was about seven eight years ago i tweeted something on my personal twitter which i don't use and really never use but for whatever reason i decided out of a stroke of genius to tweet something and it said if i only had i was in college at the time if i only had a thousand bucks i could build a killer home gym and although that was almost a decade ago today i think you can still build a killer home gym for less than a thousand bucks i think in some cases you can do it for much less than that it depends on what type of genuine you want to build but i do think it's entirely possible to build an absolute kick ass home gym for cheap the first thing the absolutely foundational thing to decide before you build your home gym is what type of training you want to do what type of goals do you have and how do you want to accomplish them that's going to dictate the equipment in the setup in the place you do it everything like that in relation to your home gym if you don't know like where you're going to go then you're not going to know where to start with your equipment so in fitness there's all these different types of training all these different niches within other niches you've got powerlifting and even within powerlifting you have raw and you have strong man and you have olympic weightlifting general fitness crossfit you name it so you have to decide what type of training you want to do because yeah there's a catch-all type of equipment that can work for a lot of them but i think first and foremost you have to determine your goals but for most people i would say the goal is just general health and fitness it's living longer it's looking better naked and you know overall just being healthier and so i think most training needs in most garage gyms home gyms will situate around that focus if you're competing in different things obviously that's going to change the equipment you're using if you're competing in olympic weightlifting you got to have bumper plates if you're competing in powerlifting you got to use a 29 millimeter bar you know those sorts of things are factors you got to consider but for most people i think the goal is to live longer and so you should situate your equipment around that and that's kind of my focus for how to build a home gym today number two and i think this is the way that most people should start is starting with an mvp okay whenever you start a business most times you're starting with an mvp an mvp is not most valuable player it's minimum viable product what is the minimum amount of equipment you can have what's the minimum amount of money you can spend to get the maximum benefit to basically decide is this something you really want to do long term because you can go out and make a beautiful man cave but most of you should go out and make a pain cave you should go out and make something that's minimal doesn't cost a lot of money so you can determine is this something that i'm going to actually enjoy before going out and buying a you know a ten thousand dollar squat rack bench plates bar all that sort of stuff you need to decide what is the cheapest way to do that and different people have different thoughts on this for instance dave tate the owner of elite fts and also like a world level power lifter an extreme example of somebody in a garage gym he started by just buying equipment that he used in addition to what he used at the commercial gym so instead of like buying like a bar and some of the basics he started with just a ghd and some other things that he could do accessory work in addition to his regular commercial gym and over time he just built it up so he had a commercial type gym in his garage and no longer needed the the commercial gym i think for most people though it's starting with the essentials the things that you really need to help you get bigger stronger faster those sorts of things or thinner so for most people that's the essentials that's a squat rack of some sort that also has a pull-up bar it's a barbell because a barbell is really versatile you can use it for a ton of different things it's a bench it's some plates and i think it's like some adjustable dumbbells or some basic handheld weights of some sort those are like your basics and you can do them for much cheaper than i think most people realize so then more practically i think the place to focus first is on used equipment pretty much all this stuff either has a lifetime warranty or won't break within your lifetime if you're buying gimmicky crap yeah it's gonna break but if you're focusing like i've told you on the essentials then it's things that's going to be very high impact and going to last a long time there's really no problem buying it used because most of this stuff would be fine in a commercial market where there's tons of people using it but the reality is if somebody's selling it it's because they probably didn't use it very much and they used it in a single person gym so an 11 gauge steel upright squat rack is going to last extremely long regardless of whether it has a warranty or not so look to the used market because you may depending on the product get a little bit less than what it is retail but you're going to pay less in shipping and it's just going to be cheaper overall so i would start with the used market and then in addition to that i would focus on first not being afraid to build stuff the garage jim way the way that home gym started was doing it as cheaply as possible and most of the time you couldn't get equipment so people just built crap right like you pulled your bootstraps up you got your miter saw you got your drill you went to lowe's or home depot and got lumber although it's extremely expensive today you can still build stuff and it'll still be somewhat cheaper than what you can buy on the market but you just build stuff so if you want a sled well maybe instead of going out and buying one you go get a tire you put some weight on top you attach a rope to it and you drag it if you want to use say a bench get some wooden uprights even squat rack all there's a lot of equipment that you can just build very cheaply so you can determine if it's something you actually want to buy because if you find yourself using a lot replace it and reward yourself for doing a good job in your training with a new piece of equipment you bought online the next one would be watching for sales most gym equipment companies have one sale a year historically and that's been black friday okay obviously covid and kind of the pandemic and the increase in people wanting home gyms changed the dynamics there as far as like being low supply and a ton of demand where most of these companies didn't have sales these past few years or past year however going forward i expect black friday and normal sales to continue to increase typically it's been black friday there have been some companies that have done them more often and i suspect that more companies will do that than more often than that as supply starts to meet demand but i would look for black friday i mean some of this stuff let's take rogue fitness for instance they have one sale a year you can buy like a boneyard bar or everyone small to have equipment that doesn't sell and they just decided like hey we'll sell it for cheaper but really majority of the time they have one sale matt black friday and they discount it it's not discounted a ton however when you start adding in your full cart with all these different items you start decreasing the shipping it can end up saving you a lot that's one of the problems with gym equipment is it's heavy so shipping it costs a lot more so buying it in bulk buying it a lot at a time is going to save you quite a bit of money and one of the best ways to do that is around sales times because a lot of this stuff doesn't go on sale because it's in such high demand so looking for those times when there is a discount is going to save you benjamins and that's something we all want to save so my last recommendation i think is one of the most pertinent and that is buy equipment that's versatile buy equipment that's going to be used for a lot of stuff so i talked about some of the essentials but there's actually some items even beyond those that i think can really be versatile and also really cheap an example is a sandbag so you look like like a goruck sandbag or a brute force sandbag even a rogue sandbag something like that sandbag i think is a super underrated tool in a gym you can use it for all sorts of dynamic movements you can weigh it heavier you can incrementally load it yeah it's going to take time it's going to you know take more time than like putting plates on a bar but it's also extremely cheap you have a bag you fill it with sand you want it heavier fill with more sand if you want heavier than that take out the sand put in lead shot you can build it extremely heavy and do it in a way that you know you're going to get stronger you're going to increase your conditioning and there's a ton you can do with it and they're going to last a long time another example is a barbell or adjustable dumbbells they don't take up a ton of space you don't need a ton of money to start with them if you buy them right they can last you literally generations so you can pass them down and they're not very expensive but you can get pretty much all the training you want crossfit has shown us that you can not only do strength training with a barbell you can also do conditioning so if you want to do conditioning with a barbell do lighter weight more reps conditioning equipment for a budget home gym isn't something i'd really recommend i think for most people starting with like basic strength training equipment and then using your body weight for the other types of conditioning exercises so things like burpees sprints hill sprints running those sorts of things are all things that all you have to do is go outside your door for most people so buying equipment for that like a treadmill and rower and all this sort of stuff get that stuff later focus on the stuff that you really can't do in your home gym with just your body weight most of that is going to come in the form of a barbell dumbbells sandbag that sort of thing okay these are some tips on how to build a budget home gym some overarching tips that i've given over the years i hope they're helpful to you let me know of some that you think you'd like to add to the list we'll include them in a future video or maybe on the site we appreciate you guys thank you for watching we'll see you next time [Music] peace [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Garage Gym Reviews

Views: 187,573

Rating: 4.9119468 out of 5

Keywords: garage gym, garage gym reviews, home gym reviews, coop garage gym reviews, home gym, budget home gym, home gym guide, cheap home gym, home gym ideas

Id: XnMvBGXo72U

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021