3 Aspects to Consider When Creating a Home Gym on a Budget

A home gym is key to staying active, especially while the pandemic has most gyms shut down until further notice. Your home gym doesn’t have to be elaborate or even take up a lot of room. Ensuring that you can let off steam and stretch out stressed muscles will keep you healthy, physically, emotionally and mentally. If you can make your home gym on a budget, even better!

There are three key areas to consider when building your own home gym.

1. MOTIVATION & FOCUS

The extent of your workout space will depend heavily on what your goals are and how much time you intend on spending working out.

• • Style | What’s your workout style? Do you lift weights or prefer cardio? Maybe it’s a mix of both? Decide on the exact style of exercise that works best for your body. Then make a list of the necessary equipment you will need to accomplish your fitness goals. You don’t need to buy it all at once. Start small and shop online community pages for used items.

• • Routine | Are you an all-in-one kind of person or a circuit trainer? If you are a circuit trainer, look for ways to consolidate your stations so that you don’t need such a large space. NerdFitness.com suggest the following at home circuit training for beginners, which can be accomplished comfortably in a small area.
    • • Bodyweight squats: 20 reps
      • Push-ups: 10 reps
      • Walking lunges – 10 each leg
      • Dumbbell rows (using a gallon milk jug or another weight): 10 each arm.
      • Plank: 15 seconds
      • Jumping jacks: 30 reps

Unless you have an unlimited budget and loads of extra space – which most people do not – it’s not going to be possible to replicate your gym at home. Focus on what you love doing (so you will do it more), choose two or three compact but effective pieces of equipment (like a small set of weights and a pull-up bar), and create a ritual of working out that will leave you starting or ending every day feeling like your best self.

2. BUDGET & SPACE

 The reality of what you can afford – both money-wise and space-wise – will have a significant impact on your home gym. GarageGymLab.com says it well, “Knowing where to look, being diligent in your search, and at times being patient during the process, are a few keys to building a quality, budget home gym.”

• • Budget | There are a few solid ways you can budget for a home gym without going into debt or using your savings. Don’t buy new if you can avoid it. Think about all the people making workout resolutions every year and then not following through. That means there are loads of lightly used, barely used, equipment up for grabs on community sale pages like Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji.
    • Set aside the usual cost of your gym membership in a separate savings account. Slowly but surely, buy the items on your must-have list using those funds.
    • Purge your home and sell the things you no longer need or use, whether it’s furniture, home items, toys, clothing, etc. Use that money to purchase items on your workout list.
    • Apply for an online loan. Not only do online lenders focus on your current financial situation, as opposed to your previous history, your loan will not affect your credit score. Get the items you need, pay it back in a reasonable time, and avoid further debt.
• • Space | It’s okay if you don’t have an entire room to dedicate to your home gym. You can look at consolidating a room, like your office or basement tv room. You can also transform a corner of your garage or bedroom. If you want a cardio machine, look for the kind that folds up and can be stored under your bed. You can also consider jumping rope, which helps you burn 100 more calories in an hour than running on a treadmill. In terms of your other equipment like a mat and weights, create an aesthetic storage space using a geometrical shelving unit or a pegboard set up.

WE CHALLENGE YOU TO…WAIT THREE MONTHS!

Make sure that you respect your budget when building your home gym. Fitness is fantastic but don’t forget that the stress of heavy debt will do severe damage to your body and mind. Whenever you find yourself needing to spend money you don’t have, it’s important to sleep on it.

Before throwing caution to the wind and clicking ORDER NOW, try finding the money in other ways. Postpone your spending by three months, while you cut down on eating out or morning coffees, putting that money aside. While you wait, try focusing your workouts on using your body weight for resistance. Jog in place, and do rotations of push-ups, triceps dips using a chair, planking, and crunches. At the end of the three months, you will have some extra cash to buy your equipment and be in better shape to jump right into your dream at-home workout!

3. FOLLOW THROUGH

You’ve planned your home gym according to your needs, you’ve saved your money and set it all up as needed, and you’ve used it once or twice. Now what?

• • Make a Plan You Can Stick To | The real key for a successful gym is less about your equipment and set up and more about a routine that you can stick to. You want to challenge yourself, but you don’t want to discourage or injure yourself. Start slow, make a list of goals working up to the amount of weight or length of endurance you want to achieve. Slow and steady will help your body strengthen itself naturally, in a process that you can commit to over the long run.
• • Stay Motivated | Depending on your personality, set up a support group or sign up for an app that will help keep you motivated. We all have days where we wake up feeling like we’ve been hit by a truck. If you need people to keep you motivated, invite some friends to join your weekly regime. Challenge friends to a weight loss, endurance, or cross-fit program. Make it fun, and don’t take it too seriously. Celebrate your progress, especially if you prefer to self-motivate. Get an app, like Celebration Fitness, that tracks your progress and dishes out certificates when you accomplish a new goal.

Credito is a Canadian company dedicated to helping hard-working individuals create the life they deserve. Your past history is not an issue, we prefer to concentrate on your present endeavours to get it right. If you need some help working out your finances, we are here to help!