I'm getting ready to buy a house and I want to expand my home workout options. Here's my situation.
Me: I am a 38-year-old lady of unusually small stature (4'11") with two school age boys and a husband who has expressed interest in doing some strength training if he didn't have to leave home. Current abilities: When I've been training each exercise, I can deadlift 167, bench almost 90, and squat about 155.
The house situation: We have a small nook in the basement that could be used for this purpose. However, the master bedroom is also downstairs, and it's just one big piece of carpet, and I see no easy way to have different flooring in just the gym nook.
My other choices: I have an annual membership to the city rec centers that costs me $150. My primary complaint is that not all the centers have women's bars, and I can't lift a men's bar nearly as well because of my doll-size hands. Another wrinkle is that they are often closed when I want to work out and the child care is either not very useful to me or nonexistent. We are considering having another baby, which would make it even harder to get to the gym (and even the one that does have childcare only takes kids ages 1 and walking up to 7).
So I am toying with the idea of setting up a full-scale home gym, power rack, bench, the whole thing. I am also considering keeping my cheap membership, bullying them into adding women's bars, and using my home gym as my secondary option. In that scenario, I definitely wouldn't have a squat rack and probably not a bench press station either, but I would do things like suspension exercises/core work, one-legged balance-type things, and upper body dumbbell exercises.
Our house is small, and if we didn't have a giant home gym, then we would have room for a craft/gaming table.
Does anyone have recommendations for me? What are your setups like?
I recently went through the process of building a home gym, and will try to summarize all of they key lessons I learned.
I built a basement gym; it has a power rack and a treadmill. I plan to eventually added adjustable dumbbells. I prefer to get Ironmasters, but they are expensive. The Powerblocks and Bowflex each have drawbacks which I'd like to avoid (powerblocks have a weird shapes which interfere with some exercises. Bowflex are too wide and break eventually... though they are inexpensive at least).
I bought a power rack from Titan fitness ($350), and built a lifting platform onto which I bolted the rack (total money spent, maybe ~$200). I bought a Rogue olympic bar ($200), and off-brand bench (~$200), but new olympic plates (~$150). This generally followed frugal principles, and I have been happy.
I could have built everything as GuitarStv did... though I decided to just but stuff since I had a partial reimbursement from my workplace. I was also concerned about safety aspects related to whether homebuilt wooden stuff would hold up during a fail with heavy weight... or the sawhorses falling over. Fast-forward, and I injured my lower back in an unknown way during squats, and so I'm not squatting heavy anyways, so YMMV as to what is actually worth what. Since then, I have started some simple 2x4 furniture construction, and realize that I could relatively easily have built myself a a rack out of wood. It would have been more work, and I wouldn't have saved that much money, and there would always been the concerns about rep failure on a heavy set.
If you research Titan Fitness, you will find a lot of criticisms. They are cheap and Chinese-made steel, generally of lower quality than Rogue. But, value-wise they are way higher than Rogue, since Rogue is insanely expensive. Most people posting on youtube are not at all frugal and are ok with dumping thousands of dollars into a home gym when there is only marginal benefit on the cost/quality curve. there are other cheap Chinese steel racks of varying quality (rep fitness, for example), and you can research around. In the end, the construction quality of my Titan rack was more than sufficient, and unless you are doing very very heavy weight, there is no reason to worry about... and actually there are videos out there of stress tests on the Titan equipment, and it does fine. The only real issue with Titan is that their customer service sucks, and they routinely mess up shipping and deliveries, so you may have to deal with late shipments and go through their phone service a lot to track down your order ... but eventually you will get your rack.
I bought a Rogue bar because from what I could tell, the consensus was that it was worth it to invest in a high quality bar, while the rack itself did not matter.
I bought a Rep fitness bench because the titan one's are poorly reviewed.
Generally it is recommended to buy cheap used weights off of craigslist. I searched for a while, but never found the right deal in my local area. I didn't want to spend oogles of time finding used weights, so eventually I just bought off-brand new olympic plates at ~1$/lb. They work fine.
Do not get the cheap Fitness Gear plates which someone else here recommended, if you plan to deadlift. Their size is not olympic, and you don't want to mess with non-standard sizes for deadlifts. Also, these weights have reputations for occasionally snapping. For exercises that don't involve the weights touching anything other than the bar (e.g. the floor), the cheapest weight you can find is the best.
I build my own lifting platform using several 4'x8' plywood sheets from home depot, and the horse stall mats from Tractor Supply Co. I had to rent a truck from Home Depot. There are plans on how to do this all over the internet. It's easy, but does take a little work. It is definitely a good idea to bolt down a power rack. The rubber smell of the mats goes away eventually. For deadlifting, you do want a platform; otherwise you will damage your floor.
My home gym was not to hard to assemble, and the power rack looks relatively impressive... it usually impresses people when they see it. Of course, a gym snob what turn their nose up at cheap Chinese steel, but fuck them, mine is just as functional, and looks decent even if not perfect. If you are really into support American-made stuff, then it might make sense to buy Rogue, but be prepared for sticker shock with no-if-any tangible benefits.
If you do decide to buy a power rack, make sure to measure your ceiling height and choose one that will fit. I had a weird height ceiling and had to find the right rack. This might also impact gym vs basement, and make you think about what you want. Short power racks don't allow for pull ups with your legs fully extended, or at all if your head is going to hit the ceiling.
A final thought; if you can get a decent power rack used, that's another way to save money, but transporting a power rack can be non-trivial, even if you dissemble it.
My wife handled the purchase of the treadmill; I let her handle the research etc on this since she is the more serious runner, but I have been giving that thing a run for its money with some fast miles. Hopefully it lasts!