Every Good Home Gym Needs These 5 Things
Last updated on September 26th, 2024 at 04:47 pm
Normally when we talk about the Basics of a Home Gym, we are talking about a Bar, Bench, Rack and Plates… but I think that list needs to expand just a little to include a few things that often come with that first round of purchases. Things that really bring the space together, add some longevity to your equipment, and all around improve the likelihood that you’ll use your home gym.
Links throughout may include Affiliate Links. These help fund the site at no expense to you.
Shopping List
Just want the list of things to buy? Here ya go!
- ⏹ Flooring
- ❄️Cooling
- đźšżCleaning
- đź“”Organization
- đź’ˇLighting
- 👨‍👩‍👧Stuff For The Other Home Peeps
- Living.fit Bands – Save 10% w/ Code: GML
- Micro Gainz Plates – Save 10% w/ Code: GGC10
- Micro Gainz DB Plates – Save 10% w/ Code: GGC10
- Dog Bed – Save 15% w/ Code: BXT15
Transparency Note
Almost everything in this article I paid for myself with the exception of a brush and some bands that I’ll mention as we go. A large chunk of the links in this article are affiliate links. The affiliate links help fund the site and everything I do for the home gym community at no cost to you, so I appreciate if you use them. Let’s hop in!
Every Good Home Gym Needs These 5 Things – Video
Home Gym Flooring
If you go back a few years on r/HomeGym, about 75% of the questions were “What is the best flooring for a home gym?”. Today in a Facebook group I help manage, that is still the case.
Flooring is such a weird space because if you google Home Gym Flooring, you typically get really expensive stuff, or really cheap crappy stuff. Neither is probably the answer for your home gym.
We know we want something affordable, because its simply going to be on the ground all day long. But we also need something that is ready to withstand some plates, bars, benches, and more rolling and bouncing off of it.
The solution for the vast majority of home gyms are Horse Stall Mats! These are the gold standard for affordable and quality flooring. So much so that guys like Jake at Garage Gym Experiment, even Brandon Campbell still have them in their home gyms today.
We had horse stall mats as our only flooring option in our home gym for over 10 years, going from mats on the platform, to a full single stall covered in them.
I recently made a big upgrade on my flooring, going with rolled rubber. This was a decision for several factors. We wanted to cover the entire garage because we use both sides for the gym, but we also park our car on the empty side when the gym is not in use.
So, horse stall mats were likely going to shift and move with the car too much. Rolled Rubber gets installed, glued down, and it is rock solid. There are a number of ways that you can make horse stall mats stay down a bit better, with mending plates, tape, and more. But with a car driving back and forth on it, I just see them moving too much.
Add in that the rolled rubber gives me an awesome space for my filming and pictures, and this was the right decision for MY space. Keep in mind, my neighbor is a flooring guy so he installed the entire thing. I also spent close to $600 on GLUE alone to adhere it to the ground. So this project is a hefty investment if you plan to go this route.
If you want something special, permanent, really fancy and awesome, grab some rolled rubber and install it. Otherwise, go with horse stall mats. Just don’t go with those cheap foam mats or pay absurd prices for what is essentially yoga mats for your gym.
Cooling Your Home Gym
It has been absurdly hot here in California this year, with triple digits for the majority of the summer. To even begin to make it through the heat, we’ve got a few fans running. An even more ideal solution would be insulation and a mini-split, but in an unfinished garage from the 70s, that is a big expense.
I’ve tried a few portable AC Units, a Swamp Cooler, and nothing seemed to do the trick. So fans it is!
We’ve got one fan that lives up on the rafters, is always plugged in, and can keep the air circulating on days that are just a little warm. Then we have two big floor fans… one on a pedestal, and one here on the floor. We typically set up the pedestal with the side door, and the floor fan follows us around.
If we REALLY need it, we also have a battery powered DeWalt fan that moves around easily, can go on top of the DB rack, even ride on the sled outside.
Some people have said “just tough it out, make it part of the workout”. There are some legit arguments to this, whether we are talking about quality of life, potential health hazards of working out in 100 plus degree temps, or even from a performance stance. You don’t recover as well between sets when the heat is that high. Your body temp needs to come back down so you can spend your energy on lifting, not on cooling. So there is a legit performance aspect associated with keeping the temps more reasonable.
If you have a finished garage with insulation, take a look into a MiniSplit, they have deals fairly often on places like Slickdeals, you just need the right set-up and someone to install it. For the rest of us, a fan or three can help keep the air moving and cool us down. Keeping that air moving, especially when you are sweating, can be the difference between tapping out and finishing a workout.
Home Gym Lighting
Most garages come stock with a light, and then the garage door light. But those lights often aren’t bright enough, don’t cover enough of the garage, and are just simply lacking for that POP we probably want for our home gyms.
Now I’m not saying that you have to go all out and snag the Hex LED Lights that every influencer loves. You also don’t need to go the route of professional lighting, trying to get color accurate lights, with certain CRI levels and other fun stuff. But making your space brighter is a win on many levels.
Bright lighting stimulates neurotransmitters associated with improved mood and increased energy. So it is like taking your pre-workout.
Better lighting improves the safety of your space, as climbing around a darkly lit gym can be dangerous. AND a better lit space is simply more aesthetically pleasing. That stainless steel knurling glistens in the light. That matte black finish is smooth. Everything just looks and feels better.
So this is an aesthetic bump, a safety bump, and a performance bump.
What Lights?
I recently installed these Barrina 4ft LED Shop Lights. They come in a few different packs, and you might have seen them from guys like Brandon Campbell and others. They have almost 22,000 ratings on Amazon, so these are popular.
You can run them together in a few different fashions, either with a pin that lets you direct connect them like I have, which gives off this seamless look. Or you can use the extension wires included if you need to wrap around corners. They come in a few different color options; I went with 5000k because I’m not typically a fan of the Ultra bright 6500k look. 5600 is my normal setting for sunlight, so 5000k is close. To my eyes the 6500k is too sharp, and not something I would enjoy casually looking up at during a set.
But here is the kicker. I had to run these into outlets way up above my head. So every time I wanted to turn them on, I would have had to get on a ladder and flip the switch on both of them. OR I would have had to call out an electrician to rewire and run these lights to a switch.
Luckily, I found these wireless remote-control outlet plugs. You can get them in 1, 2, or 3 outlet options. You plug the adapter into the outlet of your choice, for me the outlets up in the rafters. Then you install the base and remote where you would normally install a light switch. And now you have a switch ready to control your lights.
They make SMART options as well, so if you want to go that route, check into that. No one would ever be able to tell that I didn’t have these professionally installed. And now I have two full strands of LED strips, filling my space with wonderful bright light, that can be controlled just like any other light in my house.
Cleaning Your Home Gym
There are two reasons to keep your gym clean. One, because it looks good. And two, because it might just extend the life of your equipment.
There is a very common recommendation to use a leaf blower to get the leaves, dust, and small stuff out of the garage. In my experience, this just made more mess and I started sneezing. My wife also has a NO LEAF BLOWER rule in our house. I’ll leave the story in the comments if you want to read it. But basically, leaf blowers didn’t work well in my garage, no matter how many people tried to convince me otherwise.
Instead, I got a recommendation from a buddy on r/HomeGym to grab a Bissell Crosswave Vacuum Mop, which I found on Marketplace for a steal, and have been abusing the heck out of it. The beauty here is that this thing both mops AND vacuums, at the same time. Now I wouldn’t use this as a Shop Vac picking up tons of debri, but in a garage setting like ours, it works fantastic and it saves me from having to vacuum and then mop.
Most Sundays I give the gym a quick clean, it takes me roughly 5 minutes with this dude. I pick up a TON of dog hair, people hair, and all the grime leftover from the week. The chord is long enough that I can reach everything, cleaning it is simple, there is only one filter but with a good clean you likely don’t have to replace it ever. I’m just using straight water right now, so this is a one time investment kind of item so far. Bissell makes a handful of options, I don’t know enough about vacuums to recommend one over the other, but I have the green one. So good luck!
Now, that is for flooring. Don’t forget about cleaning the gym equipment itself. For most things you simply need a basic rag and some water to dust a little. But for the bars and moving parts in machines and cable systems, we need something extra.
Barbell Rescue makes the best brush for keeping your bars clean… dust, chalk, oxidation… you name it. Because it wraps around the bar entirely, you just give it a few passes and you are done. Like my Vacuum, this is a one-time purchase. I’ve talked to Kim, the owner, and he says even their original prototype is still in use several years later. These things are built to last, compared to those cheapo Harbor Freight brushes. They are great cause they are so cheap, but I never made it through more than one cleaning without tossing them.
And Barbell Rescue recently released a kit that includes their best oil and rag. This oil can work on the majority of equipment, so give your shaft a nice lube occasionally and remind it that you love it. Oil up all those moving parts on your machines, especially the guide rods on your cable stack. This will make sure that the money you spent buying cool stuff, continues to work well into the future.
Organizing Your Home Gym
Probably not a shocker after looking at my gym, but I believe organization to be something that just isn’t worth skipping. I’ve got my mass storage unit from my local hardware store that we use to hold all kinds of knick knacks. They now offer a build-your-own kit option, which is pretty rad. So you can build it out to whatever specs you want. These things are rated to over 1000lb per shelf, so they are ready for gym equipment and then some.
As you can see we set ours up to be able to leverage both sides of the rack for vertical storage support, as well as hanging various knick knacks off of it with some additional storage hooks, and of course the shelves themselves. This thing is a cheap investment in making your space much more usable.
We’ve got Wall Control as our preferred wall storage option, in 3 different places in the garage, in various sizes for different needs. Cable attachments, various hooks and stuff, and tools. Not only do these look awesome, they are ready for whatever you toss at them. They have been holding chains which total over 100lbs, for well over 5 years.
I’ve got barbell storage, weight storage, and even my production and camera gear has its own storage section. Being able to get everything put away, organized, is what gives me the ability to actually have so much stuff in such a small space, AND actually reach it and access it when I want to use it.
Even back when my gym was a lot more basic, I still had wall storage solutions, pegboards, and various shelf brackets that allowed me to cram things into the right spots. So, you don’t have to have a ton, or spend a ton, to make this a priority.
Quality and well selected storage allows you to fit more, use more, and all around really pull the space together better.
Stuff For Everyone
Ok I’ve got one more…
If you are like me, your kid lifts, and your spouse lifts too. This means that I need some things that aren’t just for the big bad powerlifter dude, but everyone else in the home gym. I mean, it is called a HOME gym, right? So everyone in the home should use it, correct?
Now before I proceed, my workouts don’t look entirely different than my wife’s. Men, women, and children can all follow a sound program like JuggernautAI. But there are some things that can make their life a lot easier.
First up is bands, in all assortments. Bands get used for warm-ups, I can modify them to rig up a ton of exercises for my wife and my daughter, we use them for burn out sets, and a bunch more.
Recently I started using Living.Fit bands. I will be the first to say, that the majority of bands are all the same. The key difference here is that Living.Fit stands behind theirs. If one snaps, they’ll replace it. And with your kiddos doing whatever the heck this is with them, that is a helpful piece to the puzzle.
Second, is Micro Gainz plates. Looking at both the DB plates and the micro plates themselves. We are a family who firmly believes in progressive overload, so my wife uses the DB plates religiously. Curls, lateral raises, push presses, DB rows, you name it. Jumping from 10lb to 20lb is a legit 100% increase in weight. We can cut that down a bit with one of their 1.25 or 2.5lb plates.
We owned the V1 DB Plates that used the bands, now they have the spring loaded V2s, they make them in various color options, they even have their new PVC dipped ones to protect the knurling on your dumbbells.
My daughter uses the Micro Gainz plates regularly. Whether we are slowly increasing our cable stack, getting her new PR for the Garage Gym Competition, or simply loading up her DIY Rickshaw, these get used every single week.
On top of this, I went as far as making sure my wife and my daughter had their own barbells, my daughter has an entire section of the gym dedicated to her Ninja Warrior Workouts, and I have a number of items that can be moved inside if my wife decides it is just too hot for her, even with the fans.
We even have a dog bed for our dude Jax here. He is a big Cane Corso, so we wanted to make sure he was comfortable out here with us. We have a dog lead that is attached to a strap that comes with the Living.Fit bands. This can go in a door, can wrap around our sled, tie onto our rack, or otherwise keep Jax locked in to anything sturdy. This is less about him running away, but more about making sure he doesn’t decide to come get a pet during a heavy set of deadlifts.
His bed is a BullyBed, which is specifically made for the big doggos out there. He has one inside in his kennel, and one here that is slightly different in build.
The idea is to create a space that is conducive to the members of your family, so hopefully everyone can partake in the awesomeness that is the Home Gym.
Wrap Up
So those are my 5 items, plus 1, that I think every good home gym needs. I asked this question over on Reddit r/HomeGym recently and got a varying assortment of answers.
Joe Gray
My name is Joe Gray - aka Gray Matter Lifting - and I've been lifting at home since 2013. In that time I've built a badass gym, deadlifted over 600lbs, helped grow r/Homegym to over 1 Million subscribers, created the Garage Gym Competition and written a ton of posts here on this site. I love the Garage Gym Community... If you do too, I hope you stick around.
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