Working out is hard to do, she says, four weeks into her “new year, fitter me” resolution that no one asked to hear. But seriously – if you work out or want to work out but can’t get around to doing it, you know how difficult it can be to get started. For me, taking off 18 months didn’t exactly make the transition back into cardio and weight-lifting a breeze. Instead, I struggled to find a balance between finding the time and also accepting the fact that I had to start back at step one.

One of the most significant barriers to working out for me is the expense. Something I’ve always struggled to justify is the cost of a gym membership. I mean, yes, I know that they have all the equipment I need, and the facilities to level up your workouts. These things are a given. For me, it’s more so the fact that I have to spend time driving there, getting mentally prepared for what’s to come and then drive back home afterwards. If you’re not catching on yet, I really don’t want to leave my house. 

Not to mention, I already spend nearly $1,000 on sports teams throughout the year and feel like I can’t rationalize any additional cost. So, it was time to create a solution that was within my control. That solution? A home gym. 

We moved into our first home almost one year ago now, and the one part we weren’t fully taking advantage of was our unfinished basement. Of course, we have grand plans to one day turn this basement into our dream games room, but until then, it felt like a waste of space that we should be using. Enter the home gym. 

Can you still get a tough enough workout in at home?

A common misconception from many of my friends and family is that a home gym doesn’t provide the same level of toughness that you’ll get in a gym. And I mean, sure. You’re not entirely wrong. However, there are a lot of factors that weigh on this belief. So, let’s break it down into a list of pros vs. cons:

Pros of a home gym	Cons of a home gym
No membership cost	Need creativity to make at-home workouts
Saves you time by eliminating travel	Need understanding of proper form to avoid injury
Shower in your own home	No social aspect, so you need to be self-motivated
No waiting to use your favourite equipment	Won’t have the more expensive equipment or more costly weights
The convenience of no gym hours	You need the space to be able to do so
One time expense to buy all the required items	Large upfront cost

So, sure – there are a ton of excellent pros to a home gym, but also a ton of great cons. A vast majority of the reasoning behind why it may not work for you is due to personality type and experience. What you won’t notice is any comparison between the difficulty of the workout. You are the only one who can determine how strenuous your at-home workouts are, aside from your gym workouts. 

If you now think that you might be interested in a home gym, because, like me, you also hate to leave your house – let’s chat about how we did it and what purchases we made to accomplish our basic home gym. 

Everything we bought to create a home gym

As both my husband and I play competitive sports, coach or are actively involved in the sports community. We have, over time, built a good foundation of items we could use in our home gym. However, before we moved into our current place, we had to downsize most of our belongings for a significant cross-province move. Therefore, we had a lot less than we had thought. 

To start, we had two agility ladders, four lighter dumbbells (5s and 8s), a medicine ball (8), two yoga mats and two kettlebells (10 and 15). It wasn’t a lot, but it was a good start. From there, we sat down and started to do some basic research to get a feel for the cost of gym equipment. It was expensive. I won’t lie. However, there were some items that we could justify to buy first, and we would work on building out our inventory at a later date if we needed to. After all, as I was getting back into it, I wouldn’t need anything heavy-duty yet. Here is a list of everything we bought and its cost:

Item	Cost
Gym mats	105.48
TRX	129.95
Resistance bands	25.99
Core sliders	16.99
Used dumbbells	Free
Total	278.4

What type of at-home workouts do we do?

When I first started back into my workouts, I created a personalized workout program to get a feel for where I was at and let me tell you; it was worse than I was expecting. First and foremost, I knew that I would need to work on my cardio and fitness levels to get back into shape. So, this took little to no equipment. 

For the first month, I used five-pound dumbbells and followed along with some Tone It Up HIIT YouTube videos. I would do two or three of their workouts three times a week (would up to five if I didn’t have soccer twice a week). These workouts were an easy toe-dip into what was to come, and an excellent way to measure my cardio levels. Once I felt confident enough that I’d be ready for the next step, I chose to look for a workout program that I could purchase that would help me accomplish my fitness goals.

I decided to purchase this one from Kaylee Eulom, who I’ve followed on Instagram for many years and was thoroughly impressed when I received the 68-page document. As some of the workouts require gym equipment we don’t have, I went in and made adjustments that would ensure I was still getting the same results I would get if I were going to the gym. In the end, the $40 I spent on the workout program felt a lot better than the $40/month I’d be spending, on top of the gas and time I’d waste commuting to the gym. 

Is a home gym right for you?

There is something to be said about the fact that self-motivation plays a considerable role in your fitness regimen. The moment you decide that you’re going to work out at home, you have to be aware of the fact that you might plateau in different ways than just based on the weight of the dumbbells you lift. 

For now, we are working with what we’ve got, and sub in extra dining room chairs for seated movements and tricep dips or using our agility ladder for cardio warmups instead of the treadmill. 

In the future, we’ll invest in what we feel we need when the timing is right, both physically and financially. Until then, my focus is on learning to find joy in workouts again, and our home gym is making that possible a lot more quickly than a gym would.