5 Reasons Your Home Gym Could Be The Best Investment of Your Life

First things first, there are many ways to “skin a cat” with one’s health and fitness. Some enjoy the big box gyms, some enjoy going to smaller community based gyms, and there’s booming growth in the community of people who work out at home. I like to call that booming group, “lone rangers.” I’ve written and spoken about this concept before, but I believe it is so important for people to learn to be intrinsically motivated in their health and fitness endeavors. In fact, this applies to all endeavors, but let’s focus on health and fitness. If all you ever do is rely on someone else to “cattle-prod” you to do the work, then you never really develop discipline, all you’ve developed is the reliance on someone else. This presents the all-too-common scenario when the person relying on the external stimulus to “do good” with their health and fitness loses the stimulus, they fall off the wagon completely.

I was doing good, until my trainer moved, switched careers, etc…

I was doing good until my fitness challenge ended.

I was doing good until the gym that I went to closed down.

I was doing good until a pandemic hit the world.

Those are just excuses. You can call them something else if you’d like to sugar coat it.

What if, just maybe, you found it within yourself to learn how to do this on your own? What kind of self-reliance and discipline would overcome you if you did it on your own. Heck, you can even have some interdependence with a training community that you’re part of (wink-wink), but when it comes down to it, you gotta pick yourself out of bed, walk down to the basement, or the corner of your garage, and choose to get after it. When this becomes you, there’s no stopping you. Until this becomes you, there’s a whole host of excuses lying there and waiting for you to pick one of them.

So, if you don’t have your health, then what’s everything else worth to you anyway? This is why investing in the personal development category of personal health and fitness is HUGE! One aspect of that I encourage everyone to invest in is in their home gym, and here’s 5 reasons why your home gym could be the best investment of your life:

1. It will save you lots of money.
   1. Just do the math. Most quality gyms nowadays charge north of $50/mo. That’s $600/year on the low end and in many cases more life $1,000 – $2,000/year in expenses. Let me be clear, this is a good investment if it’s what you enjoy and will do consistently. In fact, for many people the price needs to sting enough for them to use what they are paying for. Trust me, anytime I’ve done something for free for someone who begged me to, they never follow through. But for us long rangers that workout from home, after say less than $500 in home gym equipment, you can workout monthly for free, and even if you were to pay for some online support from, say a guy like me, that’s $40/mo, you’re looking at less than $1,000 for the first year (if you need to purchase equipment) and after than you’re looking at less than $500/yr or FREE!
   2. Let us not forget that at many gyms now, they have no less than 10 different profit centers (good for them) where you’ll likely spend even more of your money. You’ll spend more than you need to on their supplements, their food, and more than likely a few other services/products they will make available to you.
   3. In either case, did you know that there’s evidence that shows those who workout regularly make – on average – $25,000 more annually than those who said they never exercise? Interestingly enough, intensity of exercise also shows trends that those who cited higher intensity workouts earned a higher salary than those who did low-impact routines. Whatever the case may be, the point is you can save more and earn more, which sounds like a win-win in my book.
2. It will save you lots of time.
   1. Personally, I roll out of bed at 4:30am, brush my teeth, head to the kitchen and take my supplements, and walk into my garage and begin warming up. I train almost entirely with kettlebells for many reasons, but probably the biggest reason is in its efficiency. After I warm-up, which takes about 10-12 minutes, my workouts are 20 minutes or less, meaning from the time I wake up to the time I’m done working out, only an hour of my day has passed. Contrast to the typical gym-goer experience. Drive to gym (15 minutes), head to lock room and get changed (5 minutes), warm-up (10 minutes), workout (60 minutes), shower and get changed (30 minutes), drive back home or to work (15 minutes). That’s a total of  135 minutes, or 2 hours and 15 minutes if you struggle with that conversion. Now let’s do some more interesting math:
   2. If I worked out at my home 4 days/week with the time formula I laid out, that’s 4 x 60 min = 240 minutes/week x 52 weeks = 12,480 minutes / 60min/hr = 208 hours/ 24hrs/day = 8.6 days of your year is spent on your fitness routine, at home mind you.
   3. If I worked out at the gym with the other time formula I laid out, that’s 4 x 135 min = 540 min/week x 52 weeks = 28,080 minutes/yr / 60min/hr = 468 hours/day / 24hr/day = 19.5 days of your year spent away from home at a gym, likely being much less efficient while spending considerably more money.
3. You can workout in your underwear.
   1. Let’s be real, you and I both know that the vast majority of people put time and energy into looking a certain way at the gym. This also costs more time and money if you want to look especially cool, hip, and whatever the young people are calling it these days. As for me, I throw on a pair of shorts and t-shirt, and away I go, and wear that much clothing because I coach others online. On days that I don’t coach others online, you can find me in a pair of shorts. That’s it. No shirt, no shoes, and no socks. Just straight killin’ it in my gym shorts.
4. Modeling healthy behaviors if you have children is of the utmost importance.
   1. If you’re a parent, this should likely be #1 on this list. As a whole, we are failing our children in one of the worst ways by being lazy in our self respect for our bodies. Modeling how to fuel and train the body mindfully is one of the very most important life skills, yet in our society, it’s become less important than toilet paper.
5. You’ll develop self-reliance and confidence.
   1. You can cover it up as much as you want, but nothing feels or looks as good as someone who has figured out their health and fitness, which is basically a journey in figuring out yourself, and there’s few things more satisfying and empowering to just dominate in this area of your life. Discipline truly equals freedom and sets you free from the bondages of poor health and poor habits.

I guess I should’ve mentioned reason #6. You’ll be less likely to die prematurely. That makes for a pretty good investment too. Considering the times and the state of health and fitness in the USA, you best be getting your home gym set up and using it often.