Investing in a home gym holds better advantages over paying a monthly fee to honour your membership to some over-commercialised branded gym chain. The operative word here is indeed ‘invest,’ in that you’re spending money with a view of gaining some tangible long-term value over time. Sure, the traditional communal gym environment offers an entire experience on its own, but you have to look at your own personal fitness and exercise goals in choosing the environment that gives you the best chance to realise your fitness goals.
Some of the world’s greatest achievements came out of converted home garages (think Silicon Valley start-ups) and the greatest work you could do on your body could very well come out of your garage-turned-home gym. A couple of practical benefits home gyms have over communal gyms include the freedom and ability you’ll enjoy to completely personalise your gym space to your liking and get more value out of exercising in the privacy of your own home gym. You can still wear your favourite gym clothes and hit the same fitness goals – just from your home! You can wear the same twin sets with your bestie or partner, it will just be inside your new fitness heaven and not at the crowded gym like before. If you’re trying to bulk up and get ripped or indeed if your fitness goal is to shed the flab and get toned, your converted home garage gym will make for the perfect refuge, shielding you from otherwise having to contend with the self-consciousness of lifting weights next to a considerably bulked-up gym rat or perhaps heaving through the cardio programme your much fitter gym buddy seems to be breezing through. If you don’t have a garage you can convert, there are other ways to get a home gym. Have you considered looking into the metal buildings Nevada has? By erecting a metal building on your property, you have an affordable, easy to maintain space where you can set up your own home gym.
A lot of progress made (or not made) in a gym comes down to psychological factors which are influenced by very small and seemingly insignificant things. The dreaded drive down to the gym becomes a total non-issue when your state-of-the-art gym is located right there in your garage, so too your preferred choice of workout aids, motivational sources and positive reinforcements. You can add a television or radio for example and watch or listen to whatever you want, as opposed to having to block out the sounds of a communal gym with your expensive iPod’s earphones. You can access your gym at any time, which is useful if you’re following a strict, specialised programme that requires frequent gym access like perhaps several times on a specific day.
From purely an investment perspective however, a home gym makes even more sense because you’d then effectively do away with having to pay monthly gym fees, usually as part of a contract.
Make no mistake about it though; home gyms do come at a bit of a cost, but if you finance your home gym through a guarantor loan, you’re not only instantly giving yourself the ability to afford your home gym, but are also getting double value for roughly the same amount of money you’d otherwise spend on a conventional gym membership. Between the fuel costs of driving to the gym, membership fees and joining fee, the monthly costs of a traditional gym membership are about the same as those of the repayments you’d make on your guarantor loan. The only difference would then be the fact that you’re effectively paying a monthly fee for unlimited 24/7 access to your home gym, at the end of which repayment term you then fully own all the exercise equipment, such as an air bike and a running machine, that forms part of your conveniently located, personalised home gym.