How to Build a Home Gym

All any home gym really needs is some room. There should be enough space to make a snow angel and to jump all the way up, though you probably won’t need to. Equipment, of course, is important. But it’s better to just work out to start. In a perfect world I would live in Montana, or at least lift there, in a heated garage. My reality is a pull-up bar, bands, and a couple kettlebells I store in my oven. This setup will work for anyone who isn’t a powerlifter. Very few home gyms have everything, but very few people do, either. This way at least I still live close enough to the good movie theaters.

Every gym has weights, but not every workout needs them. Incarcerated people do jumping jacks and push-ups in their cells to get strong, and gymnasts do hand-stands. Both can look like competitive powerlifters. We can follow their leads with a pull-up bar, bands, and a handful of bodyweight exercises. Hang the bar over the bathroom door, and do five every time you go in and out. If you work from home, or just like hanging out there, and hydrate, you’ll hit a few dozen a day. If you can’t do a pull-up, that is totally fine. Get to the top of the bar and lower yourself down to a hang, very slowly, and repeat. It’ll build up resistance, then strength.

Resistance bands are like weights, but don’t take up space. Buy the looped ones, which are around 3.5’ long, and are made of thick rubber. (The thin ones are meant for physical therapy.) Tie one around your heating pipe, maybe just during the summer, and stand far enough so that it’s tense, and do face pulls, which means pulling the band to your face. The weight should be felt, but shouldn’t unbalance you. Or stand on the band and pull up, like a row.

Bodyweight exercises — like holding a plank, or doing air squats and lunges — can be repeated to exhaustion, or just until you sweat through your rug. Do a combination of this stuff four days a week, and rest on the other ones, or play with your parakeet, or work on your screenplay.

Weights are the most efficient way to train, because they require fewer repetitions than bodyweight exercises. But most take up space, and are heavy. Kettlebells, though, are the hack. Teardrop-shaped, they have all their weight at one end and feel extra substantial when they get whipped around. They strengthen tendons and joints and add muscle. When moved ballistically — fast — they function as cardio. Plus, you only need one or two — anywhere between 15 to 35 lbs. to start should be good.

The two best kettlebell exercises can be learned in an hour but take a lifetime to master. The swing, a long jump that doesn’t leave the ground, beefs up the posterior chain — the hips, back, and hamstrings — which gets especially wrecked from fake email jobs. The Turkish get-up starts lying down, with the bell over the shoulder, and ends, after eight steps, at standing. It works just about everything else.

The best thing about kettlebell work is that it’s thoughtless. Just do 100 swings a day, or twice that, five days a week, for the rest of your life, and you won’t have to do anything else. If that sounds boring, it’s not. Nailing a swing is as hard as pruning a Bonsai tree or perfecting a French omelette. After a decade, you’ll begin to understand what you’ve been doing. And you’ll also stand straighter on giant legs that will make you feel good.

Gyms, to their credit, always have more than enough treadmills and bikes. And it’s not very easy to do sprints in the kitchen. (I do mine in my courtyard.) Home cardio will have different exercises, but similar results. It’s about moving enough to mimic a long, focused run. Jumping rope — 15 minutes a day, four days a week — is one way, as are Tabata workouts, where a circuit of exercises, like jumping jacks, push-ups, then burpees, are done one minute on, one minute off. Rowing machines are another great option. Some fold up after use, though to be fair, even like that they’re still pretty big.

My ideal home cardio situation involves a Craigslist-ed bike with a fan — specifically the Schwinn Airdyne, produced in the ‘70s, which looks like a Brutalist sculpture. The fan adds resistance to pedaling, which builds up muscles: even a six-minute ride can be punishing. But my kitchen’s too small for that thing unless I get rid of my dishwasher. I thought about draping a Mexican blanket over the Airdyne when it’s not in use, so people wouldn’t notice the giant bike in my apartment, but then I’d have to get rid of my coffee table.

A gym’s only as worthwhile as its equipment, and of the thousands of gyms in America, only a couple hundred are any good. The best machines — GHDs (glute-ham developers) and reverse hypers, which each target the posterior chain and don’t load the spine — are absent from just about all of them. (Only expensive, specialized and elite gyms seem to have them.) This feels like a low-grade injustice, as well as a missed opportunity. Many of us sit at desks for a living, and destroy our backs, glutes, and hamstrings. We could fix them, over time, with these therapeutic, strength-building machines. But we can’t, since most gyms don’t have them. Really, it means a home gym with one or both of these contraptions is better than just about any franchise in the country. If you have room, and your back hurts, you should get one. And, frankly, charge money for people to come by and use it. Recovery can also include a Theragun —an at-home massage machine shaped like a space ray — and regular Epsom baths. Also, having someone walk on your back, like they used to do in the movies.

It’s hard to be motivated about anything when there’s no money involved. It’s why people pay trainers and nutritionists, why they sign up for classes. People work out harder when they get bossed around, and when someone else is in charge of directions. To be sure, this is money well spent. But it also can’t be the only motivation for exercise. There won’t always be someone around who raises their voice.

My advice, and this has helped me, is to focus on how great it is to not have to go to the gym. We don’t always want to work out. But sometimes we have to. Even in these situations, at least there’s no wait for machines, no commute, and no all-too-real danger of leaving your shorts at the bar. Workouts at home are imperfect, and compromised, and don’t have it all. But they’re fast and they’re pure. It’s only exercise, and not anything else.