To me, living well is more important that living long. To be healthy enough to enjoy the things that make life great is as important as having the time to do the things that make me happy. One of the things that I like to do to keep myself healthy both physically and mentally is repeatedly lift the element with the atomic number 16 i.e. go to the gym and pump some iron.
Lifting weights is good for maintaining muscle mass, bone density and generally makes me feel manly.
Normally when people think of weights they join a gym, which is what I did for a while until realised how annoying it was to have to wait for equipment; drive to and from the gym and smell the delicious odour of all kinds of people posing instead of working out.
Enter the home gym
This was one of the best investments in our health that we have ever made. I’ve made the most rapid strength gains at once we quit our commercial gyms and started up our home gym. The main reason for this is…
….wait for it…
….the superflex all in one training dynamic system complete with strength enhancement levers!
Hahahaha NO WAY
It’s CONSISTENCY. With our home gym we never have to wait for equipment, we never get annoyed with the lack of parking spots and our workouts can be done at any time. Further to this we save on 15 mins travel time each way, needing to buy fancy gym clothes and our pre and post work out nutrition is about 10 steps away. We’ve essentially eliminated all mental obstacles that stop us from working out. How does this tie into financial freedom you ask? It reduces our cost of living by about $1870 per year (2 x 17.99 per week memberships at Goodlife).
Cool, what’s the upfront cost?
When we moved into our house I already had the 110kg of standard weights so we purchased the remaining $2180 worth of gear to create version 1.0 of the home gym, which was kept us happy for 4 years. This paid itself off in gym membership savings in less than 2 years which was awesome and we’ve been reaping the financial benefits ever since. Recently we decided that we wanted to do some barbell work safely so we upgraded to the now home gym 2.0 which we expect to pay itself off in less than a year.
Can this be done more cost effectively?
Here’s where I’ll admit to not being as financially savvy as we could have… ….We bought everything new except for the tread mill. I also bought the 100kg of standard weights back in my uni days before I considered the safety benefits of using an Olympic barbell inside a power rack. So if I had my time again I would have only purchased the Olympic set which is gives an immediate saving of $500. Further to this, the body pump step is a pretty useless piece of marketing that we fell for and I wouldn’t buy it if I had my time again. If you’re still wondering about cost effectiveness, it really depends on your training requirements but if you’re creative you can get a really good workout with little or even no equipment.
Upgrades planned for the future?
The only thing I’d really want to add to this gym is more 20kg weight plates to allow my squat and deadlift to grow. Apart from that there’s such a huge variety of exercises that we can do with the equipment that we have now that we keep us challenged for years to come.
There you have it, we built a home gym and we couldn’t be happier. Now it’s time for us to pump our $140 per month gym membership savings directly into our investment funds.
Engineer your freedom