My Top Three Reasons For Training At Home

For years now 70 – 80% of my training occurs in my home gym. I’ve had gym memberships. Heck I owned the only gym in town for more than a decade. However, since 2013 when I sold my gym Healthy Bodies Fitness, I’ve gone out of my way to keep up a well-equipped home gym and do most my training at home, on my deck. I’ve even gone through the effort of building a cover over it so I can train during the harsh winters that we have here in the Sierra Nevadas. However, recently a violent wind storm blew my cover clean over my house like a giant metal kite. That’s when I knew the time had come to move my home gym in doors and just last weekend I completed that renovation.

So why have I gone through all this the trouble to build and maintain a home gym? There are many reasons. I will outline my top three.

1) Convenience – I can train any time I want to and take as long as I want. I’ve been known to spend the better part of an entire day training. Usually I do so in a very casual manner; doing a set, then helping the boy with his homework before hitting another set. Doing laundry or cooking dinner in between sets. Watching “The Walking Dead” and hitting sets during the commercials. This is the main reason I love training at home.

2) I stick to the plan better – When I go to other gyms, I tend to stray. Either the machine I want to use is taken or they don’t have the specific device I want. Often, my ego gets in the way and I end up doing more weight or more sets than I have programmed. Especially when I should be doing higher rep work. Loads need to be lighter and when I train at home, my ego lets me train with the lighter weight since no one is “watching.”

3) I can get “animated” – although I’ve toned my expressive nature down in recent years, when I’m training hard I tend to get a bit boisterous. When I train at home I can grunt, curse, blow snot bubbles, whatever, and not have the “lunk alarm” go off and the planet fitness police come and lecture me.

So, there you have it. My top three reasons for training at home. I have other reasons that are of less significance and would make this blog post longer than it needs to be. However, I can see myself training at home for the near and extended future. I’ve made greater progress in the past 3 years training at home than I did in the 10 years of owning my own gym. So, I see no reason to change any time soon.