How to build yourself a home gym.

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Chris Hobson

Chris Hobson

Well-Known Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 2
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Exterior shot of the gym. The sides still have the original low budget overlapping boards but the front and back have now been clad with proper tongue and groove boards of much better quality. The plan is to upgrade the sides too, sometime in 2018.
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Here you can see the weights bench. The brightly coloured area above the mirror is made of ribbons from finishers' medals. The black square beneath the clock is the bracket for mounting the TV.

This home gym has now been up for more than four years. It started out as a Billio 10' X 14' shed that was delivered as a huge flatpack consisting of something like forty panels including the floor and roof. Being made in sections, the floor doesn't have any structural strength so the first job was to build a base for the shed to stand on. This involved digging out the required area to a depth of about 200mm or 8 inches, building a frame out of gravel board and filling it with a mixture of sand and cement powder. The sand and cement mix then had to be leveled off below the height of the frame to allow for the thickness of the paving stones that then went on top. I made the base a little bigger than the required area which was fortunate because the shed is slightly narrower and slightly longer than specified, 9'6'' X 15'2'' in fact. This works out at about 150 square feet as opposed to 140 so I wasn't complaining. I built the whole thing on top of a plinth that gave it a little more height and added lengths of timber to the top of the walls to give a little more structural strength and a little more height. The windows and doors were very crude so I constructed some better window frames and proper door frames and double doors. The whole thing was insulated with reflective bubble wrap and lined with 8mm MDF painted with white emulsion. The carpet is a cheap roll end of plain charcoal colour. The guttering had to be added because the base became a little waterlogged and water was finding its way in and wetting the carpets. The power supply is taken from a convenient junction box in the outhouse which is connected to the downstairs ring-main of the house. An armoured cable is buried under the lawn. This powers six double sockets and the three strip lights. I later added a trip switch after an electrical fault in the shed blew the fuse in the consumer unit in the house.
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In this picture you can see the lat exerciser, the rack of spare weights and a runner's eye view of the running machine.
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Here you can see the spin bikes and two of the three de-humidifiers that are required to keep the damp at bay. There are now sixty finishers' medals on the front wall.


With the shed completed the search for second hand gym equipment began. We managed to find a good selection of weights, a weights bench and a sit-ups bench for about eighty pounds on ebay. The running machine was bought from someone at work. We already had a cheap exercise bike up in the loft and another one was bought new but discounted due to having been damaged and repaired. The one from the loft has since been replaced with a better one. The storage rack for the weights was bought new and we later bought more weights, some from internet sites and some from Argos. The mirror is actually a sliding door from B&Q. My exercise bike has now been replaced with a single speed bike and a turbo-trainer. To begin with, the home comforts consisted of stuff that we already had around the house, the fan and fan heater and a small digital radio with CD player. The fan heater and radio have since had to be replaced, an ipod dock has been added and eventually we put in a TV with built in DVD player to combat the intense boredom of indoor cycling.



I started using the gym in August 2013 and have been doing a weights routine roughly every three days since then. I took a break during the early part of this year due to having to increase the level of my triathlon training and have taken a while to get back into my routine again but have now recommenced my weight routine. The turbo-trainer and running machine tend to come back into use as the winter weather closes in, this means that I can keep ticking over during the winter so that my fitness level doesn't slip too much. Having my own gym in the back yard makes it easier to motivate myself to train, not having to pack a gym bag and get into the car to travel to the gym is a big help.

Edit 19/08/2018
I finally got around to doing a write up about what I actually do in the gym.

https://forum.diabetes.org.uk/boards/threads/working-out-with-weights.74806/
 
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That's impressive. 🙂 I've never bothered with a gym although I'm sort of tempted by a turbo trainer in the garage for those days when I can't get out on the bike. Not been many in recent years though.
 
Lucky you, to have the ground to be able to do it, and of course the money.
 
"Is it a garage ?"
No it's basically a garden shed but it was the largest in the range, nominally ten by fourteen feet.
"Lucky you, to have the ground to be able to do it,..."
One of the pluses of living out in the country is that even very modest houses like ours have fairly spacious gardens. The downside is that you have to travel to do anything, our village doesn't even have a shop.
"...and of course the money."
We aren't rich but we are not too poor either. We both work and we only have one sproglet who is now at university. I have a small savings account which at the time I had left alone for a while so it had built up a few hundred quid. I also sold one or two things, notably all of my beer brewing kit which I no longer needed as I gave up drinking when I was diagnosed. We also went for the cheapest big shed on the market and sourced the equipment second hand wherever we could.
 
Notwithstanding the financial outlay, you obviously had the motivation & the knowledge to convert a shed into a home gym. I'm very impressed with the final outcome. You should be feeling well pleased with your efforts ~ thanks for sharing and for giving others inspiration to follow suit.
WL
 
I am an engineer by trade. I originally trained as a diesel fitter but later moved onto working with compressed air driven power tools and then onto electronically controlled pneumatic systems. My interest in working with wood was stimulated by watching a TV show called 'The New Yankee Workshop'. My wife bought me two books based on the show and I made a shaker style wall clock and several American style garden chairs which I felt justifiably proud of. I have a massive DIY book which had the instructions that I needed to make the base, I basically just followed them to the letter. The shed also came with instructions on how to assemble it but I made improvements to the windows and doors as I mentioned in the OP. The experience that I gained from building the gym means that if I had to do it again I would do some parts of it differently, I would have made it a bit more waterproof and would have added more strength to the roof supports. You can see from the external pic that the lawn is overdue a haircut.
 
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I somehow missed this earlier Chris, that's seriously impressive! 🙂 Terrific job! I've got a Concept II rower and Kettler exercise bike in my back room 🙂
 
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Having got some Christmas money to spend, some of it has gone on upgrades for the gym. Pics 1 & 2 show the existing digital radio plus the new CD player with inputs for the Sony Walkman and other types of music player, both USB and jackplug. Note the reading glasses which I need to put on so that I can see the buttons on the remote control. Pic 3 shows the new squat stand. I've been thinking about getting a squat stand for a while, up to now I've just been hoiking the barbell onto my shoulders and just about managing. I've recently developed a creaky elbow which has made this process a little painful. So I've now pushed the boat out and bought the stand. Because of the somewhat compact nature of my gym I've had to sort of combine it with the bench. I've yet to do a full weights routine so I'm not sure whether it is completely practical how it is set up at the moment, I'll have to see. Note the cheesy motivational poster in the background, I spotted it in the book shop at Keele university and it made me laugh so I bought it for the gym.
 
Update.
I've recently bought an extra barbell in order to speed up my weights routine a little. The new barbell came with a box of extra weights, you can never have too many. I already had one spare barbell which I wasn't using so I now have three altogether. The exercise routine that I do involves barbell weights of 38, 26 and 20 kilos. Up to now I have had to unscrew the nuts and take off and put on weights as required. I now have three barbells made up to the three different weights that are required so that I just have to switch to the one that I need for the next set. I will be trying out the new setup tomorrow morning and it should knock a few minutes off the time needed to get through the routine.
 
Officially jealous. Although i'm moving house in two days time, and we'll have a spare bedroom (moving further out of town; spending less money + getting a bigger place!) so my treadmill will have it's own room. Not a patch on your gym, but maybe one day...
 
@Chris Hobson – so my treadmill room in the new house had become the obligatory dumping ground for the last seven boxes which were duly unpacked this weekend. I now have a much scaled down version of a home gym. I got back on the treadmill for my first run in around a month (healing calf) and did a 40 min fast-paced walk, with a 15 min run in the middle, just to ease back in (I came back too quickly last time and made it worse). So it's well rested now and hopefully good to go, if I dont overuse it again. I need to accept I can't run daily anymore.

I used to do a lot of yoga, so I've dusted off the ol' mat and set that up in there too. After the run, I did a Hatha Yoga session. It feels good to be back!! Reading your posts has helped keep my mind on it, even if my body wasn't! So don't ever feel like you're sharing too much or too often, I'm sure you're inspiring lots of us!
 
My gym is only 150 square feet. I have had to be very careful in laying out the equipment in order to make the best use of the available space. As it is, it works very well. I don't think that I could add much more equipment without it getting too overcrowded. Your ability to endure long periods on the treadmill is impressive, time stands still for me, but my determination to stay fit without getting frozen and wet gets me through.
 
Music gets me through it! Or I watch something on the iPad – anything to take my mind off what I'm actually doing. It's strategically placed next to the window too, so I have a nice view. I have the opposite problem here, it's been too hot and humid to be outside for more than a nano second, it was up in the high 40s with 75%+ humidity for the last couple of months. It's back down to the low 30s now. But I've grown accustomed to running without going anywhere in the comfort of my own home, so i'm interested to see if i'll run outside again.

It looks like you have everything you need in your gym though, are you missing anything?
 
The only thing that I can think of is a rowing machine and I've never really fancied one of those anyway. I would say that the gym is now pretty much complete for my needs.
 
My starting point was to buy a load of stuff second hand from a guy who was selling his entire collection of weights and associated benches. I got my weight training routine from a book. Once I started doing the actual workout I could see which weights I was short of and bought additional weights new.
 
Today I have been on the gym roof doing some emergency maintenance as a big chunk of felt has blown off the roof. I bought an extra roll of felt and have spent a big chunk of my Sunday patching it up. It is now over six years old and is in need of some TLC more generally. The soggy summer and winter of last year have left it quite damp inside, and the dehumidifiers have been fighting a losing battle. I'm retiring soon and I have an ever growing list of jobs to do once I no longer have to go to work. Putting a new roof on the gym is just one more.
 
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