How much did my Home Gym cost?
The beginning of my Home Gym Strength Training journey
Since the end of 2017 I got interested in Strength Training. As for everyone, the first months in the gym were a tornado of different exercises and chaos trying to figure out the best possible training plan. I was not even close. After a lot of researches I have luckily discovered Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe and Jason Kelly.
The link to the book is a Amazon affiliate link so if you buy the book using this link I will earn a commission.
I started to make some decent progress with my lifts but eventually at the begging of 2020 all the gyms in Italy were closed due the Codiv-19 pandemic.
The idea to build my home gym was born.
Requirements:
- Being able to do Squat, Press, Deadlift and Bench Press
- Not too expensive
- Possibility to buy the equipment piece by piece
After a lot of research I landed on the Lacertosus website
When I saw the Pro Power Rack Extreme Set I just fell in love. The problem was that it was too expensive and an absolute overkill for my needs. So I started to build my wish list on the website by searching all the needed items that were strictly necessary to limit the total price. This is the result:
- 1 pair of Barbell Hooks
- Lat Machine with weight stack (95 Kg)
- Double Vertical Rack for the plates
- Fractional Plates Set (2x250gr -2x500gr — 2x750gr — 2x1000gr)
- 1 pair of Olympic Barbell Collars 50mm
I have recently seen on the website that it is now possible to get the bundle of all the RAW Bumper Plates to save some money.
I have also decided to add the Lat Machine even if it was not necessary to fulfill my initial requirements because it allows me to add some complementary exercises (Plus I liked it very much and the pins to increase the total weight stack with the plates is a killer feature in my opinion).
Using Scalapay it is possible to buy stuff from Lacertosus for a value of max 1500 Euro per order and divide the amount into 3 monthly payments without interest. Of course you can not do multiple orders running in parallel.
I have inserted the values in an Excel spreadsheet and by arranging the price of items in such a way that I was able to start as soon as possible with some training and respecting the max value of the cart required to use Scalapay, I was able to compose 3 orders.
All amounts are in Euro. In the table on the left there are the names of the items, unit price, quantity and total price. In the table on the right there is the assortment of the price of the items per order. At the bottom of each table there are the totals. The pair of Barbell Hooks is bundled for free with the Pro Power Rack.
With the right timing in the order placement I was able to use some discount (i.e. Black Friday, Christmas) and some months with free shipping that allowed me to save quite some money.
The total cost of the gym is highlighted in red.
The shipment was fast and the instructions for the assembly were easy to follow. I also want to mention that all items are made with top quality materials.
Of course I will buy more plates while I improve with my lifts.
If you, like me, are starting your Home Gym journey I suggest you to prioritize the quality of the equipment because at the end of the day you will be using it every day for the rest of your life so you need an equipment you can trust.
Moreover I strongly suggest you to buy Fractional Plates. They allow you to extend your Novice Program by adding really small weight to the barbell each session.
Outro
I hope the story was interesting and thank you for taking the time to read it. Just to be clear I do not have any commercial affiliation to the mentioned companies. On my Blogspot you can find the same post in Italian. Let me know if you have any question and if you like the content that I create feel free to buy me a coffee.
