How to build a home gym. Buy less, and buy it in the right order.

Can you get strong in the corner of a flat?

Worth settling before you spend anything, because it's the doubt sitting underneath the whole question.

For strength, yes, and the bar is lower than most people assume. A 2024 overview in Sports Medicine looked at what happens when you strip resistance training back to almost nothing. One session a week. A single set per exercise. A few minutes a day. All of those approaches still increased strength, and the authors landed on a simple conclusion: small volumes of resistance exercise beat none, comfortably.¹ That isn't a claim that less is better. It's that the gap between a little and nothing is far bigger than the gap between a little and a lot.

The kit matters less than people think too. A meta-analysis of eight studies put elastic resistance up against machines and dumbbells and found similar strength gains from both, across different populations and different protocols.² Bands aren't a consolation prize. For some things they beat dumbbells, and they're the one bit of kit I never travel without.

None of which means a home setup does everything a gym does. Unless you have endless space, budget and enthusiasm, you'll run out of load eventually, and there are exercises you'll never get to without the machine that does them. But what stands between most people and a stronger body isn't a leg press. It's turning up twice a week for a year, and a corner of your own flat is very good at making that easy.

Start with less than you think, then prove you use it

My position on this hasn't shifted in fifteen years, and it's survived my own behaviour, which is saying something.

Start with a small amount of equipment that covers several jobs. Use it. Keep using it. Then, when your training needs something the kit can't give you, buy the thing that addresses it. In that order.

The mistake nearly everyone makes, me very much included, is buying for the training they picture rather than the training they do. Buying it often feels like training. Same rush, far less effort. The problem turns up about three weeks later, when the thing is still there, sitting in its box unopened, and the enthusiasm isn't.

Equipment doesn't earn its place on the day it arrives. It earns it on the twentieth session you still reach for it.

Everyone is different, and what a person needs comes down to their body, their space, their goals and how they like to train. But the sequence below is the one I use when a client moves from training with me in person to training on their own. It's basically a blueprint.

A 5kg dumbbell is a 5kg dumbbell

Before the list, the thing that decides how much of this you need to spend.

Three names come up below. Decathlon is the floor, and an honest one. Atletica, German and built around home gyms, is the one I love and where most people should be looking. Rogue and Eleiko are the top end.

A plate is a lump of iron with a hole in it. Decathlon sell a 5kg one for €11.99 and Eleiko, who supply competition platforms, sell theirs for €109. Both weigh five kilos, and on a bar in your flat they're doing the same job.

That applies to plates, and mostly to mats and bands. Where it stops holding up is anything you grip, balance on or trust with load. Three things are worth thinking about before you spend.

A bench, because it's the thing you lie underneath. A cheap bench wobbles, and a wobble under a loaded press stops being a comfort question. You need to trust the equipment you're using, otherwise you might not use it to its full potential.

A barbell, if you're going to load it. Price mostly buys knurling, the crosshatched grip texture along the bar, plus sleeves that spin freely and steel rated for far heavier loads. Most people training at home will never get near those loads, and if you aren't dropping the bar or throwing it around like a mad cross-fitter, a mid-priced one will see you out. I don't own an expensive bar. I'm not a powerlifter, I don't need one.

A rack, because it's safety equipment. Whatever holds a loaded bar above your body deserves the better version, and a wall-mounted one needs fixing into something structural by somebody who knows what they're doing.

Everything else, buy it affordable and buy it once.

The order I'd buy in

You'll notice this is roughly the list my sister and I stumbled into at eighteen. We got the basics right by accident. I've had two decades to check the working and I wouldn't change the order.

First, something adjustable you can load. An adjustable kettlebell or a pair of adjustable dumbbells. One purchase, a full range of weights, one footprint on the floor. A kettlebell alone gives you swings, goblet squats, presses, rows, carries and get-ups from day one. Dumbbells give you most of a full-body session.

The cheapest honest route is Decathlon's 50kg cast iron kit, which gives you two dumbbell handles, a barbell and a set of discs for €134.99. It's slow and a bit inconvenient to adjust the load between sets, but it covers three purchases at once. If you'd rather buy once, Atletica's QUAD adjustable dumbbells are a pair that go up to 36kg each, €487.05 for both, which most people will not outgrow.

Second, a mat. Small, cheap, and the difference between training on the floor and avoiding the floor entirely. Decathlon's 8mm folding one is rated for indoor and outdoor use at €14.99. If you're precious about your floor, rubber tiles are the better call, at roughly €38.95 per square metre for 20mm recycled rubber on Amazon Spain.

Third, a bench. Nothing else opens up as many exercises for the money. Pressing at an angle, rowing with your chest supported, hip thrusts, split squats, step-ups. Plus somewhere to sit.

Decathlon's folding Bench 500 is €99.99. It inclines, declines and packs away, which covers most of what a flat needs. Atletica's B4, at €273.52, is the one I'd point most people at. A cheap bench is fine, but it matters that you feel safe on it.

If you want a bench that does several jobs, the Freak Athlete ABX is €499 and grows into a dip station, a preacher curl bench, a sit-up bench and a leg developer as you add attachments. Worth knowing that the attachments are extra. The leg developer alone is €399.

Fourth, a barbell, plates, and somewhere safe to store them. If you made me pick one item and one only, I'd cheat and say two: a barbell and dumbbells. A bar is perhaps the best route to getting stronger over time, because you can add as little as 1kg as you progress.

Check the diameter before you buy either. Standard bars take 28mm plates, Olympic bars take 50mm, and the two do not mix. Ordering a bar and a stack of discs that don't fit each other is a common and entirely avoidable mistake.

Decathlon's 1.55m standard bar is €29.99. Atletica make one called the Zeta, shorter than usual specifically for small rooms, at €202.35. Discs are sold by weight, from €11.99 for 5kg to €49.99 for 20kg. Buy fewer heavy plates than you think. Plates aren't small, and the chances of you back squatting 200kg are probably a little unrealistic. You can always buy more as you progress.

If you're deadlifting, rowing and pressing off the floor, a rack can wait. The moment you're squatting or pressing out of one it can't, and it needs safeties or spotter arms set at a height that will protect you if you fail. Atletica's foldable wall rack is €426.04 and folds flat when you aren't using it. A great option if space is limited.

Last but not least, the specific stuff. Wedges, a landmine, an ab wheel. These are excellent and I use all of them. But each one was added because my sessions required them, not because they looked good in a photograph. The slant board is the clearest example I have. It doesn't convert into ten machines. It makes squats sit deeper, keeps knees tracking where they should, and gets people into positions they couldn't otherwise reach. Barely a leg session goes by without one coming out.

Four questions before anything comes through the door

These are what I ask myself. They've saved me more money than they've cost me, though not by a huge margin.

Does one purchase cover three? Floor space is the currency in a flat. A bench that folds into a dip station and a preacher curl bench has bought you two things you never had to find room for.

Is there room to grow into it? You're going to get stronger, and fixed kit has a ceiling. A pair of 10kg dumbbells is perfect right up until the day it isn't, and then you're buying again. Adjustable costs more today and buys you the years after that.

Does it have a home, and room to be used? Those are two different questions and the second is the one people miss. A machine's footprint is not the space it needs. A cable pulley might take up a square metre and need three, because you have to step back into the movement and swing a handle through its full arc. A barbell needs clearance at both ends and above your head, not just the floor it's standing on.

One client bought a rack that fit the room in the narrow sense of being inside it. It also swallowed the floor and left him edging round it sideways, which isn't what he thought he was buying.

I'm in no position to laugh. I bought a rack that was too wide for my barbell. I assumed it would fit. It didn't. My mistake, nobody else's, and an expensive way to learn that a tape measure costs €4.

So measure. The floor it stands on, the space around it you need in order to move, the height if you're pressing overhead, and the bar you already own. Then measure it again.

Would it come out every week? Nothing looks optional in a shopping basket. Most of it turns out to be.

If it lives outside, buy for outside

This part only applies if your setup is like mine, but if it is, it's the most expensive lesson on this page.

Mine sits on a terrace in Barcelona. Sun, rain, and the occasional reminder that the sea is nearby. Steel rusts, foam perishes, fabric fades and splits, and a bench that would have lasted fifteen years in a spare room starts looking sorry for itself in two.

Another client bought a Technogym bench. Proper money, proper kit. The delivery team told her plainly not to use it outside, and the instructions added that she shouldn't move it with the weights still in it. She is gloriously stubborn, and her position was that she would show them. So it went outside. And at some point it got moved with the weights in. The frame cracked.

Whether the weather had already softened it or she just did the one thing the box told her not to, we'll never know. Two instructions, both ignored, one cracked frame, and a bench that should have outlived both of us.

So either buy equipment built for outdoors, or budget for storage that keeps it out of the weather, or accept that you're going to replace things. Those are the three options and I've never found a fourth. A cover beats nothing. A box that closes beats a cover.

The training changes. The box in the cupboard doesn't.

Now, the ropes.

I didn't buy ten of them because I was chasing a better one. The rope was never the issue. I bought ten because every session I was giving at the time included skipping, and one at a time had started to feel silly. The rope was right. The number was right for that year. What I hadn't accounted for is that the way I train myself and others changed, and within a year, skipping was out.

I've also got resistance bands in quantities I couldn't defend in court, and that one was purely me.

The lesson isn't don't buy. It's that your training moves and the kit doesn't always move with it. So buy for the sessions you're doing now, buy one of the thing, and let next year do its own shopping.

What this costs in real money

My entire budget at eighteen was €1,000, and I turned most of it into a fashionable elliptical and a Smith machine I broke myself.

Around €300 will get a beginner a setup covering the whole body. An adjustable load of some kind, a bench, a mat, a set of bands. None of it will be beautiful and all of it will work, and a year of using that beats a year of owning something better.

Between €1,000 and €1,500 is roughly where it stops feeling like a compromise. Adjustable dumbbells with real range, a bench you trust, a bar and some plates. Spent in that order it's a setup you could still be using in ten years. Spent in one afternoon on five things that each do one job, the same money buys you very little.

Past that you're paying for finish, capacity and commercial-grade durability. All three are real. Whether you need any of them is a separate question, and for most of us the answer is no.

A setup you use four times a week was cheap at almost any price. A setup you use twice was expensive at any price.

One line on assembly, since I've already paid for that lesson. Delivery and building are not always in the price, and self-assembly on anything that holds a load above your head is not where to save money. If the option is there and it's €50 or €80, take it. My eighteen year old self would like a word with anyone about to skip it.

And on fashion, since that's where I started. I had a client spend €18,000 on an elliptical. Technogym will sell you an elliptical for €4,150, and they will also sell you the Artis Synchro from €18,090. To be fair to them, the expensive ones are their commercial line, built to run twelve hours a day on a gym floor, which is real engineering and costs real money. My client uses theirs about four hours a week at home.

Which makes it the same mistake I made at eighteen, with the decimal point moved. Half a budget, or eighteen thousand, spent on the machine that happened to be in fashion when the decision got made.

What a good home gym looks like

Smaller than you pictured, and used more than you expected.

A thing that does ten jobs is a good thing and I'll not pretend otherwise. I've spent fifteen years buying kit that does several jobs at once and I enjoy all of it. The only catch is that the box tells you what something can do, and you're the one who decides what it will do.

The rest is simpler than the internet might suggest. Buy things you want to use. Put them where you'll see them. A setup you're excited to use on a Tuesday always beats a fancy one you have to talk yourself into.

Start with less. Measure before you buy. Consider the space you need around it, not just the dimensions of the equipment. Buy the next thing when your training calls for it, or when you just really want it, as long as you're honest with yourself about which it is.

We got half of that list wrong and the gym still got used for years, which is the most encouraging thing on this page. Get enough of it right and the mistakes just sit in the corner being mistakes.

The Smith machine held towels. The elliptical held an ashtray. The bench and the dumbbells are the half I'd buy again tomorrow.