THE EVERYMAN'S GUIDE TO BUILDING A HOME GYM: THE TOP 10 ESSENTIALS
(Transcript from Brutal American Podcast 04/15/2026)
A lot of guys are asking about training and what they should be doing. Having a home gym goes a long way. You can do a whole lot. You can do multiple workouts a day if you want to. You can get stuff in really quickly if you've got a busy schedule. There's less commute time, all that good stuff.
But the principle here is this: start small. You can get away with a lot. The equipment is not the limiting factor. Most of the time, the limiting factor is your willingness to go out and put yourself in uncomfortable situations and be creative about it.
You could get away with one through five on this list — barbell through resistance bands. If you have that collection of stuff, you've got a pretty solid home gym. The second half is all just additional stuff that would be nice, for when you've already got one through five and you're looking at where to go from here.
BEFORE YOU BUY ANYTHING
Slowly accumulate instead of buying it all at once
The temptation is that you get convicted. You're like, I need to drop some weight, or I want to get stronger, or I want to be a more brutal American. And so you decide I'm going to start working out, and the tendency is to want to go buy a whole bunch of stuff from the same place at the same time and just get it all at once.
I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that instinct. If you've got that level of conviction, go for it. Sometimes you can find good deals. Free shipping on a whole bunch of equipment could go a long way. You could save a lot of money doing that.
But I think the better way to do this is to slowly accumulate equipment and gear and make sure that you're going to be in this for the long term. You don't want to go out and spend seven, eight thousand dollars or more on a bunch of gym equipment and then never use any of it, because then it's just a giant waste of money. If you're not going to use this stuff, don't buy it. I think you should buy it and you should use it, but the use is the thing that actually gets a return. Buying a bunch of stuff and not using it won't do you any good.
Buy used
Buy used if you can. Obviously we're looking for quality equipment. You don't want to just buy junk. But if you can buy stuff used, that is definitely the way to go.
This goes for a lot of stuff, but I think gym equipment might be near the top of the list when it comes to buying used gear, because the whole point is that you're going to beat it up. You don't need a barbell that's polished and perfect looking. It doesn't matter. You just need to be able to load weight on it and it not break. That's about it.
Usually if you're finding someone who's selling this stuff, they either inherited it and they're just trying to get rid of it, or they bought it and never used it. And so it's probably still in pretty good shape.
Shipping kills you.
If you can find stuff in your local area where you can go pick it up, that's going to be way cheaper than trying to ship stuff to your house.
If you live in a more rural area, broaden your search. What I did when we were in Texas is we went on a weekend trip, and my brother-in-law pulls out Facebook Marketplace and reassigns his Marketplace location to where we were, and we found all kinds of stuff. We drove to a guy's house while we were down there and picked up a bunch of stuff for really cheap that I still have. Don't be afraid to broaden out that circle when you're looking. An hour, hour and a half from you, there's a good chance you're going to find way more options and cheaper stuff, and a day's drive to go pick up some gym equipment is not the end of the world if you can avoid that shipping cost.
Sort out your flooring first.
One of the things that people first getting into this probably don't think about is flooring and what you're going to set this stuff on. That is a bigger deal than you probably think it's going to be. You want to make sure that you have decent flooring, something that you can set weights down on, and you're not going to tear up your foundation or break weights.
Horse stall mats are the answer. Tractor Supply has them, they're three quarter inch, good solid rubber mats, and they're not terribly expensive. The rubber smell goes away after a little while. I've dropped 300 pounds from over my head with bumper plates onto horse stall mats with nothing underneath them and had no issues at all. It didn't break any concrete. Weights were all fine. No damage to barbells or weights or anything.
They are terrible to cut. The box cutter is the way to go. Put down chalk lines or something like that, measure, make marks on it, then take a ruler and get a box blade and cut it. Freehand, you're going to have a hard time cutting those things straight, and once they're cut, that's just how it is.
You need less space than you think.
Even the gym that I have that a bunch of our guys use is a 12 by 20 room. It's basically a big closet. It's 240 square feet, and we've got all kinds of stuff in there.
If this is your home gym and it's going to be you and maybe your son or your wife using it, you're not going to have a problem with space. Even going on your back porch, leaving stuff under a tarp and then pulling it down onto your back porch — you can get a lot done in a really small space.
One of the big pluses of a home gym is just proximity. You're going to use it more because it's there. It takes less time out of your day to walk out here and just get started, rather than getting in the truck and leaving and driving and getting through the parking lot and all of the other nonsense that comes along with that. This is literally almost in your bedroom. You can come out and work out in your pajamas if you want to. No one cares.
1. A BARBELL AND PLATES
For a home gym, as far as a barbell goes, I would try to find something that is going to be a good do-it-all, multi-tool kind of barbell. I think the Rogue Ohio bar is one of the best ones out there. It lets you do both — I really like it for the big powerlifting lifts, squat, bench and deadlifts, but you can also use it for the Olympic lifts. If we were talking about bourbon, you would go: this is Buffalo Trace. This is just the standard, right in the middle, good option.
The exact barbell that I have, if you bought it brand new from Rogue, is $365. A black zinc version is three-oh-five. I think anywhere between a hundred and 150 bucks, you ought to be able to find a decent barbell in that price range used. You could even go with something that's not quite so name brand. Rogue is obviously a really premier company in the gym equipment space, so that name is going to have an additional price tag attached to it. Go find a YouTube review on a couple of different barbells. You can usually find one that will work just fine.
The biggest thing is to know that it's not going to break on you. If you're putting a barbell on your back or you're picking a bunch of weight up off the floor, you don't want it failing on you during lifts, or it can be dangerous.
As far as plates go, it's goal dependent. If you're going to be doing just the standard lifts, I would go with metal plates. A lot of the time, if you're doing squat, bench, deadlift and you're not worried about dropping weights ever, then definitely go with steel plates, because it's going to be cheaper. If you're going to be dropping stuff, because you're doing cleans and you want to make sure that it's not tearing up the floor or tearing up your weights, then you're going to want bumper plates.
Metal plates new, you should be getting for less than $2 a pound. Bumper plates are like two to three dollars a pound. If they're used, somewhere around a dollar a pound is probably reasonable.
I think the first thing people do is say, I need a thousand pounds. And you're like, when are you planning on picking up a thousand pounds? One percent of the one percent on the planet are moving that much weight. The likelihood is that you need somewhere around 400 pounds. If you can have two sets of 45s, a set of 25s, a set of tens and a set of fives, you can get away with quite a bit. For most of your other lifts, when you're doing sets of three, five, seven, ten, you're not going to need more weight than that.
2. A SQUAT RACK
You can get squat stands, which is obviously the cheaper method here, just single posts. It works. You can still squat. You can still bench press. You can still do all the stuff you would normally do. The biggest downside is you don't have any storage on it, and with just the two posts, it's not the most stable thing, so it would be a little wonky to really load up one side of it.
I do like something that's more of a power rack. When we say power rack, we mean two posts on each side, front and back, so that there's more stability to it. If you can make it more stable front to back, then you can do some of the other stuff.
There are also tons of options now for wall mounting these. They have arms that come off the top and bolt into the wall, and then you can bolt them into the floor. That's what we have at the gym and it works great. It can be hard to move — once you set it in place, it's set in place — but it would hold more weight than you're ever going to put on it. You can pull away from it, you can do pull-ups on it, I use the dip bar on it. It's really versatile.
If you can do the three by three tubing, having a little more rigidity is really helpful just from a stability standpoint. Three by three tubing with one inch holes for attachments is the most standard thing. It works really well, and you'll easily find attachments for it that fit. Once you get outside of that, it's kind of hit or miss, and you just have to pay attention to make sure you're getting the right stuff.
On pull-ups: you've got to be a little bit creative. There's not a set rule that says pull-ups only count if you have a pull-up bar mounted at a certain height. You can take the barbell on your power rack and put it about the height you'd use for a bench press, set your feet out in front of you, and do body weight rows to a barbell. I program those all the time. That is one of the most deceptive — you think this is going to be so easy, and then you do a set of 20 and everything is lit up.
If you have the budget, add some gymnastics rings. You can mount them on even a shorter rack and use those for things that simulate a pull-up or a body weight row. You can find gymnastics rings setups with ropes and handles on Amazon for 35, 40 bucks. They're portable. You could take them and throw them in a tree. Anything that you could hang something from, you can use gymnastics rings on.
Just the squat rack is about 450 or 500 new. Used, a power rack with the safeties runs a hundred to $215. Not crazy money to get something.
3. A GOOD WEIGHT BENCH
I think this is one of the things that people tend to skimp on. They go, it doesn't really matter, I just need something to lay on. You want to make sure that you have something solid.
It's not the end of the world if it doesn't incline — that's obviously a huge bonus if you want to be able to do incline bench or have more angles. But having something that's really stable is important, something that will hold plenty of weight and not be rickety. You've probably laid down on one where you can feel your shoulder blades dipping, one side or the other bends with you.
This is why having a big strong back is actually really important for your bench press: that's the foundation that you're pressing off of. Same thing with the bench. If you're laying on a bench and it's super rickety, you're just not going to be as solid.
A good bench does more than bench. If you're squatting a decent amount and maybe have knee issues, or your back bothers you a little and you don't like going to a full squat every time, doing box squats to your bench is a great way to solve all those problems and still be able to squat. People do bench dips, where you're literally pushing all your weight on one side of it. You can use them for box jumps. You can use them for weighted step-ups.
On safeties: I think it's important if you are alone and you're not an experienced lifter. It's definitely better to err on the side of caution there. If you have workout partners and people that can spot you, then it's not as big of a deal. But even the guy who's been doing this for 20 years — if he's pushing really hard and wanting to hit a new PR, you need something to catch it, because when you start getting to those end ranges, things happen. I've blacked out during a workout before and hit the ground. You don't want to do that with weight on your back.
4. DUMBBELLS
This one can be a money pit if you decide you're going to get every single dumbbell in five pound increments from 10 to a hundred. It's better to do this over time, buy a couple of sets at a time.
I would go in 10 pound increments. You don't have to have 25s. You don't have to have 45s. You can just go from 40 to 50. It might be kind of annoying to make 10 pound jumps, especially at those heavier weights, but it's not the end of the world.
There are some really good adjustable dumbbells out there now. The thing to consider is whether it's just for you, or whether you're going to be inviting people over to work out, or you and your spouse work out together every single day and are doing the same stuff. If you only have one set of adjustable dumbbells, only one person can use them at a time, and that can get annoying. So I like having the more common weights in a couple of sets. Having a couple sets of twenties is really useful if you're going to have more than one person working out in that gym, whereas having sixties may not be the most important thing in the world for you.
Having the right ones is more important than having all of them.
For the average guy, 15 to 35-ish is somewhere in there. You can use those for pretty much everything. I use 15 pound dumbbells for stuff all the time, especially during warmups, getting shoulders moving around. I love doing really high rep sets of lateral raises with 15 pound dumbbells. I know that doesn't sound like a whole lot if you're doing overhead presses, but if you just triple the amount of reps you're doing per set, it still works pretty darn well.
Most of your heavy stuff you're going to use a barbell and plates for, and the dumbbells are going to get saved for that more accessory type work. I'm not going to do really heavy dumbbell bench. It's not worth it. There's more risk to it, spotting it is more difficult, it's way harder to load up. I would rather be able to throw two 45s on each side of a barbell, lay down and pick it up off the rack. There's way less stress and annoyance, and it's safer.
5. RESISTANCE BANDS
The next one here might be kind of surprising, but I think resistance bands are extremely useful, and bang for your buck one of the best things on this list.
You can do almost any movement that you would normally do with a weight. I especially like them for shoulder stuff, rotator cuff work, face pulls — wrapping it around your power rack and then doing face pulls with them. I do lots of banded pull-aparts with the really light ones, just starting with your hands in front of you and then pulling the band apart. That stuff is hard to hit those angles with dumbbells.
You can also use them to add resistance. Say you're doing a bent over row and you only have up to 45 pound dumbbells and you want to add resistance. You can run that loop under your feet and then through your hands as you grab the weight, and it adds resistance to the movement you're already doing.
The other thing about bands is that the curve of resistance is increasing. When you pick up a dumbbell, it's 35 pounds whether you're at the bottom of the movement or at the top. With a band, the resistance at the bottom is much lighter than it is at the top. So in the squeezing portion of all of these movements — locking out a bench press, finishing a row — that's where things should be producing the most force, and you can match that with the band.
And they're cheap. Extremely cheap. You can buy a set for hardly like 20 bucks.
One pro tip for banded pull-ups. What people typically do is loop the band over the pull-up bar and then sort of step into it. You've seen those videos. Instead, if you're doing this in a squat rack, you're already going to pull the barbell out of the way, and the J hooks are still sitting there. Put the J hooks about where your feet should be, or just a little above, and loop the band between the two J hooks. It'll just go straight across. You don't have to try to step into it or step out of it every time and let it throw you on your head. You can just step onto the band and do your pull-ups. It works way better, and it's way safer.
6. KETTLEBELLS AND SANDBAGS
You wouldn't want to use a sandbag as your primary implement if you're doing general fitness stuff. It just doesn't work as well as a barbell and plates. However, I think they're really good for filling some of the holes, especially if you're trying to be in this more general preparedness category and you're not specializing in some lift.
There are not a ton of lifts with a barbell where you're having to squeeze something in front of you and hold it in a front rack position. There's not a lot of stuff where you're going to be able to swing something like you can swing a kettlebell, and that's a very particular kind of human movement that comes up a lot but is kind of hard to find stuff to train.
If I was just the average guy, I would start out with one of each. One sandbag, one kettlebell, at a moderate weight — whatever that means for you. It might be a 35 pound kettlebell or 53, somewhere in that range, and then for a sandbag somewhere between a hundred and 150 pounds.
Kettlebells are going to be priced about like dumbbells. But sandbags are cheap. A 150 pound sandbag is around $105. As far as loadable stuff that you can get pretty dang heavy for not very much money, sandbags are at the top of the list. A 250 is about $125, and then you go fill it with five bags of sand that are six bucks a piece. It's not expensive to have a really heavy implement that you can use for deadlifts and rows and sandbag cleans and heavy carries and all kinds of stuff.
Plus they're just cool. There's some sort of blood memory that gets awakened. You just feel like you're in Scotland picking up some really heavy rocks to prove that you're a man.
7. CONDITIONING EQUIPMENT
This one is really important, especially if you live in a colder climate.
There are some points in the winter, especially if you're working out early in the morning, where going outside and running is just going to be miserable — not because of the running, it's just miserably cold. You're going to have mornings where you need to do some conditioning, you need to do something long and slow, but going and running right now would just be completely miserable if it's snowing outside.
If you are building a home gym, this stuff has to be repeatable. Everyone can't be David Goggins. He's made a living out of being that guy. Most guys are still going to have to go clock in on a daily basis, and it's actually more important for them to get to work and make a paycheck and provide for their families. The reason that you would build a home gym is so that you can do this stuff on your own. It's more accessible and it's more repeatable. You're not going to skip it as much because it's just right there.
I think that the single most diabolical piece of equipment on planet earth is an air bike. The Rogue Echo bikes are even worse than the others. They have a bigger fan and it's belt driven, so there's no take-up. There's no momentum with that Rogue Echo bike. It is torturous. You can hurt yourself pretty quickly with one of those things. I put myself into 30 minutes of full blown shock at one point, almost threw up, had full body chills and was shaking uncontrollably from a few intervals with some buddies there. You can overextend yourself really easily, even if you're in good shape.
New, an air bike or rower is like a thousand bucks, 1200 bucks. But they're all over Facebook for 600, 700 bucks, and they're probably very lightly used. These are the new treadmills. These are the things where some guy's wife says, I really want a rower, I'll row all the time, and then it ends up being a catch-all for random coats around the house, and eventually someone says let's get rid of this thing.
The other thing is that if you're buying one second hand for 700 bucks, you can use it for four years, and if you decide it's not worth it and you'd rather get something else, you can post it again for 700 bucks. They really do hold their value well.
On treadmills, I would go as cheap as you can, unless you're somebody who's trying to run really fast marathons and you've got to do specific training. The treadmill that we have, I think we got for free — someone just wanted it out of their house and I went and picked it up. It's a tiny little thing, it's not a nice treadmill, but you can walk on it as long as you want and it works.
8. A WEIGHT VEST
This is one where you can get away with doing something interesting. The first one I ever bought — I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have body armor. And then I started looking and thought, well, these level three plates are not really more expensive than buying weight plates from someone like Rogue, except they can stop a rifle round.
So I bought a plate carrier and level three plates, and still have them, still use them. It's about a 20 pound setup. You get a 20 pound weight vest that also doubles as other gear that you might use at some point. Two birds, one stone. Use it for weighted pull-ups and dips and running or rucking or whatever you want to use it for.
A weight vest is extremely useful in a fitness context, even if you're just walking with it. It makes things a little bit more difficult. You're getting used to carrying some additional weight, and there are all kinds of benefits with rucking.
What people tend to do is start out and say, I need to put 50 pounds on my back and go hike up a mountain. And then you're hurt, because you have overuse injuries, or you twist an ankle and instead of it just twisting, you break it. I think starting with something like 20, 30 pounds and a plate carrier — that's still annoying to have on, but not nearly as detrimental as putting on a really heavy pack to start out with — and then just using it consistently, is a great way to add some additional fitness. Especially if you hate running and you just want to go walk.
9. A JUMP ROPE AND A HEAVY BAG
From here down is just kind of fun stuff, in my opinion.
Having a good jump rope, a good speed rope, and then a heavy bag is really useful. It's very underestimated how much you can exert yourself and be in a really high heart rate zone just from hitting a heavy bag, or doing intervals between the jump rope and hitting a heavy bag. We've done a few boxing workouts at the gym and had someone come up and run us through them. It's an hour and a half of basically just body weight cardio, and it's extremely demanding.
You're also now just a little bit more capable of throwing a good punch, and you know what it feels like to make contact with something with your knuckles and exert some force that way.
There's the idea of being in a fight, but a lot of guys have never been in one. They've never thrown a punch at someone. They've never been punched themselves. You might think, yeah, I would just hit that guy, but if you've never thrown a punch, you don't have any idea what that's like. It's almost like walking out onto a tee box and going, I'm just going to hit a drive. You watch the Masters and go, they make it look easy. And it ends up being a lot harder and you get winded real quick. Why do I suck so bad at this? Why can't I make solid contact? It's because you've never done it before, and there's some skill to it.
It's another one of those really inexpensive additions. A hundred pound heavy bag is around $185 on Amazon. It's almost as cheap as sandbags and it's going to last forever. The gloves are not that expensive. Wraps are not that expensive. And it doesn't take up that much space.
You can also hang one from a squat rack and just hit it from one angle. It's not as good as being able to work your way around the bag and hit from angles and move your feet, but it's better than nothing.
10. FARMER'S CARRY HANDLES
The last one is something that I picked up recently and have gotten way more use out of than I was expecting: farmer's carry handles.
I found these on Amazon. I think you can put 300 pounds a piece, so if you wanted to load up 600 pounds and pick it up off the ground with 300 in each hand, you could do that. And they're less than a hundred bucks — mine were around 50, 60 bucks.
If you already have plates, you can just load as much as you want on there and make it incremental, instead of going out to buy 200 pound kettlebells or 220 pound dumbbells. This makes it a little cheaper, they don't take up as much space, and they're really useful.
A lot of farmer's carry programming is based off your body weight. If you're 208 and you're going to round up to 210, you're trying to find 105 pound dumbbells to match that perfectly. If you have something like this, you can just use change plates and get right to that number.
Because these are handles and the weight sits lower, you can pick them up from closer to a hex bar deadlift height or even higher, instead of having to pick up a kettlebell or a dumbbell all the way from the ground. That part's useful, because they're just easier to pick up and set down. There's not as much effort there, and you're not going to do something dumb just trying to pick them up. It's going to be hard to carry no matter what.
START SMALL
That's the top 10. Those are the things that I would go out and grab, starting by priority, starting with number one and then working my way down.
But the principle is this: start small. You can get away with a lot. I remember I lived in employee housing in Colorado at a ski resort, and all I had was a tactical backpack full of books. I used it every day for everything that I did that wasn't pushups and air squats. I used it for curls. I would swing it like a kettlebell. You can just throw it on your back and go for a ruck.
You can get away with really, really simple stuff. The equipment is not the limiting factor. Most of the time, the limiting factor is your willingness to go out and put yourself in uncomfortable situations and be creative about it.
