Spend your hard-earned money on the exercise equipment you’ll use the most.
Regardless of who’s asking, that’s always my fundamental answer when I’m questioned about the best kind of exercise equipment to buy.
What about where you exercise?
For certain activities it’s obvious: It’s not easy to swim without a pool or have a group cycling class in your basement.
Many other workouts are possible at home, though. So it’s a bit surprising that we often don’t give as much attention to our exercise space as we do to the equipment.
Recently I saw two very different rooms in homes that demonstrate distinctive ways to create a supportive space for an exercise program.
In her new home at Echo Falls Country Club east of the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, Lynn Newcomb walled in one bay of a three-car garage to create a compact, functional, customized weight-training center that any bodybuilder could appreciate.
For good reason. Lynn, 45, is a former competitive bodybuilder who’s been lifting weights for 19 years–at her peak up to three hours a day, six days a week. In a former house she’d had a gym in a detached building. But as she scaled back and diversified her activities, she liked the idea of working out in the house so everyday diversions such as laundry, the telephone and a big organic garden would defuse her inclination to train intensively. So, as she says, “I wouldn’t obsess.”
When she and her husband Mark, owners of Looney Tunes Sports, a snow-, skate-, wake- and surfboard shop in Kirkland, Wash., bought their house, they planned the gym from the start, building the inner wall and arranging equipment on paper. Overhead fluorescent fixtures augment the natural light from the garage entrance and side and back windows. Waterproof carpet was installed with Velcro, so if they ever sell the house they can simply pull up the carpet and pull in a car.
Anchoring the room’s far and mirrored side walls are rows of free-weight equipment: custom-made hack slide/leg press, sissy squat and cable crossover stations; a Roman chair for back extensions and abs; an old-fashioned lat machine for pulldowns and pulley rows; two decline/flat/incline benches; leg extension and seated curl; and a self-spotting squat rack/bench press with flyes and attachments for bar pulldowns and rows. Some pieces, as well as racks of fixed dumbbells and barbells, were purchased from fitness clubs that were changing equipment or going out of business.
Large bars for squats lean into corners at the garage door. Smaller equipment and accessories hang from grooves in a slat-board wall panel at the far end. Heart-rate monitors dangle off a hook next to one mirror; a bin holds lifting gloves and belts; cupboards and shelves store exercise videos and nutritional supplements. A wall-mounted TV swivels and stereo speakers are indeed in stereo. A glass-panel door leads to the garage’s main bay — and a treadmill.
“I believe now less is better,” says Lynn, who spends 35 to 40 minutes on weights and crosstrains on the treadmill and, lately, also with kickboxing (an upstairs room in the house has her hand wraps, gloves and punching bag). She also has directed some of her intensity into outdoor sports, including hiking, mountain biking, and especially snowboarding — for which she takes winters off from her real-estate business.
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“This has turned out to be probably the best gym I’ve had,” she says. “There’s nothing I can’t do here that I could do in a gym.”
Equipment doesn’t have to be the focus for a useful exercise room. In her Woodinville, Wash., house, Mary Schneider knew she wanted a workout area that was both inviting and motivating. Seeing the trompe l’oeil work of Bothell artist Juli Lovejoy at the Street of Dreams spawned a vision: to make her basement space look like an old Italian villa.
A downstairs entry off the front door hints at what’s to come. Hand-rubbed walls with painted ivy dangling and winding around the edges give the feel of a courtyard perimeter. A closet door has been transformed into a wrought-iron garden gate.
Inside the exercise room, African-Multi Autumn slate sets a rustic atmosphere with tones of orange and gray and keeps the room pleasingly cool. Rust-mottled walls are “crumbling” in places, revealing “brick” behind — a pattern started when Schneider asked Lovejoy to help mask a rough spot from a patched hole.
Rustic iron furnishings — towel holder, magazine stand, phone stand, plant urns — complement the slate and hold together the incongruence of battered walls containing a HealthRider, Tunturi treadmill, mirrors, mats, dumbbells, stretch cords, piped-in stereo and a TV with exercise videos.