You can jog on the treadmill for 30 minutes and that way you don’t have to be out in the blistering sun.

I have spent years using public gyms and now have a home gym. Home gyms are better in every way if you have the motivation to push yourself. At a public gym its easier to find that motivation because everyone around you is focused on the same task.

You have all the things you need in one space and you can’t leave easily and go home.

I’ve seen plenty of jeans at my rural gym. Just don’t wear them on leg day.

Weightlifting can require insanely heavy weights, they take up a lot of storage and cost a lot of money. Gyms also offer the benefits of having specialised machines that focus on specific muscles. I used to go to a commercial gym then built a home gym, I’ve spent over £2,000 and I’m still not close to finished.

Sure you can do bodyweight stuff, or limited exercises with adjustable dumbbells and resistance bands, but you won’t get nearly as strong as a good gym, training plan, and diet.

If you’re motivated at home you can run on street/walk/trails, you can do core body workouts, you can get some cheap equipment that will get you most of the benefits of a gym at much less cost. You can always find cheap used equipment for sale from people cleaning out their houses

Going to the gym gets you better equipment, more equipment, and helps establish a routine to keep you going when motivation isn’t enough.

If you get home equipment similar to what you’d use at a gym, the payback time is much longer, it may be difficult to move or store, and you can’t get rid of it when it’s time.

At home I have a good set of dumbbells, an Exercycle, and exercise mats I never use. However I’ve never really been able to establish a gym routine so that’s a waste of money. My brother has a good half ton of exercise equipment he’d give me free of charge but I have no way to transport it and it would cost too much.

I actually am considering getting more home exercise equipment. At least my teens would use it and maybe I would too. It’s expensive but it’s not continuous cost like a gym would be.

Something tells me you don’t own a treadmill at home, so Im not following how you’d do that at home.

Yo could do that at home. I do.

For many people a gym is a matter of discipline. To force them go and do it.

But for me it works the opposite way, the extra time going to another place dissuades me from going at all. So workout at home works better for me.

I personally really like lifting weights and running an the gym. You can do it all at home but having a barbell, squat rack, bench press, weight plates, dumbbells, treadmill, pull down machine, rowing machine and so on at home would take a lot of space at home.

Having it at a different place also helps a lot with motivation IMO, there’s a strong “at the gym I work out” effect instead of being at home where I can take a break and “continue later”.

you pick up heavy things and then you put them down so you can pick up heavier things later.

A lot of exercises you can do in the gym you can also do at home with a pair of dumbbells or even just your body weight.

The benefits of the gym for me is having an air conditioned environment, with machines that can guide my exercises and help enforce proper form, a good space to meetup with personal trainers, opportunities for group classes, and somewhere where there’s people around in case anything goes wrong in one of my exercises.

Not all gyms are the same too. There are climbing gyms, kickboxing gyms, mma gyms, gyms with pools, gyms with basketball and volleyball courts, gyms with tennis, squash, and badminton courts, etc. A lot of those you can’t do from home.

Run on a treadmill and lift some weights?

Yes, that is exactly what you do at a gym.

I feel like I could do all of that at home. Gym memberships are insanely expensive.

Absolutely correct.

Are home workouts actually effective?

Yes.

Does one even enjoy gym time?

Yes.

According to Atomic Habit, we tend to form a habit when there is a reward.

First you you can’t wear jeans to work out. If people have to argue, then they have never worked out before.

Then, reward. When you workout by yourself, then is almost no reward, no motivation. In the gym, you can see how for some people are and that motivate you.

With no goal and no motivation, hiding in the basement/garage lifting some weights and wearing jeans, I doubt that person will work out much.

I went to the gym for a couple years and managed to increase my PR’s consistently and doubled my bodyweight at the same bf %.

Then i decided i was disciplined enough for a homegym as the gym attracted a crowd of generic fools instead of the old club of bodybuilders and powerlifters…i wasn’t disciplined enough.

I really need that: “since i’m already here, might as well go balls to the wall”.

My old gym cost about €13, now generic shit gyms cost more than twice as much. I won’t be going back at those prices because food and rent also tripled, i don’t grow money from a tree or something.

You can do this at home. Everything here is under 2000 dollars spent total because we bought from bankrupted gyms liquidating during covid and a couple home gym people after covid who preferred going to a gym and were offloading equipment for next to nothing.

Outdated pic but same rack today:

You need the space to begin with, but besides the rowers (can be stored vertically) and rack, the space waste isn’t that huge. George Hackenschmidt’s abridged/edited down by me workout routine is pinned to my back wall there. An old world strong man from an era before steroids existed. He didn’t do focused muscle training, instead all-round balanced and, this is key, a very minimal amount of equipment is needed. You can look up how he looked, I think it’s aesthetically pleasing.

But yeah that’s really it. Lift heavy things, row, and I run or bike. I do not enjoy it. I don’t pretend to. I’m not doing this for enjoyment, I’m a big nerd who never enjoyed physical activity ever. It’s simply to stay in good shape because that was noticeably slipping in my 30’s.

So I’m doing this entirely out of self preservation. Importantly, I also do Yoga. Flexibility is important too.

Gyms are indeed predatory with their obnoxious membership programs and cancelation antics. I’m lucky to have some space in my ugly basement.

Its mostly for the social aspect, people will say its not, but with how expensive they are, especially in Aus where i live, itd be cheaper to buy your own equipment than pay for a couple years membership.