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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

During the pandemic, I built a home gym in a spare space at home for a couple hundred dollars. I'm never paying for a gym again.

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Unfortunately in most of the Bay Area, even just the floor space to have anything remotely usable as a home gym would cost many hundreds of dollars per month.

I think the point here was "see if you might already have enough space to spare", not "get extra space for the sake of a home gym".

And the next commenter's point is that space is so expensive in SF, that no one just has an extra room on hand that they don't already use.

The Bay Area is way bigger than SF, and it said "space", not "dedicated room". Obviously not everybody will have any room whatsoever but some folks in the Bay will be able to spare a bit.

This takes creativity. Gymnast rings cost ~$10 which you can hang from a tree branch. Someone gave me a barbell, but I had no weights. So I screwed rings into some heavy logs and am now deadlifting ~400lbs. I get to do all this in my bikini in the sun while maintaining my garden between sets. I look like a fitness model and spent about $30 on my yard gym.

If you can afford to live there you can surely afford weights, but the space for storing logs (of all things) just isn't practical.

You can go pretty far with:

1. dumbbells

2. screw a pullup bar into the ceiling joists

3. burpees

during the pandemic a couple hundred dollars wouldn't even buy me enough weights for a bench press, let alone the rest of the necessary equipment.

I was going to say there is always used gym equipment available (used a handful of times), but then I never tested the market in the middle of the pandemic.

during the pandemic (and somewhat even now) the price of used equipment was extremely elevated. Even basic weights were expensive. Used plates in my area went from 50c/lb to $1/lb+. The prices of equipment similarly jumped. It was a bad time to build a gym, financially, but necessary.

Cost me $1000 for a rack and weights, but I’ve already saved it back in gym fees.

Same.

Also better music, relaxed dress code and light chores in between sets.

And the women are friendly.

> I'm never paying for a gym again.

I believe for most gymgoers, a primary purpose of going to the gym is to hang out with your gym friends.

If you just want exercise, you can do body weight exercises for free; a couple hundred dollars is overkill.

No, not the case.

I've been going to gyms for years. Have never spoken more than a single sentence to anyone there and 99.5% of the other people I see there are also training and not socializing. In fact I can specific remember one pair who were socializing in the gym once; I saw them about 10 months ago, it was very irritating and so unusual that I still remember it now.

Bodyweight workouts can't come close to the effectiveness or satisfaction of a proper set of weights.

This doesn't ring true to me; most people at the gyms I've been to don't talk to anyone. I think most people actually want the equipment, mainly the squat rack, bench press, and treadmills. I personally love bodyweight exercises but I still feel I'm missing something without heavyweight squats and deadlifts.

> treadmills

Just go out for a jog. Fresh air is far better for you anyway than stinky gym air.

Tell that to my allergies.

Being in or outdoors made no difference to my hay fever. It was miserable for 6 weeks of the year, the rest was fine.

I use the past tense, because getting older means my allergy has abated. It only gets bad if I mow the lawn, so now I wear a mask doing that.

I have broad spectrum allergies to lots of stuff (pollen, etc). I live in the southeast with pine trees everywhere so it isn’t really seasonal.

A mask does help, which I’ve been wearing for… obvious reasons but exercising in a N95 is rough.

Ugh. That sounds terrible.

I'm sure you've already considered it, but move north were there are seasons and no pine trees :-/ The rain in Seattle tends to wash the pollen out of the air, too.

For me its grass. Even walking in grass with shorts on is a no-no.

Oh yeah, grass’s too…

Luckily none of them are that severe, but it’s just so many things… I got allergy shots for a few years in my teens which helped a lot, so it isn’t normally that much of a problem, but I’m also a bit asthmatic so exercise outdoors is a big trigger.

Sorry about that. I'd never jog if I had to do it indoors on a treadmill. Tried it a couple times, blech. Outdoors is so much better. Like I often stop to chat with a neighbor. Just today I found out one on my route had a hidden 57 Chevy, so I had to give him a ride in my Dodge :-)

(The secrets people hide in their garages!)

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