A gymnasium or gym is a building or room, or an athletic facility equipped for indoor sports and physical training, exercises and physical education. It originated from ancient Greece where it was referred to as a locality for both intellectual and physical education of young men. If it is a home gym, therefore, it is a room or facility in your own premises with equipment for sports, physical training or exercises, or a place where you can regularly exercise or train physically. It may also refer to a compact unit of equipment with which you can do many exercises, or a multi-gym of various work stations that fit into your spare room, home basement or garage, where you can do your weight training as often as you want.
Setting up a home gym is not as hard as they think, because the set ups depend on the goals of the exercisers and their levels, such as the beginners, intermediate trainers, and advanced trainers. For beginners whose goals are based on general fitness, muscle tone or flexibility, a minimum set up is best to include aerobic exercise equipment such as treadmills, stationary bikes and rowers, and combinations of basic extensible equipment like dumbbells, bench, balls, steps, mats, bands and ab workers. For intermediate trainers, the home gym should consider a complete set of dumbbells and barbells with weight plates, a barbell rack and an exercise bench, and free weights combined with cheaper multi-gyms. For advanced trainers, or serious weight trainers, the home equipment often supplement but not duplicate those in regular gym sessions but may include free-weight bench set ups or multi-gyms.
The other types of home gym set ups include the following: (a) Multi-gyms based on steel or composite cords and bands that create the resistance, (b) Total gym concept that uses an inclined bench, adjustable height, and a sliding seat platform, (c) Multi-gyms based on stacked weights that uses a pulley and cable mechanism with carefully arranged weights, and (d) Multi-combinations of Smith machines that constrain the bar in one vertical plane.
As part of the home gym set ups, you can decorate them or choose the colors that will motivate you to perform more. You can paint a mural or artwork on one or two walls in it, with colors that can make the gym room feel cooler and give you something to help you recover when you are seating. If the gym is going to be used for running, weight lifting or stair stepping, you can paint it or some areas with warm colors such as peach, orange, banana yellow or even bold red are aggressive-looking and can invoke from you some feelings of determination and persistence. But if your gym is mainly for yoga or Pilates exercises, you may want to use cool colors like green, purple and blue for a calming and soothing effect.
With a well set up home gym, some good exercises can be performed on a regular or daily basis, such as body building, heart rate training, general fitness, low-impact exercises, sports training, performance training, weight loss workout, strength training and stretching.