All the equipment you need to setup an affordable garage gym

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Alex Kalogiannis/Business Insider

• Building a home gym is often intimidating, mainly due to the high costs associated with purchasing gear like dumbbells, squat racks, and cardio machines.
• The anxiety of a nightmare price tag often comes with the idea that you'd have to replicate all your usual gym equipment at home — but that's not always the case.

We've all had to make adjustments in our lives to keep ourselves and the people around us safe, and one of the biggest compromises has been to our fitness routines. While there are loads of no-equipment ways of staying fit, they're not ideal solutions for everyone.

Be it different goals or personal preference, people who are used to weight training at their local gym find themselves at a loss without the same myriad stations, machines, and racks available to them. There are several great bodyweight exercises that can be done at home, but they're often a poor substitute for those that consider the gym a second residence.

I am one of those people and if you're like me, I have some good news: If you've got the space for it, building a versatile weightlifting station in your home is both easy and affordable — so long as you know what equipment to focus on.

Below is a guide to building a back-to-basics weight training setup that allows you to target all the muscle groups you're used to working on, all while keeping equipment costs at a bare minimum. It's intended to help home-bound bodybuilders construct a home gym setup that offers a full-body workout without unbearable equipment costs.

Some time ago, I decided to put the tiny, shed-like garage in the back of my house to good use and constructed a mini gym. My goal was to build something capable of supplementing the training I did elsewhere and that would suffice when getting to the gym was difficult, or for when I wanted to train in private.

Along with not having much space to work with, I wasn't ready to drop loads of cash I didn't have on a pricey, sophisticated power rack with enough moving parts to make a mechanical engineer go cross-eyed. By sticking to the fundamentals, I was able to put together an inexpensive setup that gives me a diverse number of options when it comes to different exercises.

Now, whatever I used to do at the gym, I can now do at home and even when I can't, it's still designed to provide a worthy alternative. It's a setup that's good for beginners and intermediate lifters, and can even help advanced trainers maintain — all while keeping the price tag as low as possible.