The best home gyms to help you get swole

If you’re looking for a high-quality home gym that will give you a full-body workout without taking up a ton of valuable space and costing you a ton of valuable cash, the Marcy 150-lb Multifunctional Home Gym Station is our top pick overall. It’s made with heavy-duty steel that can withstand some serious use and abuse. The 150-pound weight stack can be customized to suit most weightlifting needs and abilities. The stack uses a safety locking pin to hold the desired weight in place and protect your fingers and toes from being pinched.

This compact piece allows you to perform vertical butterflies, chest presses, preacher curls, isolated biceps curls, leg extensions, hamstring curls, lat pulldowns, and more, giving you a fairly comprehensive workout. With a maximum weight capacity of 300 pounds, this unit is suitable for use by most adults. This unit probably isn’t the best if you’re capable of tossing around some heavy weight. It also loses some love for providing a lackluster customer service experience. It does come backed by a two-year warranty, though.

The Weider Gym is a great choice if you’re really looking for a budget-friendly option that doesn’t take up a ton of space and still allows you to perform a variety of exercises. With its 112-pound vinyl weight stack, it’s an especially good option for beginners to familiarize themselves with proper form and technique. With the integrated pulley system, it offers 280 pounds of total resistance.

This unit features five different exercise stations, including butterfly press, chest press, lat pulldown, biceps cable curls, and leg extensions. It also includes an exercise chart. It also has a maximum user weight capacity of 300 pounds, making it surprisingly sturdy, considering its compact size. One drawback is that this home gym has a reputation for being difficult to put together. It’s also not a great option for taller users, due to its compact size.

If you’re in the market for a commercial-grade home gym that you won’t be able to max out anytime soon, check out the ErKang Olympic Power Cage. Constructed from 11-gauge commercial steel tubes, this home gym is a beast that offers you a wide variety of workout options, just like you would see at any public gym. It includes a T-bar, cable handles, lat bar, tricep rope, dip bar attachment, barbell clamps, and J-hooks, and more with your purchase. With two towers instead of one, you can do plenty of bilateral exercises, like cable crossovers.

As with other commercial grade gyms, this one offers up to 500 pounds of customizable weight. Each tower offers 18 different height choices. It also comes with a workout guide board. The one drawback is that this piece of equipment is very large, heavy, and bulky. It will take up a significant amount of space. It doesn’t come with any free weights, so you’ll need to purchase those separately, adding to the already high price of this unit. You might also want to add in a flat weight bench.

The Body-Solid Bi-Angular Home Gym is the ideal option if you’re looking for a more serious set-up, yet need something that won’t take up a lot of space in your home. Modeled after some of the more budget-friendly options, this gym is a considerable upgrade. It offers six different exercise stations, including ab crunch, pec station, bi-angular arm press, seated row, and leg extension, so you get an almost full-body workout with this compact unit. Constructed using top-quality steel and military-spec steel aircraft cables, this gym comes backed by an incredible lifetime warranty on not just the frame, but the parts as well.

Accessories include a revolving straight bar, lat bar, ab/triceps strap, ankle strap, full-size exercise chart, total body workout DVD, and a water bottle and towel holder. The gym comes standard with a respectable 210-pound weight stack with an optional upgrade to 260 pounds. Swivel arms give you the option of either unilateral or bilateral movements. Heads up though, this unit is a “splurge” item for a reason. The price tag is a sphincter tightener, for sure.

When it comes to innovative designs in home gyms, Bowflex has been leading the pack for some time, and the Bowflex Blaze Home Gym is another great example of why. The cleverly designed power rods actually give you up to 210 pounds of resistance and you have the option to upgrade that to either 310 or 410 pounds. The layout of this gym also allows you to perform more than 65 different full body exercises that hit all your major muscle groups.

This model also offers a sliding seat rail that lets you perform leg presses and aerobic rowing for added versatility. A lat bar, squat bar, and multiple cable/pulley positions make this one of the most comprehensive compact home gyms available. We also really like the reasonable price tag. Be prepared though, since assembly of this unit is notoriously time-consuming.

If usable space is a big concern for you, but you still want a free-standing home gym that lets you get a good workout, the Gold’s Gym XRS 50 Home Gym System deserves your consideration. This compact unit measures only ‎48 x 18.9 x 16 inches. It comes equipped with a 112-pound vinyl weight stack, which gives you a respectable 280 pounds of resistance. On this model, you can perform chest presses, pec flies, lat pulldowns, triceps pushdowns, biceps curls, leg extensions, and more. It offers a maximum user weight of 300 pounds, so it’s easily suitable for most adults.

The gym also comes with a comprehensive exercise chart that was designed by a certified personal trainer. Being compact, however, this unit isn’t the greatest option for taller users or users who can easily max out the weight stack, as there’s not an available upgrade. The good news is that this gym is very affordable. The bad news is that the 90-day warranty is barely enough time to really put this unit to the test.

If portability is the name of the game for you when shopping for a home gym, you’ll like the Moulyan Portable Home Gym. It’s great for people who travel a lot or folks who like to frequently switch up their workout locations. It’s also ideal for tiny home living and major space restrictions, where a more permanent set-up just isn’t feasible. This package comes with a stable foot base, a resistance bar, four resistance bands, two ankle straps, two handles, carabiners, and a training manual.

You can turn anywhere into a viable “gym” that will give you a complete workout. At less than $100, this is a highly budget-friendly, extremely compact choice that can meet the fitness needs of almost any user. The equipment itself is constructed from strong, yet lightweight aluminum alloy bars and the bases are ultra durable ABS plastic that won’t chip, snap, or buckle. The max weight capacity for the base is 242 pounds. Tension on the resistance bands is adjustable between 30 and 120 pounds, making this a good beginner choice. More advanced athletes may not find this challenging enough, though. To make this an even more comprehensive choice, you might want to consider throwing in a set of adjustable dumbbells that you can store under your bed or dresser.

For a truly challenging, full-body workout, it’s tough to beat the Marcy Smith Machine Cage System Home Gym Multifunction Rack. This home gym is really more of a commercial-grade gym than most on the list. It features a triceps rope, dual adjustable pulleys, a multi-grip pull-up bar, padded butterfly press, preacher curl bar, an adjustable bench, and much more. It’s everything you would expect to get at a professional gym. The maximum lifting capacity of this unit is up to 600 pounds, depending on the exercise. That makes it one of the most heavy-duty home gyms on the list.

Be sure to note that this unit doesn’t include an Olympic weight bar, but you can easily add it for an extra fee. Check out our top barbell choices here. This gym comes backed by a solid two-year warranty. There are a few drawbacks: For one, this gym is pretty large and requires a large amount of clearance around it. In fact, it’s the largest choice on the list. Also, this gym requires some major assembly. Because it’s so large, this gym also weighs a significant amount, making it unsuitable for a lot of home spaces. As you would also likely expect, this gym costs a significant amount and is a sizable investment.

Suspension trainers have been around for decades, but the TRX Tactical Gym Suspension Trainer takes it to the next level. The TRX system is one of the most advanced suspension trainers on the market. This kit includes a door anchor, a suspension anchor, the TRX Xtender, a carrying bag, and a 30-day free trial access to the TRX Training Club app. The app gives you access to more than 500 on-demand workouts, daily live classes, and new workouts added weekly.

This particular TRX model was specifically designed with the military in mind and features larger foot cradles to accommodate boots. It also has convex, easy-to-clean, rubber handles, and a super light travel weight of only 2.2 pounds, making it ideal for a go-bag or even boot camp. Made with heavy-duty ripstop nylon, this trainer is mold- and mildew-resistant. This workout is completely customizable simply by changing the angle of your body or the length of the straps to make exercises easier or harder. It also comes backed by an industry-leading six-year warranty.