Fitness enthusiasts often have an unconscious ritual before heading off to their exercise. It could be preparing their gear and equipment, it could be eating a certain type of food to energize themselves, or even a quick setup to turn their living room into their personal gym.
Regardless of your personal rituals, there’s a lot of ways to make your home a lot more conducive to your fitness aspirations. Today, we’re going to look at how you can make that happen and some tips on making your home an alternate gym for days you don’t want to go out.
Set Up a Mudroom
If your fitness activity of choice involves getting dirty, like dirt jumping or even snowboarding, then you need to have a mudroom. It’s essentially a space before your living area where you can take off your equipment and clean off your shoes. Ideally, your mudroom is placed behind your home so you won’t dirty your space while walking across the room with mud or snow on your feet. This way, prepping and cleaning up for your hobby is convenient (hopefully, encouraging you to do it more).
This isn’t exclusive to outdoor sports- any activity that requires you to get down and dirty benefits from having a mudroom. Skateboarding, swimming, even running all benefit from having a mudroom as you’ll have space to both prep and clean up.
Organize Your Fitness Cabinet
It’s hard to get motivated to do sports if your equipment is all over the place. It’s ideal for organizing your sports and hobby stuff in a way that makes sense to you. You can separate them depending on the season, type of activity, and who owns it. For example, have one side of a wall dedicated to space-eating equipment like boards and poles, and then subcategorize it: top shelf for skiing, mid-shelf for surfing, bottom shelf for your kayak.
On the other end of your wall, display ball sports stuff like football, basketball, volleyball, and baseball. If your fitness cabinet is in a mess right now, dedicate a weekend to organize it, and make it a habit to maintain the order. Just like a kitchen, what you want is to be able to reach for what sports equipment you need without scouring through the junk and other stuff.
Your Garage Can Double as a Fitness Space
Having a home gym is a privilege many aims to have, but you don’t have to tear a room down to build your own gym. Consider turning your garage into a fitness space. You don’t have to stop using it for your car. Instead, use storage cabinets for the garage to keep your space organized. You’ll find that with all the mess cleaned up, you actually have space to squeeze in a dumbbell rack or a bench somewhere there.
However, before you go about renovating, make sure you have a plan. Understanding how big or how small of a space you need is necessary, as the last thing you want is to make a guess and then find that the squat rack hits your car. A garage that functions both as a car parking and a home gym is definitely possible, but you need to be wise about it.
Display Your Equipment and Accomplishments
Nothing beats seeing how far you’ve gone in your fitness journey. You get a sense of how hard you’ve worked, and you’re reminded that you improved throughout the years. Consider displaying your equipment out in the open, especially ones that you’ve used but don’t use as often anymore.
This self-affirmation works to display your accomplishment while doubling as an easy-access area for your gear (especially if you put your current equipment in a cabinet underneath). It’s not about being arrogant; it’s about being happy and proud about how far you’ve gone.
Extra Tip: Keep Scribble Boards
Throughout the day, we often have ideas for self-challenge or just self-reminders that are usually left as a mental note. Then we forget about them. For someone living an active lifestyle, trying to remember that thing you wanted to do at the gym is something that’s all too familiar.
A simple solution to this is to keep scribble boards around. You don’t have to place whiteboards everywhere, just key locations where you can see them often. You can put reminders, like catching up on macros you didn’t get to eat that day or to remind yourself to try to hit that PR. This tip might sound too simple or basic, but it’s something that will prove useful once your fitness level goes up.
