If you live in a small- to medium-sized home and want to exercise at home, your options used to be somewhat limited, or at least compromised. Until PIVOT, that is, but we’ll get to our solution later, after we’ve discussed the common challenges.

It’s definitely not just small homes, though. Most large homes don’t have enough rooms to have a dedicated gym. If you live in a five bedroom home, for example, you might have three children, each with their own bedroom. That leaves one guest bedroom and, whilst a guest bedroom is a luxury, it’s a luxury most can’t do without because we all love to be able to have friends and family stay with us. Unless you can dedicate an entire room to a gym, the size of the home is somewhat irrelevant.

The biggest challenges to working out at home:

1. No usable space to exercise
2. Not enough space for the basic equipment
3. Risk of damaging flooring, or carpet that’s unsuitable for exercise
4. Awkwardness of working out in front of your partner/family
5. Annoying your partner/family while exercising between them and the TV
6. Fear of injury though equipment failing (e.g. doorway pull-up bars)
7. Time and effort required to setup for a session
8. The same effort to put the equipment away again after your session

Most of these issues can be boiled down to one issue: not having a suitable space to exercise where all of your equipment is easily accessible. So how can we deal with it? We can split the solutions into two categories:

1. Buy or build more space

2. Find a way to optimise your existing space

Solution #1: Buy or build more space

Clearly this is an incredibly expensive solution. 

Moving home into one which has an additional room you can dedicate to exercise is not something many people can manage – that space doesn’t come for free.

Similarly, extending your home is a huge, costly and time-consuming undertaking and one that isn’t guaranteed to have a return on the investment. You’ll add value, but perhaps not enough to cover the costs of the building work.

Even if you are intent on adding another room, why not create an extra bedroom AND a gym? Adding a bedroom to your home can hugely increase its value, so why not list your home with bedrooms +1 and a gym? The average price of property in the UK per bedroom is estimated at over GBP £42,000 (thanks to Google's Gemini for that stat).

 

Solution #2: Find a way to optimise your existing space

Before we begin, please accept that filling your home with highly-specialised pieces of equipment is a huge no-no. Don’t fall into that trap, you don’t need a hack-squat machine and you’ll regret it. The goal should be to maintain a living space which is completely free from bulky, eyesore fitness equipment. It shouldn’t look like a gym – it’s your home. 

If we stick to strength training, the only reasonable option is adding a folding power rack to a wall in your home. A rack is the fundamental piece of equipment you need to enable virtually unlimited different exercises. There simply is no substitute when it comes to strength training and it couldn’t be more different from that specialised hack-squat machine in terms of utility and value.

Add a generic, folding power rack to a wall in your home

A generic folding rack will always be visible on your wall, even when folded closed. While you could build a cabinet to conceal it, this may not be ideal as it would create a random cabinet on your wall. Additionally, suitable flooring in the space would be difficult to manage, as it would either need to be permanently in place or rolled up and stored elsewhere, which would discourage exercise. You’ll also need space to use it, though, so will you need to move furniture?

You could install the folding rack on one wall in a bedroom and a wall-bed on another to create the necessary space. However, the rack would still be visible, or at least that random cabinet, when you have guests. Additionally, when the room is in "gym mode", a bed would be on the other wall.

It’s important to note that the cheapest wall-beds on the market are often basic and uncomfortable, and yet not significantly cheaper than our PIVOT Bed. By the time you increase quality to the mid level, still well below the quality of our product, you'll find the prices are similar to our Strength Package, which includes our highly engineered power rack.

Before you think about a sofa bed, I’d urge you to consider if anyone will actually use the sofa. Why would someone be sitting in your gym on a sofa? And will anyone want to sleep on a lumpy sofa bed? They’re highly compromised beds, so the benefit needs to be very apparent for a sofa bed to be a good solution. For a sofa bed to make sense, the room must already be used with a sofa – there must be value to be had from the sofa beyond being used as an occasional bed.

The PIVOT Solution

PIVOT is an innovative, impressive and durable solution for strength training at home. All of your exercise equipment is perfectly concealed under your bed, transforming your bedroom into a private gym whenever you desire. With PIVOT, you can seamlessly switch between a regular bedroom and a personal exercise zone, all without taking up any extra space. PIVOT provides all the essentials for strength training, allowing you to do serious lifting at any time, day or night. With PIVOT you are the limit, not your equipment.

You may want a room which is very proudly and overtly a gym, that you can turn into a bedroom when required. Or you may want a guest bedroom that can be converted into a gym as required. These are both easy with PIVOT, with the only differences being how you decorate your room and whether you have other exercise equipment in the room which will always be outside the space occupied by the bed.

PIVOT is designed to be compatible with future accessories, allowing you to expand your home gym over time. With the addition of accessories, your PIVOT home gym can support a wide range of exercise routines, and its capabilities will grow with your own.

For example, you could use it for barbell squats and lunges on Monday, a TRX routine on Tuesday, rowing on Wednesday, bench presses on Thursday, and pulling exercises on Friday. At the weekend, hang a punchbag from the pull-up bar and get rid of the week’s frustrations and aggression! In the future, maybe some cable-based exercises on any day of the week. One of the least-considered benefits of PIVOT, though, is having such a strong structure which you can attach a myriad of resistance bands to – no more fear of doorknobs catapulting towards you!

Having a gym so readily available in your home will revolutionise your fitness. You'll find yourself incorporating exercise into your daily activities – pull-up sets while cooking, squats before bed, bench presses before work, or lunchtime TRX routines. It’s so easy to fit in a short session that you’ll find yourself rarely missing a day. PIVOT isn't just another fitness product to be tossed in the cupboard after a couple of months; it's the product that will enable you to use your existing equipment consistently, all in your private workout sanctuary. There are no subscriptions to pay and PIVOT is a product which will be passed down through generations of strong, healthy families.

Compared to a home extension, or buying a bigger home, PIVOT is a small investment. If sold with the property in the future, it will easily pay for itself by adding an extra bedroom and/or a gym. 

 

Other Considerations

Will my home smell?

This is a misconception we hear far too often, and it’s simply not a well-considered response. Commercial gyms smell because there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of random people exercising together while often not taking care of their personal hygiene and not wiping down machines or floors after they sweat on them. It's no wonder some commercial gyms stink. The only person who’s going to make your home stink is you, and if you’re worried about this then we suggest you help your family, friends and work colleagues out by washing a little more regularly!

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide exercise in their homes and smell is not an issue for them. The smallest amount of personal hygiene and ventilation is all that you need to prevent smells building up.

Flooring concerns

Occasionally we hear from people who say “I couldn’t put PIVOT in my home because all my bedrooms are upstairs – it would come through the floor!”. Even our fullest package, the Full Monty, weighs the equivalent of four average adults. If you’re concerned about your floor dealing with four, eight or even twelve or sixteen people, you should have your flooring inspected by an expert immediately as this is not healthy. Floors are designed specifically to handle heavy loads, way in excess of exercising in your home with PIVOT.

“I can’t perform strength training on a carpeted floor!” is something we hear occasionally. Carpet is normally too soft and can be dangerous when working with heavy weights – you won’t have stable footing and you can catch your shoes on the carpet when trying to move. However, a simple layer of plywood on top, and then covered with rubber matting, is an easy and very effective solution. As the founders of PIVOT, we’ve always had a carpeted room where we use PIVOT and the plywood layer works wonders.