best home gym for best price?

after a few years in a gym, and then a few years out of the gym , i'd like to get back to working out and am looking for something i can keep in the garage and hit in the afternoons. i don't really want to break the bank with something too expensive, but i also don't want a POS plain jane bench and a couple of dumb bells. i know that it's hard to get the experience of the gym in your garage, but i'd like the best piece of equipment i can buy for a realistic price. i looked at sears today and saw a couple that i liked. a weider pro 6900, which has some basic stuff for $299, and then there was the weider pro 8900, which has a few more options for $399. i'm asking for suggestions because all these deals are going on this week and i can get most of them for a couple hundred bucks off. i also saw a really basic bowflex there. it wasn't the ones you see on tv, but it had the things for most of the workouts i want to do. it was only $399, but the thing is that it only had 210lbs of resistance; which is really like 100lbs of free weights. that won't really cut it, because i'm aiming to get my upper body size back up. i guess what i'm looking for is just something that i can do my bench, military/incline, biceps, triceps, back, etc. i'm not too worried about my legs or their size because i will be running. so basically i'm leaning towards an upper body workout, i love free weights, but i would have to literally have a full home gym to do everything i wanted. so probably a resistance or pulley system type setup. like i mentioned about the 210lbs only really being about 100lbs, is that the same with the weight stacks on the pulleys? i never really knew because in my gym the stacks were just labeled "1-20," no actual weight labeled.

sorry for the long post, but if anyone has any of the setups i mentioned, i'd like your feedback, and any suggestions for a mini-home gym would be greatly appreciated.

 

anybody?

 

p90x

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8xqgmnNnI?fs=1

 

i should have saw this coming

 

Check into a book called Convict Conditioning. It is all about bodyweight excercises, with some of the goals being one arm pushups, single leg body weight squats, handstand pushups, one arm pull ups. Check it out http://www.dragondoor.com/b41.html?gclid=CNKr5rvEuqUCFdLLKgodRBAkXA

I have been on it for about 2 months now and have seen great results. The pros are that it requires no equipment so you can workout anywhere anytime, the book is only like $40 I think. After 15 years of trying to lift weights I realized that my goal wasn't to be this huge muscle bound beast, I wanted to be more lean and convict conditioning is doing that for me.

 

That commercial was too funny.

 

X2

 

Well this weekend I pulled the trigger, I got a Gold's Gym Platinum Smith Rack and bench. This thing is great! It was supposed to be $1599, but we got it for $750 on a sale. My entire family has been talking about getting in shape for a while, but nobody has done anything. I've been aggravating my parents about getting some type of equipment for a while, so I talked my mom into paying half, if I pay half also. I played the card that it would be great for the whole family, even though I knew they would never use it. She just agreed because she said she wanted my dad to work off his gut. So I paid my half, and the other half was part of my dad's Christmas.

This is great and I am glad I got it instead of true free weights and over a cheapo cable system. It is somewhat both mixed together. You have the free weights, but with the advantage of the smith machine's guide bars and bumpers = you can work out without a spotter and not have to worry about hurting yourself. You can do bench, incline, decline, military, squats, leg extensions, leg curls, curls on the preacher's seat, butterflies, etc. The pulley system allows a ton more exercises: isolation curls, tricep extensions, lat pull downs, seated rows, behind the neck press, etc, etc. This thing has pretty much everything the gym I went to had. Within a year, if my dad works out on this thing with me, it will pay for itself in gym membership. I can't thing of many, if any, things that it cannot do. I can do pretty much everything I could in the gym in a round about way. Maybe there are a few things I cannot do, but nothing more than a few machines that I never used at the gym.

I used to avidly work out at the gym 3-5 times a week. Me and my workout partner would work our asses off until we could barely get in the truck afterwards. I was a lean 225lbs. Now, about 1 1/2 years later, after not touching a weight in that long, I am a measly 175lbs. I didn't have the money to pay almost $400 for a year membership, so years of hard work in the weight room withered away. Now that I had some money and great parents, I have my own awesome gym in the garage and plan to put on about 25lbs in the next few months.

I am very pleased that I purchased this home gym and believe that it was worth every penny. The only disadvantage was having to purchase weights. I figured that at $791 after tax, you could have a few weights, but oh well. I highly recommend this to everyone.

 

yes, we have a dirty garage, like everyone. and i only picked up a few weights that night, i will get more later. so no ragging on me for only having like 300lbs total weight.

 

wtf! that thing is awesome. I cant believe you got that for less than half the price. I would love to have one of those in our garage

 

check out your local sports authority if you have one. almost all their lift/exercise equipment was like at least 25% off. most other places had theirs marked down pretty good too. i think it's because most companies are about to come out with a new model for next year.

 

An olympic bench with a lat pulldown and a set of powerblocks would have taken up way less room. Granted you would be around 1200 for that.

 

p90x is good if you just wanna shred, but not if your tryin to get big.

 

I know, but I am not training for that. I'm just getting back in shape and gaining back some mass that I lost. The space it takes up is not an issue, the garage is basically where all my family's junk goes anyways.

 

yeah, that's why i didn't want that. even though i've went from a lean 225 to 175, i'm still pretty lean. so i have no worries about getting cut, just getting gains.

 

x2 on the powerblocks. good quality stuff. I use them with p90x

 

If you really want to loose weight. Lifting weights isn't going to do anything for you to loose fat. You'll gain a little more muscle mass, but not loose any significant weight. Here is how it's broken down. muscles don't burn fat, so just weight lifting isn't going to burn fat. Everyone's body for the first 20 minutes or so uses sugar(glucose) to fuel whatever activity your doing, then after that your body kicks in to using your fat reserves. So on a minimum you have to workout for about 40-45 minutes, that's 3-4 times a week. The best way to accomplish an efficient workout is merely by walking/jogging combination workout. Let me explain. The most efficient fat burning working out is one that makes you reach your target heart rate of burning fat. That formula is as follows: 220-ur age=?, then multiply by 65%. the result number is your target fat burning zone. There are more complicated formulas, but this one works pretty good and gets real close to what you need it to be at. By reaching your target heart rate faster you'll spend more time in the fat burning zone, keep in mind you still need to work out on minimum 40-45 minutes, to at least use up the sugar in the blood to fuel the body, then the next 20 minutes is using fat reserves. I usually spend about 20 minutes after my walk/jog lifting weights concentrating on key areas: abs, biceps, triceps, quads and every so often mix others in. I also mountain bike once a weekd for about 4 hours or so. Also, exercise without a proper food diet is like pissing in the wind. The average body on a daily basis should only consume about 1700-2100 calories per day depending on your resting metabolism (calories your body burns doing nothing else but living), of course increasing your acitivities will require more fuel, but aside from that, caloric intake above those numbers mentioned goes straight into fat reserves, which makes people fat. Food in itself doesn't make you fat, it's how many calories you take in. If you achieved a fit body and simply eat the calories we are supposed to eat, you won't gain weight. Anyways I could go on forever with this subject. I just lost about 30 lbs doing exactly what i just described. Eating healthy foremost, working out, and one last thing that most people don't even think of........De-toxing your body. That actually plays a 50% roll in our health & weight, nutrition 35%, exercise 15%. true numbers. look them up. I'm still working out, still eating healthy, and just got back from an intense seminar about health & nutrition.

 

This is just wrong. Lifting weights has been shown to actually burn more fat (and keep your metabolism going longer than cardio, to continue burning more fat) than cardio. I agree that diet is a big part of it, but lifting weights DOES help you lose weight - tremendously. It all works together - weights, cardio, eating habits, etc. But to say that lifting weights doesn't help you lose weight is a false statement.

To the OP - I know it's late, but I probably would have suggested an adjustable bench (flat, incline, decline) and a set of Bowflex selectable weight dumbbells. You can do just about any exercise with any body part with just this combination. I peaked on a lot of my lifts as far as weight goes, but when I switched to dumbbells, I gained an extra 30 lbs of bench (as an example) in about 2 weeks. The extra effort of forcing each individual arm or muscle to balance its weight really helped me for gains.

Now I need to work off that holiday fluff...

 

Okay, I will take back the fact that weight lifting doesn't have some benefit, that was a misstatement on my part. however the majority of people that want to target that fat and loose it aren't going to accomplish it by weight lifting. Most people don't want to push their bodies past their comfort level and extinguishing any real chance of progress to loosing weight. I learned quite a bit on fitness from a nutrional & detox specialist that has been in this industry for well over 20 years and you know those guys don't talk shit when it comes to what's the right thing. Studies say one thing on paper, putting it to the test are the real results. Like I said, I lost 30 lbs in 90 days and none by extensive weight lifting. But all is good. It does take time to figure out what is right for your body.