Celebrity Home Gyms
Inside Five Athletes’ Garage Gyms: What Elite Home Setups Actually Get Right
Athlete garage-gym tours are compelling and mostly useless as shopping lists. The equipment reflects sponsorship, professional requirements and a training programme nobody reading this is following.
What is genuinely transferable is the layout. Look at five documented tours side by side and the same handful of decisions appear in all of them — decisions that cost nothing and matter far more than the brand on the rack.
The five: CrossFit Games champions Tia-Clair Toomey and Mat Fraser, CrossFit athletes Amanda Barnhart and Brent Fikowski, and former NHL player Brooks Laich. Every one of these is a dated snapshot rather than a permanent inventory, and two are equipment-brand tours with an obvious commercial interest. We will come back to that.
What they all do: protect the empty middle
The single most consistent feature across all five is a large area of floor with nothing on it.
This is counter-intuitive. The instinct when planning a gym is to fill it — a machine here, a second machine there, storage in the gap. Every one of these athletes does the opposite: fixed equipment goes to the perimeter, and the centre stays clear.
The reason is that functional training changes direction and equipment constantly. A second large machine adds one exercise; open floor adds dozens. Toomey’s space, Barnhart’s and Fikowski’s are all organised around a central rectangle that is not permanently occupied by anything.
Scaled down: in a single-car UK garage, that means one anchor station against a wall and roughly 2m × 2m of genuinely empty floor. Not “mostly empty” — empty.
What they all do: store beside the station that uses it
The second shared principle is that storage sits next to the point of use, not wherever there happened to be a gap.
Plates live beside the rack that loads them. Accessories live beside the area where they are used. Nothing requires crossing the active zone to fetch, which matters for safety as much as speed — most home-gym trips happen while carrying something across a room.
Laich’s tour is the most explicit about this. It is less a display of expensive machines than an explanation of why each thing lives where it does, with a defined position for every accessory and a consistent reset at the end of a session.
Scaled down: give every item a permanent home off the floor, and put it within reach of where it gets used. If putting something away takes longer than leaving it out, it will be left out.
What they all do: consolidate rather than accumulate
A rig does several jobs from one structure — squat, press, pull-up, sometimes storage — instead of four separate machines occupying four footprints.
The lesson is functional consolidation, not “buy a rig”. A competition-scale rig needs floor and overhead clearance, proper anchoring and competent installation, none of which a standard UK garage necessarily offers. A half rack or a simple rack does the same consolidating job at domestic scale.
What Fraser’s gym shows that the others do not: let it change
Fraser is the most useful of the five because more than one tour exists, taken at different points. The space visibly evolved as his programme changed after competition.
That is the argument against buying everything at once. A gym assembled in a single order reflects what you imagined you would do. A gym assembled over eighteen months reflects what you actually did — and the difference is usually several hundred pounds of unused equipment.
The corollary is the part people skip: remove things that stopped earning their space. A garage gym should lose equipment occasionally, not only gain it.
What Toomey’s gym shows: a plan on the wall
The detail worth stealing from Toomey’s tour costs almost nothing — a whiteboard.
It signals that the room supports a planned programme rather than an unstructured collection of equipment. Somebody walking in knows what today’s session is, and last week’s numbers are visible.
For a home gym where nobody else is holding you to a schedule, a visible plan does a surprising amount of work. It is the cheapest item in any of these five rooms and arguably the highest-return.
The commercial caveat, stated plainly
Two of these five tours — Barnhart’s and Fikowski’s — were published by an equipment manufacturer. They are legitimate visual sources for layout and zoning, and they are not independent buying advice. A brand tour features that brand’s products, and the athlete may have a commercial relationship with it.
That does not make them worthless; it makes them evidence of one thing (how the room is arranged) and not another (whether those products are the right purchase for a UK household). Compare warranty, parts availability, delivery cost and dimensions independently. Imported commercial equipment can carry support limitations that are invisible in a video.
Adapting any of this to a UK garage
Laich’s gym is in Los Angeles. Most of these spaces are larger, warmer and drier than a typical British garage, and that difference is not cosmetic.
Before copying a layout, check:
- Water ingress and condensation. A damp garage corrodes equipment and voids some warranties. Rubber flooring does not fix damp; it hides it.
- Temperature. An unheated garage in January is a genuine barrier to training that has nothing to do with motivation.
- Floor condition and loading. Garage slabs are usually fine. Anything above ground level is not automatically so.
- Overhead clearance, particularly for a rack with a pull-up bar, and garage-door travel — doors that lift into the ceiling space eat exactly the headroom a rack needs.
- Ventilation and power. Both are commonly inadequate and both are easier to sort before equipment arrives.
The realistic version
Take the five principles and none of the inventory:
- One anchor station against a wall — a rack, or a bench and weights.
- Open central floor, kept genuinely empty.
- Perimeter storage, beside the station that uses it.
- One conditioning option, chosen for your room and your ears rather than because an athlete owns three.
- A visible plan, on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper.
That is a functional garage gym. It is a fraction of the cost of any of the five rooms above, and for anybody not competing it will not be the limiting factor.
What not to copy
Elite CrossFit volume, loads and technical movements are the product of years of coached preparation. Olympic lifts, gymnastic skills and high-intensity conditioning need appropriate instruction, and the fact that a movement appears in a garage tour says nothing about whether it is suitable for you.
Do not install a rig, mount anything overhead, or begin dropping loaded bars because an athlete does. Follow manufacturer instructions, and get structural advice where there is any doubt about floor or fixings.
If you are new to resistance training, or returning after injury or a period of inactivity, take qualified coaching advice on programming and technique before increasing load.
Sources
- Men’s Health, Tia-Clair Toomey garage-gym tour: https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a40600784/crossfit-tia-clair-toomey-garage-gym/
- Men’s Health, Mat Fraser home-gym equipment tour: https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a35598032/mat-fraser-home-gym-workout-equipment-youtube/
- Men’s Health, updated Mat Fraser home-gym tour: https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a38014029/mat-fraser-home-gym-tour-rogue/
- REP Fitness, “Home Gym Tour with CrossFit Athlete Amanda Barnhart”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCsIHohRAAA
- REP Fitness, “CrossFit Athlete Brent Fikowski’s Dream Home Gym Tour”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdF3DB_T5d4
- Brooks Laich, “NHL Player Brooks Laich’s Epic Garage Gym”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysWEQfc4QlM
- NHS, Exercise guidance: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/
This independent article is not endorsed by any athlete or equipment manufacturer named above. Two of the cited tours are published by an equipment company and may involve commercial relationships with the featured athletes. It provides general information, not personalised coaching, structural or medical advice.
