Having an awesome at-home gym has always been an admirable goal, but in the era of COVID, it’s gone from convenient to essential. While home fitness setups come in all shapes and sizes, boasting a wide variety of tools and equipment, few items are as useful as a quality power rack.
Even the most basic of power racks will up your home-fitness routine considerably. Not only do they make it possible to perform the heavy lifts and movements that are normally relegated solely to the gym, but they can be built upon endlessly to offer an ever-expanding home gym setup.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at one power rack that goes far beyond the basics, making it easy to bring home an extremely diverse range of workouts and lifts.
What to Look for in a Home Gym Power Rack
Before I dive into a specific rack suggestion, here are a few elements I considered when choosing a product for a recommendation.
Durability and build quality are perhaps the primary consideration. While there are plenty of pieces of home fitness equipment out there, the truth is that most of them feel like they could fall apart at any moment. Obviously, this is not ideal when you plan on lifting heavy, so I’ve prioritized a durable design.
Features and versatility are also key. At an actual gym, there’s plenty of room for different pieces of equipment that are intended for specific purposes. It’s unlikely, however, that you have that much space at home. Accordingly, I’ve looked for a power rack that offers the versatility and range of features necessary to bring home a comprehensive workout.
Finally, space efficiency is essential. That means that a rack has incorporated a wide variety of features into a design that takes up as little of your living space as possible.
The Best Home Gym Power Rack
Decathlon makes an extremely wide range of fitness gear—they have something for virtually every activity you can imagine—and their weightlifting equipment is all-around solid and versatile. The best representative of this is the company’s Domyos Smith Machine 900.
This lifting cage not only offers all the key aspects of a power rack but is bolstered with the addition of a cable machine. Between the two, you can perform virtually any weightlifting motion. In other words, it’s the very definition of a complete home gym.
A few key features:
- Multi-handle, integrated pull-up bar
- Adjustable bar support pegs and safety catches
- High and low cable capabilities
- Includes pull-down bar, pull triangle, and weight plate diameter adapter
- Integrated weight plate storage pegs
Decathlon Domyos Power Rack Review
For a sub-$1,000 power rack, this is a truly impressive piece of equipment. It’s easy to put together and solid once assembled, and while it’s large enough to perform full pull-ups and other movements, it’s compact enough to fit into your living space.
Once assembled and set in place, it delivers an outstanding lifting experience. The rack itself doesn’t rattle or move about and offers confidence-inspiring stability. At the same time, while many home-cable machines offer an inconsistent experience at best, this cable pull is surprisingly smooth. In other words, you can use all the features in the rack without worrying that it’s going to fall apart on you. The design is solid.
To get the most out of the rack, it should be paired with a weightlifting bench, and you’ll need to equip it with weight plates and a bar. The company recommends using it with their Domyos bench 900, which turned out to be a great choice as it not only provides a reliably stable platform, but can be adjusted for flat, incline, and decline presses. The rack will work with any weights and bars, and those from Decathlon itself are fine options as they’re more affordable than many others.
One of the best aspects of this particular rack involves the fact that you can bolster it with a virtually endless array of additional equipment. Use the cable element with handles, rope-pulls, ankle cuffs, or any other pulling tool. The eyes drilled into the frame make it easy to expand its capabilities via attachments like dip bars, spotter arms, inversion boots, rope pulls, speed bags, and more.
In other words, it’s a great platform around which to build your ideal home gym.
