The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends strength-training your major muscle groups twice a week to maintain general fitness and good health. If you don't want to join a gym and aren't interested in exploring endless variations on push-ups and pull-ups, purchasing a home gym is your next best bet for meeting this goal. A multi-station home gym offers the convenience of working out at home but sacrifices some compactness in return for offering fewer steps -- sometimes none at all -- to switch between workouts.
Size
Before you start shopping for a multi-station home gym, measure out how much space you're willing to permanently give up in your exercise room. Although some single station gyms fold for compact storage, most multi-station home gyms do not. Keep in mind that in addition to the gym's footprint, which should be readily available on the product website or a spec sheet at the store, you typically need at least three feet of clearance on all sides of any moving parts, such as the leg developer or press arm.
Resistance
Consider which sort of resistance mechanism you're most comfortable using. Multi-station home gyms are typically either selectorized, so you adjust the weight by sliding a selector pin into a weight stack, or plate loading, which means you slide weight plates on and off the machine to increase and decrease resistance. The upside of selectorized resistance is that the adjustments are instantaneous, you don't need to purchase weight plates, and most importantly you don't have to move the plates around. But if you have or plan to own a barbell set, a plate loading gym may offer you another way of putting those weight plates to work.
Transitions Between Exercises
One of the biggest appeals of purchasing a multi-station home gym is being able to switch quickly and easily from one exercise to the next with a minimum of fiddling. Download and read the gym's manual carefully before you purchase it -- manuals are usually available from the manufacturer's website -- or examine the gym in the store. Note whether you must make any adjustments to switch from a chest press to pec flys or from leg curls to leg extensions. In general, the fewer adjustments you make the more stations the home gym will have and the more space it will take up, so exactly where the line is between convenience and compactness is a subjective matter.
Stations and Exercises
Most multi-station home gyms typically come with two or three stations. Expect to see standard exercises like lat pull-downs, chest presses, pec flys, overhead presses, leg curls and leg extensions. Some, but not all, multi-station home gyms also have a leg press platform. Look for a gym that has high, mid-level and low pulleys that you can clip a handle to. This gives you the most exercise variety possible. Other slightly less-common features you might find include a VKR or vertical knee raise station for doing dips, hanging abs and pull-ups, or a weight-assisted pull-up and dip station.
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