Maintaining a home gym is a crucial but often-overlooked part of the process. When you’ve spent thousands of pounds on equipment, the last thing you want is the materials wearing out sooner than they should. The way to avoid this? Implementing some quick and easy maintenance habits to make sure your gym is running at full performance, full time.

The first pieces of equipment we’ll be talking about are squat racks. These are likely the cornerstone of your home gym so it’s important to make sure that investment goes the distance.

1. Keep your room insulated

To avoid your equipment rusting, make sure your gym space is well insulated and not exposed to excess water or moisture in the air. Pay extra attention to your room’s climate during winter, when cold temperatures can compromise the build quality of racks and machines. Moisture build-up is the primary cause of rust, so make sure to keep your equipment dry and wipe it down frequently to prevent this.

2. Check for loose parts

While a good squat rack should be able to take the heavy loads you throw at it, it’s still worth being vigilant by checking nuts, bolts and other components on your equipment regularly. Tighten anything that feels loose to ensure your racks and machines are safe to use and operating as they should do.

3. Invest in gym flooring

Gym equipment is heavy. Without even considering the barbell and weight plates, most squat racks weigh comfortably over 100kg. Our flagship Phase 4 squat rack clocks in at 522kg, which is a lot of load to be placing on a rough garage floor. To protect your equipment and your home, invest in some rubber gym flooring.

4. Be aware of your equipment’s max weight load

Squat racks have different load ratings based on the strength of materials used. While any decent rack will give you 200kg+ of load to work with, it’s important to check with the manufacturer of your rack what its max load is. Going above this is a clear safety risk and will compromise the rack’s structure.

5. Don’t overload the plate storage

Like being conscious of your rack’s max load, it’s also important not to pile too many weight plates onto the storage poles. Keep your plates distributed evenly across the rack to avoid damaging the horns.

6. (If applicable) Lubricate cable guide rods with silicone oil

Many squat racks these days come with integrated cable systems to tick off two gym staples in a single piece of kit. We call these all-in-one machines.

If your squat rack has cables, it's important to look after these, too. We've written a whole article on the topic, but the main point of care is to lubricate the guide rods with silicone oil every few months. 

The guide rods are the long metal poles that your weight stack travels up as you extend the cable. Over time, these can lose their glide which can cause the cable to feel stiff and clunky. 

The fix is simple. Apply a thin layer of silicone-based oil along each guide rod and rub it in to provide an even coating. This will renew the smoothness of your cables and lead to a much better training experience.

We have more advice on maintaining your gym cables in a dedicated article, so be sure to look through that too.

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You’ve spent a lot of money putting your gym together, so it's absolutely worth following these quick maintenance pointers to make sure it lasts.

Check out our other maintenance tips on cardio machines, floor tiles and general home gym maintenance.