Universal Storage Systems

What is this system? It’s a commercial grade shelving unit that is specially designed for your gym equipment. Most of the companies that make these offer many different configurations (dumbbells, kettlebells, plates, balls, etc.) and, as the name implies, it is designed to hold all of your different weightlifting equipment.

With that out of the way, let’s start this review off by saying that these are AMAZING systems, but, these don’t work for most of my customers for three (main) reason.

1. Cost (to get a decent one with a few different style shelves is ~$800 to $2k+)
2. Space. These are generally tall and bulky. Makes sense when you think about how much weight they need to hold, but that’s not always conducive to the different home gym setups people have
3. Lack of need. A lot of our customers are looking for a few hundred pounds of plates, a few sets of dumbbells and kettlebells, and maybe one or two balls. There isn’t a need to be able to store as many items as you can on these

Do you fall outside of those categories, or, want to learn more about these? If so, the rest of this post is for you!

The first core decision you want to make is if space is a constraint. If you only have certain height ceilings or a certain footprint, this will limit your options.

Next we will have to decide on if we want wheels or no wheels? If you get a wheeled unit, you can always take the wheels off, but that doesn’t go the other way for no wheel units. A lot of times people will get the non wheeled units if they’re looking for more of a rig type setup (like the first picture), or because they want to be able to bolt it into the floor. Generally, I’d recommend the wheeled unit for the home gym (even if you don’t end up moving it, it’s a nice feature to have)

Now that those decisions are out of the way, depending on the unit we’ve chosen, we get to pick out our style of shelving! Note: some units only give one style of shelf, whereas others allow you to choose. Only key note here is to think about not just what you currently have, but what do you envision yourself having in your gym in the future. If you’re planning to get a full kettlebell set, it might be worth getting a full shelf for just that. You can always buy a different style shelf later on, but they are pretty hard to find on the used market/be able to sell for a decent price (just the shelf, that is).