The advice "put the camera 8 to 12 feet away at hip height" assumes a room that has 8 to 12 feet to give. Garage gyms, basement corners, and apartment setups often don't — at least not in the obvious direction. But almost every small space can produce genuinely analyzable squat footage once you know which constraints matter and which have workarounds. Here's the home-gym filming playbook.

The constraints that actually matter

Distance is the stubborn one. The camera needs enough standoff to hold your entire body — head to feet — in frame for the whole rep, without sitting so close that the wide-angle lens warps your proportions at the edges. Eight feet is the realistic minimum; more is better. You can't cheat this with cropping later, so spend your creativity here first:

  • Use the diagonal. A 10-by-12 garage bay has a 15-foot diagonal. Angle your squat station so the camera shoots corner to corner — you only need the camera perpendicular to you, and you can rotate your stance to make any sightline become side-on.
  • Borrow a doorway. A camera placed in the next room, shooting through an open door or down a hallway, buys distance walls won't. Basement squatters: the stairwell sightline often works.
  • Go landscape and use 0.5x carefully. Landscape orientation fits a squatting body at closer range than portrait. Ultra-wide lenses buy more, at the cost of some edge distortion — keep yourself centered in the frame if you use one.

Height is non-negotiable but easy. Hip height, always. A phone on the floor angled up compresses depth and exaggerates lean — the two reads a squat form check most depends on. A tripod is ideal; a stack of plates, a rack-mounted phone clamp, or a shelf works fine. Steady beats fancy.

Light and contrast are the silent killers. Home gyms trend dim, and dim footage plus dark clothes on a dark wall makes joints hard to track — for AI analysis and human eyes alike. Face the brightest light source toward you (not into the lens), and wear something that contrasts with your background. A grey wall behind black leggings needs a light shirt; a white garage door forgives almost anything.

The reps and the routine

Keep clips short and purposeful: one to three reps, under fifteen seconds, recording started a beat before the first rep and stopped a beat after the last so nothing gets cut mid-rep. Short clips also mean you'll actually film them — the ten-second habit survives; the elaborate production doesn't.

Alternate your angles across the week: side-on is the workhorse — depth, torso angle, hip-shoulder sync, balance line, tempo all live there — while front-on is the only view that can see knee tracking and stance width. CoachVision reads whichever view you give it and tells you what that view can and can't measure, so nothing gets guessed at. And since the tracker reads your body rather than your equipment, set the load context honestly — Bodyweight, Goblet, or Barbell — so your torso numbers get graded against the right style.

Mark your spots. Here's the home gym's secret advantage over any commercial gym: nothing moves. Tape an X where the tripod stands and chalk marks where your feet go, and every clip you ever film is from the identical angle at the identical distance. Week-over-week comparisons become genuinely apples-to-apples — the consistency commercial-gym lifters can only wish for.

Eight feet, hip height, decent light, taped marks, ten-second clips. That's the entire system. Your garage is now a lab — go collect some data.