There is a great deal of personal commitment to weight training when you do it right. This means a sound routine, a regulated and planned diet and adequate rest and recovery, in addition to an iron will. And I’ll freely admit that I control all of these factors as much as I am able, minus the occasional slip up. I see weight training as a veritable motivator and a hefty part of my life, and part of that for me is having my own garage gym.
The garage gym is a customisable and personalised area, and a massive boost to your commitment to and love of weight training. In my personal preference (and I’m sure in many others), it is partly due to my distaste for commercial gyms and partly down to a need for my own space. Commercial gyms envelope you into their system, playing music that is not yours and forcing you to compromise your routine to accommodate the other gym goers (who you would rather avoid). It’s a completely foreign environment, and it’s more often than not filled with people who are confrontational and up to the hilt with judgement. I don’t appreciate know-it-all novices (who are keyboard warriors at night, kinda like an inverted superhero) telling me what I’m doing wrong in the clean from the comfort of their Smith Machine. And I sure as hell hate running into the Pilates room just to find the scarce 1.25kg plates. Not to mention waiting on equipment, being rushed off your current exercise, on top of transport and time constraints.
Garage gyms are dictated by you, and mean there’s no excuse for not turning up! It’s a very wholesome feeling when you can take your shirt off when it’s drenched, squat in bare feet and decide whether you want music or silence. Having a garage gym benefits you in the longer run too, allowing your routine to be more flexible, meaning better consistency and better progress. And from a personal point, there is something more focused about only having the equipment you need, and something deeply primal about using that equipment for the core lifts day in, day out. So without further ado, here is my wish list for the perfect garage gym (within reason).
1. Olympic bar and rubber coated weights – If you only had a barbell and weights, it would be enough to get you incredibly strong. With just the bar and weights, you can perform the Olympic lifts, overhead presses, front squats, deadlifts and rows among others. This equipment is the most important piece of the puzzle, and everything else aside from that is secondary. So because your bar and weights are the centre of your focus, resist the urge to purchase the cheaper non-Olympic bars and steel weights. The feel of an Olympic bar is far superior to normal bars, with better craftsmanship as well as metal sleeves and bearings to make lifts smoother. Rubber weights are much kinder in regards to noise pollution and cracked concrete too, and really do make weight training fool-proof. You’re going to be using these for a while, so it makes sense to get the best.
2. Mats – these protect the floor like nothing else, and are essential for any garage gym. Make sure you get the dense heavy stuff and not the really soft interlocking material, as they easily acquire indentations and divots that make exercises off the floor frustrating (a la rolling bar).
3. Squat rack – What you choose to fill this slot is up to you. A simple H-stand squat rack with a dip station sets you back anywhere from $200-$300and fits the bill for what you need perfectly. If you’re more expansive and have some extra cash lying around, get a power cage. They are expensive (generally anywhere between $600-$1500), but give you more options for exercise choice (rack pulls, bottom position squats, pull ups, pin press and many more) and are a fantastic multi-faceted tool.
4. Pull up bar – Pull ups and chin ups are the two best upper body mass builders in the Iron Game, exceeding even the overhead and bench presses. Having a pull up bar is a necessity, and if you really want to get into the nitty gritty, set it up outside or somewhere you have heaps of overhead space for muscle-ups (eventually). Pull ups add thick slabs of muscle to your lats, rhomboids, traps, forearms, biceps and the area around your shoulder girdle; and so, gravity permitting, you should be including them in your routine.
5. Dip station – in case you don’t have a squat rack that automatically comes with dip handles, it is highly recommended to set up a dip station. Dips are the best tricep exercise around, hitting each of the three heads of the muscle harder than overhead and bench presses. Dips also allow a greater ROM than benching where you are restricted by the bar hitting your chest. Done properly, dips nicely hit your chest and delts too and there’s nothing better than the huge pump you get from doing a bodyweight dropset after a heavy weighted dip set.
6. Bench – Many will find it hard to believe that the bench is so far down on the list, though this is easily justifiable. Overhead presses and dips are enough work for your chest, triceps and delts, however a garage gym is not complete without a bench. Benching is a key part of most strength routines, and although the interest in it over the past 40 years has exceeded its merits, the bench press is the undeniable king when it comes to building an impressively wide and thick chest. Get an adjustable bench so you can do incline, which in many circles is considered a better exercise than the flat version because of its applicability to sports performance.
These are the essential items, with anything else to be seen as a luxury. Just while we’re going through our ‘dream’ garage gym, it would be remiss of me to not mention the other items that add that little bit of extra dynamism and choice in your training.
1. Olympic Dumbbells – Dumbbells play an almost equal part in strength training to barbells, and can be used to perform any number of fantastic exercises. Dumbbells are great for bench presses, overhead presses, curls, flyes, and a plethora of other auxiliary movements. Many argue that dumbbells are superior to barbells because of their role in eliminating symmetrical weakness through working each side of the body independently, as well as having a more active role in strengthening stabiliser muscles. Formidable points indeed.
2. Weightlifting Belt – A leather weightlifting belt provides great support to the abdominals and the lumbars during exercises like squats, cleans, snatches, deadlifts and even overhead presses. There are some who treat belts and other supportive gear with vitriol because it means less work for these muscles; however someone who improves their belted squat from 140kg to 180kg will invariably find the same improvement in their completely raw squat too.
3. Dip/ Pull up Belt – When you are consistently doing bodyweight exercises like dips and pull ups, there is that stage when bodyweight is not enough. Some may be tempted to simply keep adding to their BW total, but once you get past 15 pull ups and 20 dips, there is not much else to be had in terms of building strength. A dipping belt offers the chance to keep the reps low for superior strength gains, and allows you to attain progress in the same vein as your other exercises.
4. Chalk – Most commercial gyms have outlawed chalk, and for most serious trainees this point is laughable. Chalk helps out with heavy pulls, whether it is a deadlift, snatch, pull up or clean.
5. Weight trees – Most of the time you can get by without somewhere to hold the weights, but this is a great convenience to minimise clutter and maintain order in your Iron Kingdom.
6. Kettlebells – These are coming back in vogue in a big way, but not for the right reasons (resurrecting a relatively underground training technique and calling it a revolution leaves a bitter taste in my mouth). There are many martial artists and other groups who say kettlebells are better than barbells and dumbbells, but that is simply not true. Barbells have been the staple of strength training for so long that if kettlebells were indeed better, they would have dethroned the barbell by now. They do however build phenomenal hip and posterior chain power and conditioning, and a tough kettlebell workout is incredibly taxing metabolically (making them great when trying to lose weight).
7. Resistance Bands – Bands are a more obscure addition to strength training routines, generally not used every workout but highly effective nonetheless. Bands create a diverse tension for your body to deal with, with your muscles needing to adapt to a different curve of resistance than normal free weights. Normal free weight movements are at their easiest at the lockout stage, such as holding a bar overhead, standing upright in the squat or extending the arms in the bench press. With bands, this portion of the lift is the most difficult because the greatest resistance occurs at the most extended point of the movement. Attach bands under the legs of your bench, under your feet when squatting, rowing, overhead pressing, deadlifting or even curling, and keep the weight lighter, and feel the difference it makes. Bands are a fantastic way to mix up your training to stimulate growth and break plateaus.
8. Foam roller – Get one of these to use before working out and between sets, because sometimes warming up is not enough to make your muscles do what you want them to. Static stretching is obviously a no-no pre-workout as it means your muscles and connective tissue is loose, and so are more prone to injury. So instead of affecting the length of our muscles, we should be working on the tone of them. This is achieved with techniques such as foam rolling and other Myofascial Release mechanisms, which make your muscles supple and ready to perform.
This list will be underwhelming to some and overwhelming to others, but I can assure you that this is all that is needed.
