A Home Gym May Be in Your Immediate Future

by Mark Rippetoe | August 19, 2024

The near-term environment
looks pretty bleak. We may be heading into World War III with
blithering slobbering idiots in charge, and even with geniuses in
charge a World War tends to disrupt many things. Your training may be
one of them, if you don’t plan in advance.

Not
everybody needs a home gym, if their training environment is stable
and not subject to political influences that might interrupt its
availability. If you are training with a bunch of guys in someone’s
garage, you’ll probably be fine. Unless somebody decides that a bunch
of guys training for strength is a problem, in which case you have
more important problems.

If
you are training in a GloboGym-chain-type place, you may find that
you’re not insulated from broader stupidity that can disrupt your
training. You’ve seen this happen before – it may happen again. In
the spring of 2020 Wichita County declared damn near everything
except gay bars, the electrical contractors that run the city
council, and shitty restaurants to be “non-essential businesses,”
thereby closing everything else.

I
cheated – I stayed open anyway. I painted over the word “Gym”
on my building and became an “educational strength training
facility.” Clever People Are Harder to Close, and More Irritating
in General.

If
your training is important to you, it may be prudent to prepare. That
means access to equipment and a place to use it. It doesn’t have to
be extensive, or even nice. It just has to be available.

And
it doesn’t have to be expensive, because you really don’t need that
much equipment to train. You need
a power rack, a bar, plates, a flat bench, and a platform to protect
the real estate. That’s all you really need,
and anything else is just luxury and self-indulgence. I like having
bumper plates, a stationary bike to warm up on, a lat machine, an
outdoor track, and a shower, but if I have to I can get by without
them.

This
little soiree in 2020 was just a test run, and something like it will
happen again, since we showed them the first time that we will do as
we’re told. Even if you’re training in a well-equipped gym you like,
it would be prudent to consider what you’re going to do if these
criminals manage to successfully start World War III.

The
space is your first consideration. Garages are the traditional place
for a Garage Gym, but a 5-inch-thick 15×15 slab in the back yard with
a metal building on it works just fine. Use a lot of rebar in the
concrete, don’t plumb the building, and don’t wire the building. Get
a space heater, a fan, and an extension cord, either wear lots of
clothes or don’t wear many clothes when you need to, and you can deal
with it. Insulate it later. A 3-layer plywood platform protects the
slab and the plates, along with some rubber stall mats, and that is
an essential part of the expense.

You’ll
need a power rack for squats, presses, bench presses, and partial
pulls. It doesn’t have to be a good one, it just has to stay together
and fit in the shed. (Don’t try to make a power rack out of lumber.
And please don’t ask me to explain this.) You’ll need a bar and some
plates, as many as you can afford – needing plates and not having
them adversely affects your training. Borrow a good scale, weigh each plate, and paint the weight on the plate so you’ll know what
your loaded bar actually weighs. The face value is always wrong on
cheap plates, sometimes surprisingly wrong. I have weighed “45-pound”
plates at 52.75 pounds and 41.75 pounds. These things are good to
know.

You
need a flat bench for bench presses inside the rack. You can make a
decent bench out of 2x10s and carpet, good enough to bench big
weights on. Buy a better one later. And the bar doesn’t have to be a
great bar like a SS Bar – under these circumstances a bent one can
be dealt with. An A-frame plate rack helps organize the floor and
keeps you from tripping over plates when it gets dark. And collars
are essential for not tearing up the metal walls of the building.
Accidents happen, so plan for them.

And
that’s about it. The total investment here is about $4000, depending
on how much equipment you can find used. I know that’s more than a
cheap gym membership. But if it’s closed, you can’t train in it. And
you may even be able to sell a membership or two to help defray the
cost. If you buy this equipment a little at a time, you’re forever
independent of other people’s silly bullshit. And I assure you that
there will be a time in the not too-distant future when this is
important.