My first garage gym wasn’t in a garage, it was on our back porch and it was bare bones: jump rope, a rusted set of five pound and twenty pound dumbbells and one fifty pound band with handles.
That was it. Just stuff I’d cobbled together over the years or threw in my car when my parents moved from our childhood home. I never needed it because up until my early 30s I’d always belonged to a decent gym.
But once I had kids, I realized that just about the only way I could make sure I got in an hour of uninterrupted exercise, where I didn’t feel rushed, where someone wasn’t waiting for me, where work or the kid’s activities wouldn’t interfere, was if I worked out at home.
And that little set-up I just mentioned was fine for a bit. In fact, you can stay in shape with no equipment at all. Or maybe just a single pull-up bar.
Between push-up variations, jumping rope, running sprints, air squats, cossack squats, lunges, and pull-up variations, you can train just about everything.
One problem: It’s boring.
Second problem: Lifting heavy weights is fun.
So as soon as we moved into our next house, I commandeered half the garage and began building my gym one piece at a time. I’ve since added dozens of pieces of equipment, some for variety, some for specific training and some for fun.
So, let’s do this Wheel of Fortune style.
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Instead of wasting the top of our list on the basics, I’m going to give you the RSTLN and E of your garage gym because these are no-brainers.
- Power Rack w/ pull-up bar (a must, plus you can hang bands, rings, straps, whatever from the rack).
- Adjustable Flat/Incline Bench
- Olympic Bar w/ plates up to 315
- Adjustable dumbbells up to 50 lbs
- One heavy-ish kettlebell
If your garage gym has all of these, then you can do just about any kind of lifting program you want. Olympic lifting. Push-Pull. Body part. Whatever. If you’re stronger, grab yourself a set of 60lb or 75lb dumbbells if you need more weight. Or grab another set of 45lb plates.
That’s the exact set-up I started with and you don’t need anything else, buuuuuut, I can speak to this, working out in your garage gym every day can feel repetitive.
So you probably want some other cool meathead stuff to spice things up.
These are my Top 5 Coolest Non-Essential Essentials for Your Garage Gym:
- A Heavy Slam Ball
I love my slam ball. I’ve been through three of them. One, I wore the grip off of and when my hands started sweating (my garage is in South Florida) the thing slipped all over the place, flying in the air and crashing into stuff (it weighed 40 pounds – I nearly killed myself). The second one, I am proud to say, I slammed so hard it split. Yeah, true story. I powered the heavy orb into the ground and sand flew everywhere. The ball split right down the middle. I felt like a damn Goliath. I’m on my third now and it’s holding up strong. I love slam balls because they’re functional and you can use them a ton of different ways: slams, overhead tosses, weights for ab work, etc… Grab yourself a ball!
- Gymnast Rings
I was very skeptical about these. Now I swear by them. All you have to do is buy a pair of gymnast rings, adjust them and hang them from the pull-up bar in your squat rack. Now you can do a ton of bodyweight stuff to support your other lifts and your posture. Ring dips (forward and upright), reverse rows, face pulls, one-arm stuff, push-ups using your bench, and on and on. Some days I’ll just do a full upper body workout with the rings.
- Hex Bar
I know I’m going to take shit from every deadlift diehard out there, but over my lifetime I’ve never been able to do it regularly with a barbell without tweaking my back. I’ve tried everything. Every angle. Every strategy. Just the bar. Doesn’t matter. Something about my physiology puts too much pressure on the wrong part of my back and I can’t do it. Enter: the hex bar. Now this, I can do! So I bought one and I love it. I don’t go very heavy these days, but one day a week I do slow, controlled reps with the equivalent of my body weight on the bar and it feels great.
- Thick Bands
I like the lighter bands for dynamic warm-ups. I like the medium bands for high rep burnout sets. I like the heavy bands to swap out dumbbells and get a ton of resistance on both sides of a lift. If you have a home gym, you likely don’t have a set of dumbbells that go up to 90 or even 100 pounds. This is where bands come in. You can also do some great pull exercises while hanging them from your pull-up bar. Rows. Face pulls. Lat pulls.
- Jump Rope
The basic jump rope rules. I start every workout with an 8-10 minute warm-up of 30 seconds on the jump rope and 5 slam ball slams for 8 rounds. Gets the blood flowing and your body moving. Wakes the space of the gym. But every other week I’ll go full Rocky mode and do a full 30 minute jump rope circuit. Double jumps. One legs. Skipping. My go-to is usually 1 minute on / 1 minute rest. Shoulders. Core. Legs. It works everything.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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