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 15x15 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.