People ask me all the time to help them to evaluate their home gym set up. They are usually trying to justify the three grand they just spent on a treadmill, or to wow me with the cool bench press with the leg extension attachment. Although these things seem practical and will surely have their place within a training plan, there are better things to spend your money on in this economy. Here are my recommendations for staying cheap and getting the most bang for your athletic buck!
1. Dumbbells – They’re versatile, practical and take up very little space. They can be used to train both the upper and lower body, when training for strength, power, stability and conditioning. Many programs, including my own, would be lost without our dumbbells. We put them in to our complexes for conditioning, use them to educate and develop power while learning to clean, snatch and squat. Dumbbells are usually fairly cheap and you don’t have to buy the most expensive pair to get quality. I would suggest starting out with 5’s, 10’s, 15’s and 20’s. You will want to step up and get a heavier set as well at some point, but we can get great work done with these 4 pair.
2. Medballs – As long as you have a wall to through against (concrete basement wall, retaining wall behind your house, etc.) you can use med balls to create rhythmic power, coordination, core strength, stability, elasticity, and train the core through multiple planes. Get a medball that bounces well so that you can work the upper body elasticity components in some of our medball complexes. I would suggest starting out with 4lb, 6lb, 8lb and 10lb balls.
3. Boxes – Stairs can work, but there is really no substitute for a good solid box platform from which to do step ups, step up jumps, single and double legged jumps, single legged squats with an elevated back leg, etc. Our box jumping progression has helped bridge the gap between leg strength and force production from the lower body. We have seen the best results on a concrete stair case of at least 20 stairs, but since most people don’t have access to this we have made some modifications to our program with the boxes and our box jumping progression.
4. Phyisoball – Although most of you think this is just for doing crunches, we really love this $20 piece of equipment for it value. We can use it for 1 legged squats (elevated back leg on the ball), rollouts, bench press, flies, reverse flies, hamstring curls, knee tucks, pikes, and over 100 other exercises that assist our athletes in developing core strength and body control.
5. Squat Rack with Accessories – Okay, you might be saying, “I thought you were going to keep it cheap!” and I was, but I couldn’t really put this list together without throwing in a rack, bar and plates. This piece is the key to truly developing strength in both the upper and lower body with exercises like dead lifts, cleans, squats, snatches, pulls, bench press, etc. This will probably be the largest investment in your weight room and quite possibly should be the last investment on this list. You want to make sure you have the dedication to the workout before you invest in something like this. Here is what you need:
• Squat Rack (with safety catches)
• Barbell – Olympic bar (45 lbs)
• Plate Weights – a pair of 2.5’s, 5’s, 10’s (2 pair), 25’s, 45’s (2 pair unless you squat over 300)
This is enough to run a quality training program out of your own home. Most of the exercises on AthleteFIT.com can be run with only these pieces. I will post another short article on cardio equipment for the home, but to give you a taste of what’s to come, check out the Cybex Arc Trainer and the Speed Board from Woodway!