Garage Gym 09/08/08

Time for a bit of an update on the equipment/gym setup front. Due to my steady income job disappearing due to winter I am left with just gym and training work which will paying the bills doesnt allow me to lay out funds on the flooring and barbells I am after. That said I just got my AbMats delivered on Friday, great simple piece of equipement for really working the abs and allows you to do half decent back extensions without carting a GHD around with you. Only gripe with getting these was that there isnt an Australian distributer so had to order them direct from AbMat, no drama there but the postage was almost equal to the cost of the product. It was somewhere in the region of $40 to send two $30 mats over. So Im using these two as testers and if people find them effective when we train I will look at getting more. Also got a couple of cheap stopwatches from Volt Electronics just an online australian electronics retailer, $9.95 each which was the cheapest I found around the place, only gripe was the delivery time was a bit slow. Definately worth the buy tho, having multiple stopwatches makes it was easier for multiple people to keep track of their workout times

Garage Gym 15/07/08

Thought I would do an update with a bit of stocktake of all
equipment that Im currently using during sessions. Over on
the right is the ring setup hanging from the pergola, these are
Elite Rings from ringtraining.com. From memory these were
around the $70-80 mark and are one of the best pieces of kit
Ive got, around 1kg and totally portable. In the background you
can see the chin up bar which also has dips handles on the
other side, not the best unit but it does the job, has a few sandbags holding it down which is an absolute necessity when throwing out some vicious kip's. The duct tape is there between the handles as a guide to make sure full ROM is achieved with the chin getting well over the tape. Apart from these bits of kit I also use :-
- 2x16kg & 1x24kg kettlebells
- Plastic and ball bearing skipping ropes
- Foam yoga/stretching mats
- 4xSandbags (cheap $2 gym bags stuffed with 2kg sandwich bags of sand)
- 1xEmpty beer keg (looking at getting the valve taken out and part filling this with water for extra akwardness when lifting)
-1 x 40mm PVC paralettes
- Rubber medicine balls
- Milk crates - great for checking squat depth and other application requiring a low bench
-4 x Wooden dowels (used for warmup & O-Lift practice)
- Stack of boxing gloves, focus mits, thai pads etc
- 60x40cm whiteboard (essential for writing up workouts and keeping score etc)

So thats about it for now, does the job for now but hanging to get 3 50mm Olympic bars and some rubber coated plates to get into some serious barbell lifting and also for the high density foam flooring so can do a bit more training indoors during the crappier weather.

Workout 12/07/08

For Time :-

50 Lunges
25 KB Swings
50 Push press (sandbag)
25 Situps
25 Double Unders
50 Squats
25 Situps
25 Burpees
25 Situps
50 Squats
25 Double Unders
25 Situps
50 Push press (sandbag)
25 KB Swings
50 Lunges

Pic shows the basic backyard setup for this workout, the milk crates are there to measure squat depth and also gives you somewhere to twitch mid workout. The crates with a towel on top of them are roughly 13.5" inches high which is about the same height at the Dynamax med balls. The black gym bags are the sandbags and have 2kg sandwich bags full of sand in them, having the sand in individual bags makes it easy to adjust the weight of the bags without getting sand everywhere.

Garage Gym 06/07/08

Picked a little bit more kit for the gym yesterday, dropped into Bunnings and grabbed four 1.5m x 25mm broomsticks for O-lifting warm-up and practice. Also figured they would be handy for doing a bit of stick wrestling practice, for those that dont know stick wrestling is where two people grab onto the same stick, both of you hold on for your life and try and wrench the stick out of the other guys hands or knock/push them over, good little warmup exercise and a pretty solid workout. Sticks clocked in at $5 each. These ones happen to already be laquered which should save on splinters a bit, also being 25mm they have a little bit more weight to them than some other sticks.
In the next couple of days I will pop up a complete list of equipement as it currently stands and essential pieces of kit arriving in the hopefully not too distant future.

Garage Gym 27/06/08

The Beginning

Okay, a couple of weeks ago I decided that with
the crappy winter weather rolling in and it becoming increasingly unpleasant to train outside that it was time to set up an indoor training studio inside the house. Im referring to it as a garage gym, even tho it is clearly not in the garage, but I am doing it in the style of a garage gym using select pieces of functional training equipment and making do and improvising whereever necessary.
The idea is to document the process here and hopefully it is of use to anyone looking to put together a similar setup, ill be putting up what everything is costing me, what works, what doesnt, what suppliers Ive used etc etc. Im doing a lot of research on the best prices/quality of equipment as this gym is being set up on a bit of a budget so hopefully the research i do can save other people a bit of time hunting around.
So the first stage is the room Im starting with, its the spare room in my house roughly 3mx4m with roughly 3m ceilings and currently filled with quite a bit of crap. Ive taken a few shots for the "before" phase and should have them online in the next couple of days. First purchase is going to 30mm high density foam flooring to cover the floor boards.