- cross-posted to:
- greentext@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- greentext@sh.itjust.works
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It should be illegal for a gym to have only one set of the dumbells from 2kg to 12kg. Those are the most used ones and they are ALWAYS occupied by some dick who carried them to the other side of the gym to do an exercise for like half an hour
This is deliberate. Gyms want you to think that you need a suite of bulky machines to work out: so you keep going to the gym.
If you realize that a couple of kettle bells and free weights is all you need, then you might also realize that most people only need to do body-weight exercises which don’t need a gym.
Depends on what your goals are. If you don’t care about being strong enough to bench 225 or deadlift 315, then yeah, you’ll never need more than your own body and gravity.
Do you train at home? I thought about getting some stuff, but I just feel it would get repetitively boring. And getting some machines is not cost effective at all. It would take years for it to pay for itself.
Depending on where you live, you can get lots of great outdoor exercise for relatively little money, especially if you buy used equipment.
If you’ve got mountains, hike/climb up them. If you’ve got water, kayak/canoe or swim. If you’ve got paths that are safe from cars, bicycle or run. If you’ve got snow, go snowshoeing or skiing. And if any of those are too easy and not giving you enough of a workout, then do it faster. And if you don’t have any of those things nearby … well, I’m sorry you live in such a shitty place – you have my genuine sympathies.
No, I’m (now) a
lazy slobbusy parent, but my wife was a PT in a gym for a while.It turns out that squats, lunges, press ups, burpees, pullups, boxjumps, and jogging/sprinting are pretty much all an ordinary work out needs for most people. Kick it up a notch with free weights and a bar to do dead lifts, cleans, etc and to add weight to lunges and squats or depth to pushups if you want to body build.
Specialized equipment might be necessary if someone has an injury or are training for very specific purposes.
When I did work out I found that keeping a log was useful to log e.g. AMRAPs or speed for motivation and having lots of subtle variations of the base exercises e.g. free squats vs heavy/light goblet squats.
I’ve got a fun home gym setup - just a bench, dumbells, and a functional trainer. There’s no muscle group i can’t hit with multiple different exercises. A squat rack would be nice, but too big heavy, and expensive. So I just do 1-legged squats instead!
With that said, if you are rhe kind of person that likes to always be doing different exercises then I dont know if I I’d recommend it. I dont really get bored with doing the same exercises, so I think I benefit from the extremely low activation energy of just being able to walk down the hall and hit the gym.
my apartment building has a gym, which is nice to have but they definitely made some uh choices.
there’s barbells (with fixed weights at the end) but nowhere to rack them, so if you want to squat them you have to do the awkward thing where you stand it up off the floor onto your back. There’s a smith machine but it doesn’t go low enough to squat with.
only one kettlebell of each size, so if you want to do some farmer carries or overhead presses or something you have to use uneven weights. The kettlebells are on this big rack that also includes a pull up bar but the rack is not secured to the floor and would probably tip over if I tried a pull-up off of it.
there’s a rack of medicine balls but every wall in the gym is flimsy drywall. there’s a big dent in the drywall right next to the medicine balls where someone clearly realized this too late.
most of the floor is taken up by rows and rows of cardio equipment and I have genuinely seen 2 at most being used at once.
Tbh I mostly use the gym for cardio and do the rest at home, but no weights rn because my spine is fractured. I live somewhere with intense heat and cold, so I’m more motivated to actually get my cardio in if it’s somewhere comfy
