Gear Not Stuff: Best Home Gym Strength Equipment
The perfect weights for your home gym and exact poundages to buy.
Post summary
Home gym equipment makes it more convenient to exercise and increases the likelihood that you’ll exercise.
But it can be confusing to know what type of equipment to buy.
Turns out you can get a lean, highly-functional home gym with just four types of strength equipment.
We’ll explain the ideal strength equipment for a home gym and exactly what size of weights you should buy.
Housekeeping
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The post
Today is the second Friday of the month. Which means it’s time for Gear Not Stuff.
The concept for Gear Not Stuff is simple.
We live in a world of mass consumerism and have more stuff than ever. As my book Scarcity Brain explains, the average home contains 10,000 to 50,000 items.
If we want a new thing, we no longer have the pause of traveling to a store—we can buy it right from our computer, phone, TV, or even yell to Alexa.
We own too much, and curious forces are now leading us to acquire even more stuff …
Consider: Online retailers stole tactics from casinos, leading us to buy more faster. They leverage what’s called The Scarcity Loop. It’s worked on you if you’ve ever bought some crap and immediately regretted buying said crap. More on the power of The Scarcity Loop here.
When we get overwhelmed by how much we own, we often seek minimalism.
But minimalism has failed us (I covered why in Scarcity Brain). Luckily, I found a smarter way we can get more from less …
In thinking about how we can make smarter purchasing decisions, I’ve begun delineating between gear and stuff.
Stuff is a possession for the sake of it. Stuff adds to a collection of (too many) items. We often buy stuff impulsively to fix boredom or stress or to solve a problem we could figure out creatively with something we already have.
Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose.
Gear is a tool we can use to have better experiences that make us healthier and give our lives meaning.
Enter Gear Not Stuff, a monthly column featuring the best gear.
This month’s Gear Not Stuff: Home strength equipment—and the exact weights to buy
Cousin Tanner, a recurring character in the Two Percent universe, recently came over to interrogate me.
His employer had given him a fund for health spending, which he could use on home exercise equipment.
That’s a good move on his company’s part. People who have home gym equipment are more likely to exercise, according to various studies. Of course, there’s a bias there—a person who buys exercise equipment is more motivated to exercise than the average person. But decades of research also shows making a behavior easier to do increases the probability that we’ll do it. Hence, having home gym equipment is a good idea for long-term health.
Cousin Tanner had three basic questions for me:
What home strength equipment should I buy?
How heavy of weights should I buy in the recommended equipment?
Why did our grandmother love you more, Michael?
Today’s Gear Not Stuff will cover his first two questions. You’ll learn:
Strength equipment for a simple but highly effective home gym.
The weight sizes of each piece of equipment you should buy.
Let’s roll …
Note: I’ve separated the weight recommendations into “male” and “female” categories.
Some women will be strong enough to move into the “male” category (you’ll probably know if that’s you), while some men might want to select weights from the female category. Use common sense based on your age, size, and exercise background.
We need more research on women, but using the “men” and “women” categories made me feel like I could give better advice than if I were to use bodyweight categories, which I also considered.
Go deeper: Read the American College of Sports Medicine consensus statement on average size and strength differences between men and women.
Good tools for a home gym
Cousin Tanner often comes over to work out with me in my garage gym.
I have all sorts of toys in there: A rack, barbell, hex bar, hundreds of pounds of bumper plates, way too many sandbags and kettlebells, a slide board, etc, etc, etc. It’s like a compact CrossFit gym.
I’ve collected that equipment over a career writing about health and fitness. But all that gear isn’t necessary for most people.
“Honestly, dude,” I told him, “You don’t need a quarter of this sh*t.”
I think most people can get equally fit with much less equipment.
If I didn’t have the job I do and wanted to build a lean, effective garage gym, here are the weights I’d buy. They’re what I told Cousin Tanner to buy1.