The Best Exercise Equipment For Starting Your Own Gym

Posted on December 31, 2022

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Are you looking to be the master of your destiny? Take the bull, by its horns be the Picasso of the movement industry. Oh, that’s right, you’re looking to build your own gym. And you’ve been looking for the best equipment that will maximize your dollar optimizer space and be functional for your clients. So stay with me because I’m gonna be sharing my thoughts on the 11 best pieces of equipment that are absolutely essential to have in your functional movement training gym. These are the ones I cannot live without. And at the end of the video, I’m going to be letting you in on three additional things people often forget to consider when creating their facilities. So make sure to watch to the very, very end. Before I get into though, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel for new content on tips, tricks, how to do stories, etc, about all things movement and related training every single week. All right. Over the past 15 years, as a movement coach, I’ve gone from training to a in a 400 square foot facility to now running a 13,000 square foot facility for the past seven and a half years. So I know that buying the right equipment and maximizing your space is critical to the flow of your training sessions, as well as your customer experience. So with the listen to others show you, I’m going to show the pros and the relative cons that come with every single piece. So let’s dive in. Let’s have some fun, some packed and let’s get your facility operating smoothly and sweet. The first tool on my list and one of the most important tools on my list is the power block not just any old dumbbell, but a vertically stacked weight space saving option. The power block is in so many ways the dumbbell of the future. Because in a functional training space, where square footage is the most important cost. And thing to watch out for, we want to stay save space, we’ll learn about the power block is that in one stack, I can go from four pounds all the way to 32 pounds in this set, we also have sets that go to 50 pounds. And we also have to have sets that go to 100 plus pounds. In terms of the ease and the ability to set and tear down a facility these cannot be beat. Also, what I love about them is their color coordination and easy ability to change and stack and grab weights at a quick quick notice, especially for circuit training type applications. It’s honestly so robust, they don’t really break honestly can’t throw them around. They’re not like the Bowflex of the quick lock, those are kind of janky to be quite frank with you and they’re not commercial grade, they’re not high high quality. The only limiting factor with a power block is that only one person can use it at a time. Even though I have literally a whole strand of dumbbells packed in this one piece. Only one person can use it at a time, which is a limiting factor. But in a circuit based training, circuit based training application, honestly, you only need about one person or two people to go through a circuit using that same piece of equipment. I love when people walk into our facility. And they’re like where’s all the weights out? Like? Do you guys even pick up load. And they don’t even realize that we actually have more sets of dumbbells than a traditional big box gym. With all the mirrors in the rack. They’re just so well hidden and so well compact in our spot. Just as quick example, though, I started out with one set, we now have over 10 Different sets ranging from the heaviest from 2022 pounds, all the way to 100 plus pounds. They’re amazing tools highly recommend them and can’t say anything more than power blocks are a great way to go. The second tool on my list is the Viper. This tool is an absolute showstopper, if you know how to use it, and I’m gonna do a brief explanation. That should be like I got to consider this tool. Because we’ve all considered the barbell right the barber that’s like a staple in our industry. But I think it needs to have its place much more on a shelf than in everyday functionality. Because the vast majority of our clients in front of us do not yield 20 kilos of solid steel in a way that is designed for vertical displacement or vertical loading. Our life is much more angular and much more rotational in nature. And this is where this tool can come in. The second thing we’re looking for is how do we get the most versatility out of our tools and the Viper fills that void. It can still be used for the traditional Olympic style type of lifting patterns. But it can be also used for sliding for twisting and pressing for also for dragging also for flipping and even. Even even if for throwing and for slamming. Do I recommend you slam it all the time? No, but you can check it. You can toss it and it’s designed to take that load a BB I’ll simply cannot do all those things with a clientele and population that the vast majority of trainers see, there is a limitation with the Viper. And it is overall load is capped out at around 50 plus pounds, there is a helpful hint, you can take a viper and stack it in another Viper to increase your weight but you’re still limited to around 70 pounds or so. But it is a small limitation because 70 pounds yielded in three dimensional space is so good for 95% of the population. So if you do want to load more Yes, a barbell can fulfill but again, it’s pulling it off the shelf, a dusty shelf that is because it needs it can be used so little to accomplish with this can do so much more. So number two on my list, the Viper number three on this list is absolutely the sled, the sled produces so much cost savings, that it’s really remarkable that we haven’t picked up on this much sooner in many more facilities that have sterols still use the traditional squat rack, there’s still choose the traditional leg press leg extension machine, when this solves all those things combined. What I love about the sled is a it’s practical, we actually have to move our body to move the load that’s on the sled. That’s exactly how life is. It allows you to train forward and backwards. It allows you to train lateral even allows you to train rotational. It’s really about thinking how do I actually operate in real life and how do I use this sled to make it happen. So real quick, if I want to increase my leg strength, well, I’m just going to push this sled on a pull and actually train downhill motion, or train my quads my front my ability to to propel backwards, I pull that sled, it’s really, really perfect in its application. Get rid of the squat racks, if you’re starting a facility if you don’t have that space, and that type of squat rack is really a great way to store equipment, more so than just actually use it for vertical displacement just for holding a barbell, where this allows that that angulation that travel. What I also love about the sled is it allows you to really kind of hook up equipment to it. To make it even more you can actually use it as an anchor for ropes. If you do want to go that that way. You can also use it as an anchor for bungees if you want to go that that way. And it’s really an amazing way that these legs can apply functionality, true functionality to where a squat rack or any sort of big bulky piece of machine only has one function where this has multiple functions, I would not start at a facility ever, without having this sled by my side. There is is one relative limitation with this this particular sled that has on skids is that using turf or some sort of carpeting material would be necessary. However, there are sleds out there with wheels on them that have gears that allow you to change the resistance level of that sled. A little bit more pricey, but something to heavily consider over a squat rack, leg press or any sort of leg machine that you sit into. Love this tool, going to have forever the sled. The fourth tool or tools on my list is going to be the medicine ball and or a bag of fit fighter a sambil something that you can throw yield slam toss with a lighter enough load that you can express movement and its ballistic nature. That’s what I love about functional movement training is that even the act of walking and running as a ballistic sport, meaning you’re throwing your legs you’re throwing your arms are propelling. You’re actually jumping, leaping, stepping, hopping with every single motion that you do. What how do you train it with authenticity, you allow something to leave your hands. Now I know that the Viper can also leave your hands as well. But not something that it’s designed to do on the regular where these tools are especially our new friends, the Fit fighter where it’s designed to get the crap beaten out of it. And yes, you can use it as a viper. Yes, you can use it even as a dumbbell but can you take it and just give it everything you have over and over and over again. And that tool to the time I’m filming this video has been the answer. But the medicine ball again, there’s so many sports in our life that use a ball and so it’s a psychological advantage to use it with your training facility because you can also throw it you can also yield it you can also toss it and a soft enough and it feels familiar enough for our athletic desires in our training and conditioning to be that kind of like welcoming like Oh cool.

It’s a ball. I’m going to train I’m gonna play. I’m gonna have fun with it. So what I love about these tools is its lightness, in terms of how it can be played in and put into very complicated situations. But also, in a sense, it’s so simple, I also just have to throw it, it’s one of the things we learned as a child very early on is how to throw something. And again, it brings us back to those fundamentals of movements. And myth, because it’s a fundamental has to be fundamental in our facility as well. So love the bag, the Fit fighter, the sand bell with cases and the medicine ball as essential staples for your facility. The fifth tool on my list is a tool that doesn’t get as much recognition doesn’t get as much hype. But it’s an essential tool for the sustainability of your facilities ability to make revenue, right, we can’t keep kicking clients out of our doors, because of our improper ability to be able to restore their muscles, their tissue, into a good amount of health. So that’s where a foam ball of foam roller comes into play and is a must, it has to be part of the warm up or cool down or part of the class that enjoys the fact that our muscles need restoration on a daily, if not weekly basis. So without these being accessible in our facility, we’re setting ourselves up for clients to get worn down, if not injured faster or sooner, it’s truly a matter of when your clients will experience some sort of movement dysfunction that is felt as pain, it’s a matter of when it will happen. Not if it will happen with every single person. So what are we going to do about it? How are we going to plan for that? What are we gonna do to prevent or prolong that from happening. And again, soft tissue is one of those things that is just it’s that kind of hidden gem like it works with 99.99% of the population, our tissue gets too tight, our fascia gets bound down needs more hydration needs more play, it needs more elasticity, and boom, these tools need to be present, they need to be accessible. They’re very, very inexpensive, they store very, very well. And it’s just a simple act of how to use them. And where to put them that allows your trainers, if you have many trainers or your clients to be able to treat, and assess and provide health, where health is really needed in the springs in these muscles in this fascia of our body. So an essential tool must have is the foam roller or foam ball or any sort of application that applies self myofascial release. Number six tool on my list, that I must have to open up a facility to manage a facility and it’s still on the restorative side of things is a mobility stick or stick mobility or something that provides me the stability to provide more elongation of my connective tissue. What I love about this tool is that it’s very affordable. It’s very versatile, and how I can use it to lengthen my clients, my athletes connective tissue, pre post or during a workout. The biggest thing that we lose when we’re trying to do stretching is stability, that doing a yoga class for a lot of people is actually more of a test on their balance than it is on their ability to actually lengthen their tissue. This is especially true with newer athletes, or athletes that have not been training for quite some time. So giving our sense that I can find stability, and I can find leverage within a pattern to lengthen in a way that allows my body to represent the movements have to actually do versus the good old fashioned, just reach down, touch your toes, sit down, do a butterfly stretch like that. Those things are not functional movement patterns that our body actually does in real life. So therefore are connected, you says you’re kind of confusing me in what you want as flexibility and what it actually need for flexibility. So the mosaic allows that pattern support that really makes stretching much more effective. Now, yes, you can’t get the best stability. And honestly, the true stretch is a bar none the best stretching device that I think has ever been invented. And yes, we do have well, more than a dozen of them in our facility. But the expense in the in the space is was something that is well needed more so. So in the start, if I knew of this, if I knew that stretching was so much about stability, then I could find a more mobility, I would have 50 of these. We actually do now but in the beginning, I would save a lot more money than versus saving up for one of those though it is ideal. It is ideal. This is much more affordable and space saving so can’t say enough about a good old fashioned stick that allows for some movability some playability and stability Woody in our stretching game, Bostick, it’s a huge win. The number seven tool on this list is the soft plyo. Box soft being critical, and box being critical, the ply apart not the most critical to describe why in life in functionality in the versatility of the class, that means we may see, changing the height of the ground is very important and very helpful to train the train that a range of athletes that we may be be seeing, when we’re going to do core, we’re going to group prone, we’re going to do supine, the ground is a challenging place to get to and come up from gravity is being thrown at us at its full potential. And so if we can change the angulation of our body, and start doing planks from a foot up two feet up, then we start to say, wait a minute, our core training potential or periodization has a lot more legs to it. And so the soft part is, is critical because how many times have I been in gym, I just see those that Shin just tore up for because they missed that box. They came on to just walk. It’s like well wait, why we’ve been doing that with wood? And why we’ve been doing that with with metal. It’s like, why can’t we can we make that a little bit more appeasing a little bit more helpful? The answer is yes, I can really kneel down on that and be just just fine. The second part about the boxes is huge is that we have steps, we have hills, there is an angulation change in most of our day to day life. And stepping up onto something to go at a at an incline or stepping down on something on a decline is just so functional. It’s just it’s kind of scary. Well, why don’t we train for that more often? Yes, we can jump. But the jump is something I’ve reserved for most athletes that we do not even see. Should we train ballistic training? Absolutely, absolutely. But when do we do it well, later on in the periodization curve would be my recommendation. So the soft plyo box is great, not only for a seat for your team meetings, but also for the sake of that applies that changing of elevation, and changing of the core that we typically love to do in a way that’s applicable, helpful and sustainable for so many of our clients. So highly recommend the plyo softbox for any brand new facility that’s being opened up, or if you’re re energizing your facility, get away from the harsh pneus of of the potential scraping of shins into something much more manageable in terms of the longevity of your clients bones, and skin flowerbox super thumbs up. So those are my seven staples that if I were to do things all over again, I would not want to live without hopefully your gears are turning a little bit. And you’re thinking about how ways that you maybe want to design or redesign your gym space already. And I would love to help no joke because I love designing and organizing facilities. I literally make time every single week in my calendar to go spend time geeking out really looking at how my facility is set up. So I can optimize it for more functionality. I literally view my facility as a manufacturing line that even Tesla Elon Musk himself would be proud of. So leave a note in the comments below and let me know what your biggest struggles are in designing and optimizing your space. And I still have actually three more pieces of equipment to get through as well as three very important considerations that are critical to know. So stay with me as I dive into them. In the gym equipment and dri design phase, there’s always accessories, small little bits and pieces that I didn’t want to miss. Didn’t want to leave you hanging on to like, Well, what about this, it’s like buying a car and wanting to put in just the right air freshener or changing those, those mats out to all weather mats, those little things and touches and pieces that you kind of forget about until we’re in the moment.

So here’s a small list. And the first one is what I’m kneeling on right now is simply a knee pad something something soft for your bodies to get down on, whether it be on for the forearms, on for the knees, or even use for excessive balancing, or padding. We’re getting we’re talking about the class that we’re serving. Not every single one of them wants to get grungy, dirty, sweaty, beyond on the dirt be rough, right? We’re dealing with clients who are in a phase of their growth. That is not completely I would say varsity, right? They’re going through those ranks. So provide the opportunity for them to be comfortably uncomfortable. And honestly, some sort of knee pads, some sort of pad is a central tool that allows for that progression into more rugged, right. So again, invest mixture. It’s a great tool. There’s many out there, I don’t want to refer one particular one, but make sure that they’re available. Again, the next piece is right in front of me and this is the ability to have a wedging. Now wedging is a huge tool for those who know how to think about functional bio mechanics and how changing the environment of my foot allows me to change and tweak things that could prevent an injury that could actually sustain a workout. And again, make those rough patches of dysfunction much more smooth. The easiest one that we could do is simply put both heels up on the wedge, which allows my squat to be so much easier. That’s the basics. But if I can start to play with more pronation, more supination. And if these things you start to understand, then having that quick availability in a group type setting a one on one type setting, can save that workout for that person. So they can start to understand why and what’s going on later on. Again, it’s much more kind of a heavy kind of thing, like what’s going on when I changed my foot position. But again, it saved me so many times that I just couldn’t not put in this video, it had to be a place for something to think about, as in terms of as an accessory. The last one is, what about the push pull right to push a viper out to push a dumbbell is pretty challenging. If you had all the money for a pulley system, that’d be great. Go for it. But what about taking the simple bands, right? These bands are huge, huge, huge help for us, in sense of getting that upright push, getting that upright pull, giving that good sustainable rotation. They’re very inexpensive, they can attach to anything with the right thought process of where to put bolts or eye hooks etc. And they allow that pulley type of feel even hooking to a hip harness, to do locomotion drills. For very low cost, very low space. Again, that bungee a dialed in piece gives you that pulley sensation without all the fuss the mess and cost of getting an entire system on the get go. Love that love this tool a must have. Now moving on to the last piece. These are the necessities of any gym, any facility that you’re thinking about building or rebuilding, and that you have to think about the biggest piece of equipment that you have. And probably one of the biggest cost is the flooring. The flooring is such a missed opportunity that so many people that as they go through it, say gosh, I wish I had a little bit more thought into it. Now I remember my first space, it was literally just horse stall mats, four by sixes, I cut them up, put them together, it worked, it worked fine. But if you want to think about using your flooring as a piece of equipment versus just a covering to make people safe, then think about application of turf. Do not application of the lines. even think about applications of floor stickers. We have compasses in our facility to help manage three dimensional movement patterns that they can view and see having a flooring that is well thought out that yes, you may spend a little bit more money on but if it saves you from gym setup, gym tear down do you had lines on your turf, we didn’t have to actually mark off to put cones were 10 yards 15 yards was if there was numbers on them, you have to say go to the fourth line, the 50 is already down there. Again, the cost is very small in relativity to the versatility it’s going to give you in terms of setup coaching, and help as it’s almost as part of your own team. Because you can plan it so it works for you. Again, even if that’s so much of a cost you cannot do don’t forget that chalk on rubber flooring works exceptionally well you can actually make your own drawings, you can make your own numbers that just can be erased and reapplied if you need to. The next thing I want to talk about is a throwing wall. It’s very important to me that I build a space that has the ability for me to launch things against it. Remember life and movement and running and look motion is ballistic by nature. So if I can train that ballistic and this in my facility without disturbing my neighbor’s breaking down a wall destroying drywall, then I’m going to have it I’ve even gotten to the point where I didn’t have a facility at that time that had my throwing wall and I actually had someone to weld me and bolted it in the ground its own freestanding throwing wall. It was that important to me. Because it allows you to train that athlete building themselves up to use their body as a sequence of ballistic power than anything else. The last thing I want to end with is thinking about when you’re designing your facility. What is the first thing your athletes are going to see the moment they walk into your facility? Think about what the first time you walk into a high scale hotel. What do you see the lobby it’s most lush it’s actually better than the rooms are themselves. What is the first thing you walk into a car dealership inside the most expensive car the most badass car that they offer? What is the first thing you walk in when you walk into someone’s house? Right? The grand entrance the front doors, beautiful. When they walk into your facility. Think of the same thing. What are they going to walk in and see The first thing that’s missed so often in gym designs and gyms setups and I actually whenever I visit gyms I think about that first thing what’s my first impression going to be? All right, appreciate you guys watching. That’s all I have for you today. Hope you enjoyed this video. Please make sure to show your support by liking this video and subscribe to our channel. I will see you soon enjoy. Cheers.