Most people haven’t the luxury of training in a real gym, due to the steady decline of mankind and the concomitant death of hardcore gyms. In spite of this fact, there are a couple of things you can do to up the ante in your gym, and make it a bit more useful.

  • Bring in rubber matting. While this might seem somewhat odd, and perhaps outside the realm of what your gym might allow, it’s worth asking. You might be pleasantly surprised by their response- Sportsplex in Birmingham agreed to let me bring in rubber matting and leave it there for doing olympic lifts and deadlifting, and Top Gym in Vienna encouraged me to bring it in. You can buy it used from restaurants, or occasionally get old shit for free, and a couple of layers of it will pad the floor enough that you won’t have to worry about a “controlled decent” for heavy lifts.
  • Buy fat gripz. They’ll confer the ability to do fat bar lifting without having a fat bar.
  • Conversely, you can create a fat bat by buying a cheap bar and then hooking pvc piping around the bar. The ends of most bars unscrew, so you can just slide the pipe on. Check out this site for tips on how to modify a barbell or dumbbell.
  • Talk to your gym owner about allowing you to use unused space (like a large storage closet) as a “scream room” for powerlifting. You’ll likely have to supply your own equipment, but with the number of gyms going out of business these days, craigslist is a gold mine for equipment.

It might suck to lift in a big box gyms, but you can employ any of the above techniques to make the place, at the very least, tolerable.

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!