Building a Home Gym for Awesome At-Home Workouts, PART ONE

Home Workouts for Mass, Power, Strength, and Muscular Development!
PART ONE: Just the Basic Barbell

C.S.: Here is a photo I took of my home gym this past weekend.

For well over a decade, I trained at a commercial gym.  When I wanted to take my powerlifting training seriously, however, in the late '90s, I decided it was time to trade in the commercial gym for a good home gym.  This is probably the opposite of what most people do, as many lifters will begin training at home on a basic weight set, then decide to acquire a gym membership once they "get serious" with lifting.  But I relished the idea of creating a good, dungeoness home gym free of the distractions on offer at any commercial gym.

In this article (and the ones that will follow) I will offer some tips, tricks, and advice for creating a home gym conducive to hardcore mass and power training, and provide some ideas of the training you can do at each stage of your home gym's development.

Getting Started

To start with, the most obvious thing you need are some weights!  Don't worry about benches, racks, extra equipment, and the like until you've purchased some good free weights.  Save your money, and buy a good Olympic barbell set. Do NOT buy barbells that are smaller than Olympic-size, and don't buy any "rubber" or "plastic" plates.  (Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of folks who built muscle on the most rudimentary equipment and weights around, but anything else other than what I recommend here simply won't last that long.)  Get a solid Olympic bar, and at least 300 pounds of plates to go with it.  Most sets that you will purchase in a store or online typically go up to 300 to 315 pounds.  Along with the barbell and plates, buy at least two or three pair of dumbbells for "assistance" work.  To "get started", you really don't need anything else.  If you think you need more, think again!  Up until the 1940s and '50s, many an Olympic lifter and/or strength athlete used little else, and many an athlete built prodigious levels of muscle and power with nothing more.

Most of your training, if you're going to get as big and strong as your genetics will allow, needs to be while you're standing up, anyway.  If you look at the 4 things that I believe all lifters MUST do in order to gain as much muscle and strength as possible, all 4 of them involve standing lifts:

1. squat heavy weights

1. press heavy weights overhead

1. pick heavy weights off the ground

1. drag or carry heavy weights or implements for distance or time

None of the 4 things above need to involve any equipment other than just a basic barbell set.  And the truth is that you could build an impressive physique, and an even more impressive level of strength, and never buy anything other than a basic barbell set your whole life! End of discussion.  Period.
Now that I've inspired you with those words, if you want to immediately rush down to your local sporting goods store so that you can begin training at home as soon as today, here are some tips to help you get the most out of your basic barbell set, and your basic barbell training:

• With the minimal equipment comes a (surprising) benefit. It forces you to do minimalist training, which most of us need to do anyway.  For your first few workouts, stick with two or three exercises, max.

• Begin your workouts with a "combo" exercise that utilizes pulling, squatting, and pressing in one movement.  For instance, the classic clean and jerk requires you to clean the barbell from the ground and squat the weight, then press it overhead in whatever manner you prefer.

• As far as exercise selection goes, here are a few ideas:

• Front squats: front squats are a great choice for lifters who don't have a rack.  It forces you to clean the barbell on the first rep of each set, which (in my book) just means an opportunity to build more muscle.

• Power cleans

• Full cleans

• Power snatches

• Full snatches

• Hang cleans

• Hang snatches

• Overhead squats

• Deadlifts (conventional, sumo, stiff-leg, Romanian)

• High pulls

• Overhead presses

• Push presses

• Bent-over rows

• Lunges

• Barbell curls

• Reverse curls

• Floor Press

• Those are enough exercises to get started, but after you have trained for a while, don't be afraid to get creative.  One of the best ways to do this is by combining some of the above into one exercise.  For instance, I'm fond of "sumo deadlift high pulls" and "deadlift barbell curls", but the combinations that you can come up with are almost unending.

• If you're new to at-home training, one of the benefits you will quickly discover is how frequently you can train.  (This is, of course, assuming that you enjoy training!😏).  Take advantage of this by training daily using just one-lift-per-day.  The beauty of one-lift-per-day is that you can go "all-out".  For instance, here is what a week of workouts might look like training Five-days-per-week:

• Monday/Front Squats: 10 sets of 8 reps

• Tuesday/Barbell Curls: Work up to a heavy single using "ramps" of 5, 3, and, finally, 1 rep. As an example, if I was going to work up to 135 lbs for a single rep, I would start with the barbell only for a set of 5, and add 5 to 10 pounds to the bar with each set, continuing to do 5s until they get really hard.  Then move on to triples, followed by the heavy singles.  I would end up doing between 8 to 12 sets total, on average.

• Wednesday/Overhead Presses: Work up to a heavy single as with the curls above.  After you have "maxed out", drop the weight down and perform 5 set of 5 reps.

• Thursday: OFF

• Friday/Deadlifts: Work up to a heavy triple.  Once you have hit your "max" for 3 reps, stick with that weight and utilize it for singles, performing 3 to 5 sets of 1 rep.

• Saturday/"Suitcase" Carries: Load the barbell with as much as you can handle, and carry it like a suitcase - one arm at a time - for distance.

• Sunday: OFF

• If you're an athlete who needs speed in addition to just raw strength and power, then the following week, you can perform the same exercises as those above, but do 8 to 12 sets of 1 to 3 reps using the dynamic effort method of training.

• Even though you train at home, you may simply prefer infrequent training.  For some of you, more infrequent training is also more conducive to muscle growth than the more frequent styles of training.  I have even competed at some of the highest levels of powerlifting when training only 2 days per week, so there's no reason to believe that more infrequent training will hold you back.  Here's an example of a 2-days-per-week training program that will build all the strength and power you could want:

• Day One (Monday as an example): 

• Front Squats - 5 sets of 5 reps.  For the squats, work up to a max set of 5, so these would be 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps.

• Power Cleans - 5 sets of 5 reps; 5 singles.  As with the squats, work up over 5 progressively heavier sets until you reach a max set of 5 reps.  After your max set, add a little weight (10 pounds for example) and perform 5 singles.  These should be "relatively" easy since you're performing a single with something you could probably get 4 or 3 reps with at this point.

• Overhead Presses - 5 sets of 5 reps; 5 singles.  These should be performed the same as the power cleans.

• Suitcase Carries - Perform these the same as described in the previous workout above.

• Day Two (Thursday, for example)

• Power Snatches - 10 sets of 2 reps.  All manner of snatches require good technique and speed, so you don't want to perform these for high reps.  Take your time working up to a "hard" set of doubles, but a weight where you still have a rep or two "in the tank," so to speak.  Stick with that weight until you have done 10 sets total, including the sets you did working up to it.

• Walking Lunges - 4 sets of 20 reps (10 reps each leg).  Here, you'll do something a little different.  Take the barbell outside, and lunge up and down your driveway, or the road in front of your house, or the field by your house - you get the picture.  But this is one of the benefits of working out at home: you can get outside and train.  In fact, occasionally it's good to do your entire workout outside.

• Floor Presses - 5 sets of 10 reps.  Work up over 5 progressively heavier sets until you reach a max set of 10 reps (or close).  

• Barbell Curls - 4 sets of 10 reps.  Perform a couple of warm-up sets, then perform all of your "work" sets with the same weight for 4 sets of 10.

• The last thing I want to mention is this: HAVE FUN!  Try something different, something that you wouldn't have been able to do while training in a sappy commercial gym.  I already mentioned training outside, but get creative.  Add some bodyweight movements such as chins or push ups to your routine.  Do something really crazy such as squat the entire day.  On a random Saturday, decide that you are going to do a squat every hour on the hour for the whole day!  Or try doing clean and jerks or full snatches (something that works the whole body as much as possible) for 30 to 50 sets of singles!  Or combine one of the workouts above with different yoga poses performed in between each set.  Your only limit truly is your imagination,  So get inventive, and get creative, and have some fun.

• In the next installment, we will discuss some training programs that you can do once you have added a bench and some dumbbells to your new gym.