Your Ultimate Home Gym
The comprehensive guide on how to make a personal strength training space you will love
Everything you need to know to set up your home gym, educate yourself, use it, and get stronger
By Adam Michael Schenck
Copyright 2020 Adam Michael Schenck
All rights reserved
Email me at < schencka1@gmail.com > | Visit @schencka1 at Twitter and Instagram
Table of Contents
Why I Wrote This Book
As I write, the United States and the world are dealing with the impacts of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. The government has advised citizens to shelter-in-home, or minimize contact with others in public spaces, and even stay away from neighbors, friends, and family members. Social distancing means staying at least six feet away from anyone if you do have to go outside the home. (Personal proximity distancing would be more accurate.)
Obviously, this has been a major change for everyone, and we will feel the reverberations for generations, much like how my grandmother who grew up in the Great Depression would carefully save wrapping paper, plastic bags, and aluminum foil for reuse.
The pandemic has been a major disruption: people are dying, the economy has collapsed, and everyone I know is staying at home. While this could seem like a depressing timethe word depression describes both an economic and mental-health statusI have a superweapon right in my garage: my beloved home gym .
I have noticed many articles, podcasts, and YouTube videos dedicated to helping people work out at home, with some offering pointers for building a home gym. While this is content on which I borrow for this book, nothing I have seen brings together the full breadth of insights necessary to create and utilize ones home gym as a full-on, comprehensive lifestyle game-changer.
Indeed, my home gym has been, literally, a lifesaver. (Well, not truly literally. Its keeping me sane right now, but my gym didnt jerk me out of the way of an oncoming train.) Your home gym can save your life, too, whether you are reading this during a pandemic or not.
Yes, I write from a grim time, but darkness makes the light.
Why You Should Read This Book
Dear Reader:
The goal of this humble book is nevertheless ambitious. I want to guide your creation of your home gym, offer insights for your ongoing utilization of your space, and help you make lifestyle changes that will bring you health and wealth.
Strength training with a barbell is the sine qua non activity for improving your physical and mental strength. Sine qua non means the essential ingredient for a goal, or without which there is nothing in Latin. Speaking of antiquity, Milo of Croton was a Greek wrestler in the 6th Century BC who (according to the myth) built his strength by carrying a calf every day until the bull reached maturity. This is a metaphor for progressive overload training. The lesson: progress is incremental. We should focus on strength.
Merely working out is not the same as strength training. Working out means performing exercise that causes you to increase your heart rate and aspiration (or breathing). You might sweat, and if you lift weights, feel sore muscles the next day. Contrary to popular opinion, this actually does not benefit you much. Soreness is not an indicator of improved performance.
Training with a barbell is the best activity to improve your health outcomes. Simply put, we are organisms that have evolved to adapt and recover in order to interact more successfully with our environment.
We cannot change our genetics, such as our height, but we can use barbell training to improve our strength progressively. We do so with training: an informed approach to improving strength, and thereby performance and wellness.
Anyone can train, just as anyone can benefit from being able to influence his or her environment more successfully via strength. Every demographic group can benefit: male, female, old, young. In fact, if you are an organism, you can improve with training. Yes, thats everybody. (Sadly, dogs and cats cannot train in this way, owing to their lack of opposable digits, but Id never mess with a gorilla thats a gorilla and lifts .)
In the popular media, you would think that in both workouts and relationships, women are from Mars and men are from Venus, and that you need a specific training, diet, and recovery plan with a brand name just for you. There have been too many fads to name.
What we need is an understanding of principles.
Training utilizes the stress/adaptation/recovery cycle, first described in the scientific literature by Hans Selye. In this book, instead of trying to explain things that deserve their own entire books, podcast series, or YouTube channels, I will point you in right direction so you may educate yourself. For example, now might be a good time to search Wikipedia for Hans Selye and Milo of Croton , and do a Google search for stress adaptation recovery cycle .
When appropriate, I will point you toward the best resources on the market, whether free, cheap, or expensive. In doing so, I am imagining you as someone who brings his or her own skills, such as an eye for snake-oil salesmen. You also have the ability to query for information and shop on the web, and search for video and audio content on YouTube and podcast platforms. You are also a person who has discretionary time and money, and you want to improve your quality of life.
I trust you to make your own decisions, but I can help you become a smarter consumer and not make my mistakes. No product or service is perfect, so I will point you toward the best stuff available, and give you hard-won shortcuts for creating your home gym and the lifestyle that comes with it. I will guide you to avoid the pitfalls I discovered, and offer thoughtful critiques even of the best minds, products, and services.
Speaking of thought leaders, so much of what is in the strength, health, and wellness content sphere is either too detailed, such as what one finds in a kinesiology research journal, or far too generic, such as any article with a general audience like Mens Health or on Bodybuilding.com . I read both kinds of content for years, and while I gained overall understanding, it is only in the past couple of years that I have learned and put into action practical knowledge.
Its no coincidence that this happened as I built my home gym. When you build yours, you will find what I found. When its your gym in your home, its personal!
Your home gym is personal in a way that a personal trainer could never show you. This is something you do for yourself. As you can tell, I derive great pride and joy from my home gym.
The value I derive from my home gym is tremendous, even when I am not stuck inside my home during a pandemic. I want to offer you a model to create that same value in your own home, and I bring specific knowledge to make that happen for you.
The strength training lifestyle is part of the sound mind, sound body approach.
Lets make it happen at home!
About the Author
My strength, health, and wellness journey started at the ripe age of fourteen. In my small rural hometown of Harlan, Iowa, in the 1990s, I was standout athlete. Granted, I was definitely a big fish in a small pond, as Harlans population was 5,000, and my high school graduating class had 140 students. Nevertheless, I loved sports and played football, basketball, golf, track and field, and baseball.
In the final game of the season of freshman football, I tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my left knee. I did physical therapy to build my strength back up after reconstructive surgery, but less than a year later, my ligament graft broke in a pickup basketball game, and I had to have the same reconstructive surgery again.
