Beyond Brawn - The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle && Might

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ting your bar and some plates out to do your deadlifts, curls and rows under
sunshine and a blue sky may help motivate you to pull out a corker of a
workout.

Equipment control
. If you want to use the Trap Bar, cambered bar and thick bar and perform
feats of grip strength, then a membership-gym will cramp your training.
While you can take your own small plates to a commercial gym, taking your
own Trap Bar, cambered bar, thick bar and various grip devices is not prac-
tical. (But you may be able to persuade the gym’s management to improve
its equipment line.) Many large training facilities do not even have a power
rack, so to use that great piece of equipment you may need to get your
own.

. Once you have your own home gym, get acquainted with a local competent
metal worker. You can then have simple pieces of training gear produced
conveniently, economically and to your own design.

. A home gym opens new avenues of training because some of the best equip-
ment you can get is, paradoxically, not available in public gyms, e.g., the Trap
Bar. Your own gym enables you to use the gear you want, rather than be
limited by a commercial gym’s equipment. A home gym gives you control
over your training.

. An aspect of this control is that you determine how you perform a given
exercise, not the commercial gym or its traditions. For example, suppose
you have discovered you cannot safely squat to parallel. If you train at a gym
where anyone who does not go to below parallel is considered a wimp, you
may be pressed into squatting too deep and suffering a serious injury. In
your home gym, you train as you know you should, not as others think you
should.

Domestic delight
. With a home gym you are set up for getting family members involved in
training, though not all at the same time. is is perhaps the best way to win
people over to your preoccupation with training—get them training them-
selves. With the convenience of a home gym there is little or none of the
self-consciousness an untrained person feels in a commercial setting. You
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