Do You Need a lot of Equipment to Achieve Your Training Goals?

DiSalvo Performance Training gym in NYC.

There are a lot of ways to get what you want out of training:

Strength training to improve your health? You can use a lot of different methods to get there.

Strength training to increase your squat numbers? Many roads can lead to that goal as well.

Any choice you make however, involves some type of equipment to get there. So much so that you ultimately need to invest enough to build a home gym (on some scale), or seek outside help in the form of a gym membership or trainer’s help.

How much should you invest though? How much do you actually need?

Let’s explore.

How Long Have You Been Training?

The more of a beginner you are, the less likely the variety and a large selection of exercise will matter to you in the early stages. What is important as a novice is to really understand exercise form and movements. It’s important to pattern the lifts properly, and gain the skills to be able to do basic troubleshooting on the fly as things are happening.

This is a classic case of “practice makes perfect.” The only required equipment is the equipment involved directly with the task at hand. A squat can be done with bodyweight, for example, but depending on how you load it (with a kettlebell, barbell, or even a belt squat), there are different demands placed on you. Knowing what your goals are is helpful in directing you here.

Weak Points & Effectively Attacking Them

Usually, you’ll find that your weaknesses are your limiting factors to your progress, so we spend a great deal of time here at DiSalvo Performance shoring up the weak points to make sure you stay progressing.

Weak points, depending on how long you’ve been training, often require special exercises or equipment to strengthen.

For example, say we have a person who may be struggling with their deadlift, and through the advice of a trainer or knowledgeable friend, they realize their hamstrings are the weak point in their deadlift and they need to work on them. The problem is: they only have a barbell and a few kettlebells to work with.

After a few months of Romanian Deadlifts and Kettlebell Swings, they’ve exhausted their hamstring training options with their equipment and can only perform hamstring exercises that involve hinging at the hips.

If you were to give this hypothetical person access to a hamstring curl (seated, standing or prone), as well as a back extension or GHD, they would find themselves with 3 or 4 times the options and ability to work on their hamstrings. Add to that, using training considerations like a hinge in the hip vs. straight hips while selecting exercises, and you now have a person who will likely no longer have weak hamstrings.

In this instance, having an abundance of equipment would speed up and ensure our hypothetical person is able to adequately train their hamstrings.

Relying on Less

I spent the early part of my career with very little available to me in the way of equipment. I learned a lot of work-arounds and tricks to training minimally that served me extremely well. It also made me appreciate the value of a tool or machine when you had one. It can be as simple as a bench when you’ve relied on working on and off the floor.

The more you rely on less, and the longer you do so, you’ll find that you build a resilience and critical thinking to really be creative in your training, but more importantly, effective.

But, The Longer You Train…

Thee longer you take either the minimal approach or the well-equipped one, the slower the progress will become. It becomes, at that point, about being brutally consistent and discerning with your training and programming.

In this regard, I would advise someone who has more experience to give themselves a new palette of exercises to help them move forward— something with a novel stimulus. If this can be achieved with minimal equipment, then I support that. More often than not, you will need to invest some time, effort or funds to do so, and that’s usually with new equipment and access to more exercises.

The Best Requires the Best

The higher and loftier your goals, the more you need to invest in yourself. There’s no way around it. For example, a person with the goal to put 700lbs or more on their back and squat will need to do so with the right gear. They’ll need to make sure they do the proper accessory work, and they’ll certainly need the appropriate bars and equipment to cycle through. Doing the same thing over and over again alone will not take them where they want to go.

Similarly, a seemingly more minimalist calisthenics goal also requires some variation and special tools as well: a person starting with very little experience who wants to do a muscle-up will need a few props to help aid and train different parts of the movement along the way.

Variety

The less you have available to you, the more likely you are to experience overuse injury if you only ever do the same exercises, over and over. At DiSalvo Performance Training, we use a lot of variety in our training. Besides keeping it fresh, we’ve found over the years through work with countless clients and athletes that when you’re rotating exercises, you’re far less likely to contribute to over-use aches and pains or injuries.

There is no monopoly on hard work.

In other words, no matter how you choose to train, you will never simply be able to “hack it” or get by without working hard and working smart. It also means that no matter what any commercially interested party tells you, that you can indeed make progress without the latest gadget or piece of gear.

In the end, a little thoughtfulness towards your training goes a long way. We have a great deal of training equipment at DiSalvo Performance, but it was all chosen with the needs of our clients and athletes in mind. It wasn’t always that way: in 2015, we started with approximately 10ft by 12ft of space in a PT clinic with a rack a few extra weights. Our clients had great results then too.

What matters most is effort, thoughtfulness and a willingness to push through the sticking points.

If we can help you with your sticking points, questions on equipment or otherwise: