How this training and equipment has benefited me, I think, bears to say that you can just look up my training log from the day one of me joining Elitefts until now. I think if you go through and look through a lot of my training videos and just look at my numbers and what my numbers have done during that time span, that my numbers have continued to follow the equipment.
Now, I'm not going to say that the equipment is going put pounds on your total, but from a lifter that went from having to train at really terrible facilities to basically creating their own miniature facility initially starting to just help myself train, I'm now offering better services to other people in the area and legitimate strength athletes and people that take their training seriously. You will begin to see that as the garage developed, so did my totals, so did my numbers, so did the people that I was working with.
That was originally the whole reason why I started training out of my garage was because I didn't have anywhere to train. Everywhere I went that I wanted to deadlift with, either I couldn't drop it, I couldn't use chalk, they had junk bars, the hours weren't conducive ... There was nothing that supported me and my goals within a close radius to make it manageable. I could squat in recs and I could bench in recs, but deadlifting seemed to be biggest problem. It was technically the lift that I needed the most work on. I decided that I had had enough, that I was basically going to start training out of my garage and start with the absolute bare essentials and work my way up and then, kind of deck things out as I could go. As I said, I started a little training crew. We've already had some people drop out and some other people come in, but we've got a pretty consistent set of three now.
We run our max effort lower and upper days on the weekends, that way everyone is here. They pitch in some money basically as they wish. They understand that I'm giving them a training environment and things they don't have access to. In return, I understand that I'm giving spots, I'm getting loads ... Someone may need help with knee wraps. I'm becoming better as a competitor myself. It's a nice mutual relationship, however, most of the guys tend to throw me money every now and then to help replace equipment or possibly think about getting new equipment.
I initially started out with a bunch of pretty crummy equipment that I managed to find off of Craigslist that was nearby. Very, very cheap equipment, but I knew it was enough to get me started.
The very first piece of equipment that I bought from elitefts.com was a Texas power bar. Immediately after that, I also ended up buying a safety squat bar and a Texas deadlift bar shortly after. I was looking more towards the competition aspect for myself and for my training and what I thought I would get the most bang for my buck piece of equipment. After I got those three bars, I decided to go with the Elitefts GHR. At the time, it was called the E-Series Glute Ham Raise, but this is now called the Scholastic Glute Ham Raise.
I went with the navy blue. I chose the E-Series due to the shipping and the price costs. Anyone that's ever used a glute ham raise knows how important a solid pad is, good adjustability, and durability of a machine that usually gets pretty high usage, especially for people that are training in your garage because there's not a whole lot of ways to train your hamstrings specifically for powerlifting unless you have a glute ham.
I picked that glute ham raise up and it still looks absolutely great. It gets used almost every lower body training session. I thought that that was the number one piece of equipment considering I already had a really cheap rack that I got off of Craigslist. After that, working with some clients, having some people over and creating a training crew, that started off to build some minor revenue.
After having dumbbells and some weights that, again, that I had gotten off of Craigslist, I decided to upgrade my rack to a Collegiate Power Rack fully decked out from top to bottom. We're talking custom paint and the whole nine yards. The rack had to be custom cut down to fit into the garage as the ceilings are only eight foot. With the way the garage door goes up, that leaves me with seven and a half or a little bit over seven and a half feet clearance.
We've also got the monkey chin bars, we've got the weight storage, we've got chain storage, we got the band storage, we got band pegs for top and bottom. There's two sets of J hooks, the two different sets of pins, so you got the rod and pipe and then, you've also got the easy adjustable ones. It took me about five weeks to get this rack, even with the customization that I had done.
Matt Goodwin did an awesome job getting the color scheme the way that I liked it. If you've ever seen the rack that was used in the promotion for the Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos, it looks almost exactly like that with a little bit of changes here and there. Along with that rack, before the order got sent to me, I decided to have Matt go ahead and throw in a cambered squat bar and the box squat box.
To give you an idea of price point of where I am right now at this stage ... Probably looking that I've only spent around four thousand dollars on Elitefts equipment alone. For the bang for my buck that I've gotten, I now have a Box Squat box, two specialty bars, a deadlift bar, a Texas power bar, and a glute ham raise. For ninety percent of people, this is probably going to be enough to really get you going and give you an opportunity to train, see the progress that you want given that you've gotten your weights to load on the barbell.
I would highly suggest the bands as one of the first things you get if you're going to do this. It's going to let you get all of your accessory movements in without needing a cable. At the time, they didn't have the Spud cable attachment, which they do now. That would be another thing that I would add on to your rack. I would also look into getting a pair of blast straps as well. It's something very simple to strap onto the rack and continue to go. The majority of my clients that I work with, we work in the rack and we don't leave the rack. We can do everything from squatting, bench pressing, deadlifting, rack pulls, pull ups, overhead press ... I mean, there's really no limitations in this rack whatsoever. After that rack, I then opted to upgrade my bench.
The bench that I had, again, was something I had got off of Craigslist locally in town. Really crappy. I went with the bolt together bench with the grip pad. This was, by far, probably one of the best investments I actually made. I should have gotten it much, much earlier. I should have gotten it when I had gotten the rack alone or even the junkie rack that I had, due to the width, the nice pad, low cost shipping. This bench is heavier duty than you will find in any commercial gym and this is technically the E-Series version of Elitefts's benches. If that tells you anything that their E-Series is better than ninety nine percent of the benches on the market, that tells you how sturdy this bench is. After that, then I started getting into a little bit more toys as to what I kind of wanted from a powerlifting perspective.
After I'd gotten all that, eventually over time I worked up to purchasing a Deluxe Monolift. I went with the same color scheme with the nice navy blue. Again, shipping on this was really great. Very, very quick for a piece of equipment that is not light or little. It definitely requires some good manpower to assemble, but very, very doable and quite frankly, if you take your training seriously, it is very possible to afford. Then, like I said, we started getting into different toys. I've also got the Swiss press bar, the Swiss angle bar, the El Gordo fat bar, Texas squat bar, a spider bar, and quite a few others.
To wrap up on that, I would say the bare essentials to start with ... If you can, get a power rack. It does not have to be the Collegiate one, but if you ever are considering upgrading your rack, I would highly just suggest starting with the Collegiate rack. That way your upgrades are absolutely nothing. You get everything you want right from the get go. Everything is top quality and you know it's going to last.
I put an absolute beating on my equipment and it still looks nicer than almost any other gym that I've ever been in for the sheer fact of quality that Elitefts puts into their work. After you get the rack and the bench, then it really kind of comes down to what do you need bar-wise. If you're a competitive powerlifter, you're going to need a power bar, you're going to need a deadlift bar. It would be wise to have a squat bar as well. In that case, you may want to start out with the Texas squat bar rather than a Mastodon bar due just to price point. Unless if you're a thousand pound squatter, you probably will get by with the Texas squat bar, especially if you're walking it out and you're a raw competitor.
Then my next thing on the list would definitely be a Glute Ham Raise, the E-Series version. You just can't replace a good glute ham raise. There's no exercise that replaces that in training. There's some ways you can kind of work around it, but you're going to get your dividend and return on investment on that. You also have to think that you can also do ab work off of it. You can also do back extensions, different various movements that kind of increase your accessory training repertoire.
If had to make another suggestion of something that I own, is an E-Series prowler. I opted to get this to get in better shape and get in some extra work. At the price point that the E-Series prowler is, that's something that you can't beat in terms of how fast the shipping is, the durability, the options that you have when it comes to accessory work, and especially if you have the ability to work outside. If you are going to end up working with clients, that's going to be the number one thing that's probably going to keep your clients coming back because they're going to feel like death. As we know, most clients want to feel like they got their ass kicked. That's going to have that immediate return on investment for your clients as I know all my clients that have used it usually hate me after they get done with it.
The process of going through and getting a lot of this equipment was very simple. All I basically did was pick up the phone and call Matt Goodwin, let him know what I was looking to do, what my budget looked like, my limitations when it come to space, etc. The garage that I'm running out of is basically 25x25. I let him know what I was looking for and he basically let me know a couple of options, what he thought we could do, and what would be able to fit within my budget to make this work.
Then once we did that, we basically just pulled the trigger, played the waiting game, and set everything up from a shipping standpoint. What's going to happen, especially if you order something like a rack or something that requires freight ... UPS is eventually going to call you and then, they're going to call you out of a central hub and set up a date and time for them to arrive so you can get all that stuff off of the truck and into your facility or garage or wherever you're setting this stuff up at.
The turnaround made a difference. It was definitely one of the best things that I ever did initially getting that glute ham raise and then, eventually upgrading that rack and getting the bench, then, eventually being able to afford a monolift and the bars that I need for competition. The reason why I picked all this specific equipment for me was I don't like to half-ass anything, whether it comes to training people, work, school, reading, education, training ... Doesn't really matter.
If I can afford the best, I'm going to get the best that money can buy because you basically get what you pay for. Anytime I have anyone walk into this garage ... Usually when I tell somebody that I train in my garage, I get the look of that I'm a crazy asshole that really has no idea what he's doing and I'm a loner and just don't want to be in a commercial setting. Well, while I don't want to be in a commercial setting, the equipment that I have purchased ... When they usually walk in, usually blows their mind.
Most people are just like, "Holy cow. I can't believe you got this to fit in here", and "This is what you lift with every day?" "This is nicer than I've seen in any other gym." While the environment is rough and a lot of the weights and stuff certainly show age and usage and chalk ... It's not a "clean place", but the equipment looks incredibly sharp and shows that there's attention to detail and that everything is built to last. Not only for the safety in the mind of the lifter, but also for the durability and long haul of the athletes of people that it's going to have to work with for the target audience that I want it to work with.
My suggestion would be if you're on the fence about anything when it comes to which rack to get, which glute ham raise to get, which monolift to get ... Any kind of equipment that has different stages or ability to upgrade. If you're on the fence, I would take the extra step and just go ahead and spend the maybe extra hundred bucks. I think you're going to find the payout will be much better than you were expecting. Again, if you have any questions about it, you could of course call Matt Goodwin at Elitefts.
He'll explain absolutely everything to you when it comes down to really fine details because I'm not the equipment guy, so I don't know that much. I just know from my experiences of getting basically all of my equipment through Elitefts what it was like. How it was definitely something that not only changed my own training and my own ability to improve my powerlifting career, but also, how it has been able to improve others increase being able to get clients in here to train. Getting them to train out of a garage is very hard, especially with summer and winter months.
It just shows the absolute dedication that Elitefts gives to their equipment. To give you a brief idea of the approximate money that I've spent at this point ... I've been training out of my garage now for officially two years. I have had the Collegiate rack for approximately, I think, thirteen or fourteen months. We're probably looking at around ... Probably around ten thousand dollars or less. I'm going to go with less of true equipment that I have in here between the rack, the bench, the glute ham raise, the monolift, and a couple of the essential bars, so looking at the deadlift bar, squat bar, and a regular Texas power bar. All very affordable.
I would definitely not recommend anything else but elitefts.com equipment. My story says it all.