What Equipment You Need to Level Up Your Workouts at Home

This week we have Victor Gillespie BS, CSCS, TSAC-F, NCSA-CPT on the podcast to talk about how to build muscle and improve your fitness at home. He will be providing you with the basics you need to get started, as well as what to prioritize if you are ready to invest in more equipment. 

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Transcript

Brianna 0:22

Hello everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of Mocktail Minutes. This is Brianna. Bailey is not with us today. She's taking some much needed time off. She did share on her Instagram and her Facebook, but for those of you who don't know, she was pregnant, had some complications, ended up delivering early, and unfortunately Zoe, her daughter, did not make it. After delivery. So she's taking so much needed time at home and I'm kind of just steering the ship for a while until she's ready to get back into it. But just wanted to give you guys a heads up. So this week I am drinking a spin drift and I did the bl blood orange tangerine. Simple. I should introduce who's with me today,'cause it's not me by myself. Today we're joined by Victor Gillespie. So for those of you who don't know, Victor is my husband and he is in the fitness exercise space. So I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you're drinking.

Victor, BS, CSCS 1:27

not so better half of the two of us. So today I am drinking also doing Spin Drift, but doing the lime'cause it's St. Patrick's Day, my background is in the tactical field and specifically working with tactical athletes. You know, a quick little rundown is I was an instructor at the Army Strength and Conditioning School. I'm currently interning at a D1 college as a strength coach while I finish up my master's. Predominantly, like I said, tactical athletes, but then a large bulk of the last few years has been with general population, so I do a lot of remote stuff now. So our topic today is p- is important because a lot of my clients, they're using home gyms.

Brianna 2:12

Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, and today that's what we're gonna be talking about. We're gonna be talking about those who are needing to, or wanting to work out at home. The type of things that they need to start out to be successful and then the things that they can start looking into once they're ready to like level up or advance their workouts or start getting additional equipment.'cause. Home gyms can be expensive. Not everybody has the money for that. Not everybody has the space for that. So this episode is basically just walking you guys through. If you're someone who wants to work out at home or have been working out at home, the type of equipment you should prioritize to kind of get started and then to level up your workouts. And you know, like in theory, you and I are like a pretty good dream team. You know, nutrition, fitness, we just don't. I think we could do a much better job listening to each other.

Victor, BS, CSCS 3:05

Yeah, probably me more than you. You're fine. You follow

Brianna 3:09

No, I,

Victor, BS, CSCS 3:09

like a raccoon out of a trash can.

Brianna 3:11

well then I also decide that there's just stuff I don't need to do that I do need to do. So for those who are starting out, so we're talking like basic, what are. And I'll kind of have you walk through the whys of why you would have these different types of equipment, but maybe like two, two to four or two to five things, or maybe even less that you can have when you're just starting out and wanting to be successful. What, what, what, what would you say?

Victor, BS, CSCS 3:45

will be on this list. So first I like to set the groundwork of what we're doing here. So a lot of times they don't think-- They just think like,"Okay, I'm gonna go work out." my question for all, everybody I work with is, why? W-what are you doing this for? Are we working out because we wanna look good? Is it aesthetics? And to kinda steer people, what I focus on with everybody I work with is the functional, lifelong, longevity kind of stuff. So I always tell people that my why, like, why do I need to be athletic and fit? Well, our boys grew up on the beach. We do backpacking, right? I've always had this, like, weird set standard where I have to ask myself if... I have an irrational fear of sharks, by the way, just so everybody knows. But if my kid got bit by a shark, could I run out to the water, apply a tourniquet, and then sprint back to a vehicle, which usually covers, what, two hundred meters in sand, and get them to higher level care? I physically and athletically capable of doing that? If one of my sons get bit by a rattlesnake, and we're three to five miles away from a ranger station backpacking for a multi-day trip, could I load up one, potentially two,'cause we got a seven-year-old who's not gonna make the run, so I may have to carry two little humans on my back running in order to, you know, save a life. So sometimes one of the things that we talk about is, one, being an athlete isn't just for your traditional athletes, like the ones I'm working with at the college. Being an athlete and being athletic is what's gonna allow you to reduce that injury risk. That's gonna, you know, be there for when life demands are kinda up on you. It also helps, like, you know, staying resilient, you know, moving well, all that kind of fun stuff. So we first target, hey, what are we even doing here? Why do we set a timer to go into our office space or for us our garage and train? And then, so we have that why, and coming at it from a kind of functional, kinda needing everything to be done perspective, the equipment that we're gonna focus on today allows us to kinda be able to accomplish all of those six functional movement patterns, right? Our hinge, squat, push, pull, carry, rotate. Sometimes carry is interchangeable with lunge, but we all kinda get the picture here. So can you do that? And are you... Do you have the equipment to train different of the energy systems required from that?'Cause we could all, you know, conceptually understand that sprinting up a beach a much different energy requirement than running a three to five-mile trail run. So kind of the framework for it. So to answer your question... Oh, and side note here, I, I said I wasn't gonna digress too much, but the reason we don't do as many podcasts is I overexplain everything. So I, I'm on a tight leash for what I-- how long I could take.

Brianna 6:39

Yeah, no, you, you like to, you're like a short story, long kind of guy and I'm a

Victor, BS, CSCS 6:46

Yep.

Brianna 6:46

story short, which again,

Victor, BS, CSCS 6:48

the way to describe me.

Brianna 6:49

sometimes I need to do the short story long. I think in terms of working with people, a lot of people appreciate like, you know, explaining the background of it, you know, why we're doing it. I like the analogy of like, you know, can I. Save the day type thing. Right. And

Victor, BS, CSCS 7:07

Yep.

Brianna 7:07

I feel like we have plenty of listeners that have that kind of mindset as well, but if you're like, Hmm, I don't have kids, or eh, I don't know. I don't for, we don't go to the beach, we don't backpack. I'm not in those kind of situations thinking about like. Quality of life, right? How long do I wanna be able to carry my kids? Do I wanna be able to play with my grandkids? Do I wanna be able to get invited to a vacation as a grandparent and keep up with everything they want to do? You know? Or maybe you don't have kids at all, but how long do I live independently? Can I do the functional things I need to do for myself so that way I can. Have a good quality of life as I age, which I'm gonna tell you, it sneaks up on a lot of people. And like working in healthcare as we both have, you see that, you see that very quickly. It, it creeps up on you. And people in their forties and fifties are way less mobile than you know they want to be. And it, again, it sneaks a bomb. It's like one of those like. I've had a couple drinks, let me do a cartwheel'cause I was able to do it when I was 17. And then you like pull a hamstring'cause you realize like, holy crap, that's a lot harder than I remember. That sort of thing. But okay. So just getting started out, trying to hit all those functional things, what is equipment that you would say people should prioritize starting out?

Victor, BS, CSCS 8:27

So my kind of bare minimums for us to be successful in all those fields and then again, our training targets, right? We're looking to do strength, we're looking to do VO2 max training, and we're looking to do metabolic conditioning. Those are kinda like the three boxes that we're trying to check. We tend to be really good with the strength. We sometimes have to be coached into these VO2 training as well as the metabolic conditioning. So bare minimums, we wanna do some dumbbells. That's like everybody should do that. Now, my biggest thing with dumbbells is I need people to go heavier than they think they're gonna need, right? So my minimum that I like to tell people is for females, you should have up to twenty-five pounds. Easy Right? For males, 35 pounds. Now, sometimes I see individuals working, they're doing 10s and 15 pounds, but starting off that first six to eight weeks of a new training program, you're going to gain strength very quickly because that's all neuromuscular. That, that's the whole mind-muscle connection. You're going to have exponentially higher growth. So you're going to cap out those very quickly. And then just for reference, Brianna uses 35s for almost everything, 20s for a lot of things. She doesn't touch a 510 or a 15 very rarely. So just because you're a female doesn't mean you need to lift light.

Brianna 9:51

Right.

Victor, BS, CSCS 9:52

again, I've worked with people who, I mean, carrying kids around is, is a task of its own, right? But you'll have, you know, women carry their kid around Target in a car seat, but then they'll use 10-pound dumbbells. And

Brianna 10:03

Great.

Victor, BS, CSCS 10:05

we, we, we can push ourselves a little more. So number one thing is dumbbells, okay? Close number second here, and this is where people tend to kind of not have, is a bench. We need an adjustable bench, not just a flat bench. Because again, idea is how are we going to maximize our space? And this kind of goes into a little bit more logistics if you work with someone like setting up a home gym. For us, we have a two-car garage that's dedicated to a training center. Our space is we're not very limited on space, but I have a lot of clients who they have a small office or a wall against a room they have where space is absolutely paramount. That's like,"Hey, I got to fit everything into this little tiny box." Right? So with that adjustable bench, we sometimes overlook that because we're like,"Oh, it's kind of big." trying to maximize the variety we can get in that little box. So having an adjustable bench so you can do incline work as well as flat work is going to just, you know, is going to increase the variety of your training program significantly. And nowadays they don't, they don't cost too much. Now, that topic, a FID bench or a, a flat incline decline, FID style bench, very common at Dick's Sporting Goods, Walmart, stuff like that, is also super cool because that decline feature allows you to do decline sit-ups, right? We can do some sit-up work on that. We can do different, you know twist movements. And then of course our traditional movements from a decline position. you know, again, they're gonna be a little bit more expensive, but not as much. And the big concern about weight capacity pretty limited, right? The only downfall to some of those adjustable benches is You know, unless you're paying five or six hundred dollars, don't be loading up a ton of weight. And when I say ton of weight, I'm talking two, three hundred pounds on a bar and get in a decline

Brianna 11:59

People are largely not doing that.

Victor, BS, CSCS 12:01

the average person, but just a disclaimer. get yourself a flat incline decline if we're starting off here. Gives us more variety. Okay. Now tho-those are like our bare essentials for our strength portion. Now, when we bring in these other two, it's gonna be our jump rope, and Brianna could tell you, I love jump ropes. Jump ropes are so much fun for me. And again,

Brianna 12:26

So fun.

Victor, BS, CSCS 12:26

we'll keep it a-as, you know, short as possible here. But the potentiation factor that you can get from jump roping and getting that neuromuscular system pumping prior to a workout is awesome, and then in the later one, we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, coordination work and stuff like that. But jumping rope is a coordination task, right? So you're also helping your ability to do those slightly finer motor movement skills in your lower extremities. then the last one is gonna be one of the six-inch mini band sets. Now, this specifically is more for our frontal plane movements, like laterals. Like our abductors and adductors, the insides and outsides of our legs, it's kinda hard to isolate and train with just dumbbells. So having some bands for some monster walks, laterals, you know engaging them during, you know, a, a glute bridge from the ground, things of that nature, is gonna be beneficial. And then there's also the added benefit that if we're-- while we're training, safety is always a priority, and we're watching knee tracking, or if you start getting some slight knee pain, something like that, of that nature, we oftentimes have collapsed in the knees going inward and that's a kinetic chain issue. But usually, the biggest contributor is that your abductors aren't firing properly. So when you put a band around your knees and then do your squats, the band kind of pulls your knees together, gives you kind of a tactile feedback to force you to put outward pressure on your knees and fire those abductors, and it keeps your whole kinetic chain in line. So your knee is tracking in line with your toes and things of that nature. So they have the added benefit of also kind of improving form and technique if you're a newer lifter.

Brianna 14:13

Okay.

Victor, BS, CSCS 14:13

All

Brianna 14:14

And.

Victor, BS, CSCS 14:14

would be my getting started.

Brianna 14:16

And I, I wanna go back to,'cause we talked about kinda like benches, right? Like Dick's Sporting Goods, Walmart even Amazon. I know Facebook market. I think Facebook market's also a good place for like dumbbells.'cause people are always selling workout equipment. That's just always, and when talking about dumbbells, I wanna hit on this because I know. Two things that I recommend to people would be like, if you can't afford, you know, two of every weight, I say like, get one. Right? Like 1 10, 1 15, 1 20, 1 25 pound. And you can work one side. Like if budget is an issue, obviously it'd be great to have two of each, but how do you feel about that? And then how do you feel about the adjustable dumbbells? Because I feel like some people love'em and some people hate them.

Victor, BS, CSCS 15:05

So you're beating me to the punch a little bit here,

Brianna 15:07

Okay.

Victor, BS, CSCS 15:08

we're on the topic, let's talk adjustable equipment. So let's first get out on the table the huge pro and the huge con. First and foremost, I love adjustable dumbbells. For the longest time, I recommended everybody use adjustable. Space efficiency. It's also significantly cheaper. That's the biggest thing is you can get I think when I priced it out, it was, you know, it was a few hundred dollars to get a few, a full, you know, the thirty-five pound set, but you can get an adjustable five to fifty for the same price. You can get a five to twenty-five for like eighty bucks, right? So adjustable dumbbells add a lot of variety to your workouts and those weights, especially for those individuals that either, one, they don't have room for a bunch of different dumbbells, or two, they're trying to save money. the biggest con, the reason why I sto- I started being a little bit a little more hesitant is for me at six one, two fifty, all those adjustable dumbbells, no issue. However, I started having slightly smaller humans come back and say,"Hey, they're just really bulky." they have to have that long shaft to fit all of the adjustable plates, when you get it down to five pounds, it's still that full length of a twenty-five or a fifty-pound dumbbell. So with overhead tricep extensions, some of the movements, they found that they just got in the way because of how big they are. So they get bulky very fast.

Brianna 16:36

Okay.

Victor, BS, CSCS 16:37

where we kinda go back and forth. So as far as single dumbbells just with, just like with fitness, I always, I'll always tell people, some is better than none. For me, I'm bougie, so I would say if you don't have the ability to get two, get a kettlebell kettlebell, solo kettlebells, again, like you've experienced, you use our twenty-fives and stuff like that, you can do almost any movement with a kettlebell, but then it gives you a little bit more variety. And it's gonna be my there's gonna be a little bit of an add-on there the inner in, in between here as we go from getting started to ready to advance.

Brianna 17:19

I know, I don't even know if you know the answer to this, but I know dumbbells are usually like a pound, a dollar per pound, right? Like something like that. Is it the same with kettlebells? Like, is a 25 pound kettlebell$25 or is it cheaper or.

Victor, BS, CSCS 17:34

Generally speaking, yes, we would say a dollar per pound, and that's for a solo one, right? So if you get a pair of 40s, you're looking at spending$80 on just that pair, right? Kettlebells traditionally have been a little bit more expensive. They're more a dollar,$25,$50 per pound, but we're seeing that gap close. Unfortunately, in a positive and negative way, we're seeing dumbbells become a little bit more expensive, everything we see is getting more expensive. have gotten quite a bit more expensive while kettlebells have kinda stayed the same, so they're kinda meeting in the middle, which is why your recommendation for Facebook Marketplace was always my go-to when I was up in clinical.

Brianna 18:19

Oh yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 18:20

physiologist, I'd tell people,"Hey, go to Facebook Marketplace. Go to-- Start off by going to Goodwill." Another really good place if you have them around you, Ross.

Brianna 18:28

Mm-hmm.

Victor, BS, CSCS 18:29

like a small single

Brianna 18:31

Max, I was

Victor, BS, CSCS 18:32

Yeah, and TJ

Brianna 18:33

actually.

Victor, BS, CSCS 18:35

They got little ones. Now, they're the thread-ons usually and stuff, but again, they're... low bar to entry there if you can get stuff less expensive. But

Brianna 18:44

the nice thing about I feel like workout equipment is when you are kind of ready to replace it, you can typically always sell what you have and kind of use that as like, that's how I'm gonna justify the really bougie dumbbells that Victor wants. That's just hurting my.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:02

say, I want you to keep that in mind.

Brianna 19:03

know.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:04

We

Brianna 19:04

Believe me.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:05

just under$3,000 tag for the new

Brianna 19:07

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:08

So

Brianna 19:09

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:09

the old ones. I'm

Brianna 19:10

Victor is the female in the relationship. He is like, just put it on a credit card.

Victor, BS, CSCS 19:16

Now, I will. I spend money like nobody's business.

Brianna 19:19

We know. Okay, so now that you have, like I'm hearing, dumbbells a bench. Bands jump rope, like four things that you should be looking to. Okay, so now say we've done that, we've been working out for a while, or maybe our workouts are getting a little bit more advanced, or we're wanting to take them to the next level. What would be the next things? And I'm, I kind of wanna put this like some boundaries on this because obviously it's like a, you're ready to advance and you have endless space and endless money. I mean, you can do a whole gold gym at your house, but we're talking like. For the typical person we have, again, we still have a limited budget, limited space, but I want to get more outta my home workouts. How would you level it up?

Victor, BS, CSCS 20:01

Yes. Now, so for our ready to advance section to kind of build on what you were saying, if money wasn't an issue to start with, most people dump and buy awesome equipment, full racks, bumper plates, right? You don't normally see somebody who comes in being like,"All right. I gotta start with the bare minimums," then just jump

Brianna 20:22

Right.

Victor, BS, CSCS 20:23

you know, ten thousand dollar training center, right?

Brianna 20:25

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 20:26

this kind of fits in line with those individuals where it's like, okay, we wanna progressively build up in our limited space. Now, one of the key things is, as we kinda go through this next list, it is not, you know, a package you buy at the same time, right? There's kind of a hierarchy of what I would recommend we get along the way, and a lot of that has to do with how you're progressing as well. So first and foremost, again, I cannot, I cannot stress enough how quickly people are gonna outgrow their dumbbells, right? Especially if you're working with somebody like myself, who's always gonna kinda click them up for you just to show you what you're capable of, you're gonna max out twenty-fives or thirty-fives pretty quick. I'm always-- So for ready to advance, females should be looking at those thirty-five pounders, while males should be going up to fifty, okay? After about fifty, the reason why we choose fifty or fifty-five, depending dumbbells get exponentially more expensive after fifty pounds. Like, you can buy a five to fifty for, you know, six hundred bucks maybe, seven hundred. Again, so it all-- price matters, right? Where you even go from sixty to a hundred, it's like three grand. It's less dumbbells, but it just becomes so expensive.

Brianna 21:39

And that's like the series of like a 5, 10, 15, 20, 25.

Victor, BS, CSCS 21:42

doing them

Brianna 21:43

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 21:43

as a package, like if you're doing Rep Fitness or Titan or RightFit, like those are some of the bigger br- wholesale brands that will free shipping get them to your door kind of thing. Also of note for those three brands, they also have adjust-- they all have adjustable stuff as well. So first, we're gonna kinda bump up dumbbells. Now, how this plays in priority is where you're at. you should not be using the same dumbbell for all movements, right? I will see people squat the same way that they're bent over rowing, and I'm like,"No way." Like, your legs are so much stronger.

Brianna 22:19

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 22:19

there, there's-- you should kinda be offsetting here. But if you haven't quite hit that space yet, this may not be the biggest priority. It just tends to be the first priority for most people, is they're gonna max out that way.'Cause again, the big thing is progressive overload, the fundamental of programming that everybody's talking about right now, right? You can't progressively overload if you hit that wall. I mean, you can, I shouldn't speak in absolutes, right? But if you wanna stay within certain bioenergetic and kind of modality boxes, you're not gonna be able to. Like, you can only do so much with them. the next thing is gonna be kettlebells. Now, the caveat to kettlebells is these ones are definitely the in-between floaters. Like, maybe you're not quite ready to advance, but maybe you have a little bit of more room to kinda increase your variety, kettlebells are gonna be my first recommendation. Now, for females, we're looking for a 20 and a 40-pound kettlebell, and then for males, a 40 and a 60, okay? With kettlebells, if you're gonna do a set, right, personal recommendation is don't go less than f- than 10-pound increments, especially at first. So with those kettlebells, it's just gonna allow us to do some different power movements, and then for our performance tools, so now we enter kind of the realm of, all right, we traditionally do strength, okay? People do really good with that. The Getting Started one is really good at doing strength. Now, you can still bring, like I talked a little bit earlier, about metabolic conditioning. So, and just to kinda touch on those real fast, I know I'm digressing, kind of bouncing around. Metabolic conditioning and VO2 max are slightly different, right? We have VO2 max is our body's ability to consume and utilize oxygen. From a training standpoint, we really look at that from a cardiovascular standpoint, where it's like, hey, sprints. I know you and Bailey have talked about it before. Hard sprints, true sprint sprints, right? What metabolic conditioning is, is this a different kinda training factor that makes your body essentially do VO2 max, but under weight. So there's a lot more metabolic waste being produced because you have so much muscle activation. So not only is your body having to utilize oxygen, it has to manage-- do waste management to clear that out. So we can do that with dumbbells. Kinda like our CrossFit functional fitness style individuals, just with dumbbells, okay? kettlebells are gonna allow you to build on that metcon So you're gonna be able to start doing kettlebell swings. You're gonna... Can you do a Turkish getup for-- with a dumbbell? Yes. Much easier to do it with a kettlebell, right? You can do a lot of more explosive movements. Like you can do a hang clean to an overhead press with a kettlebell, whereas dumbbells kinda get in the way. They-- it's, it's, it's kind of a weirder motion. So introducing those kettlebells, especially a little bit earlier in that intermediate to where,"Hey, I'm getting... I'm, I'm at the getting started. I'm not quite ready to advance, but let me start cherry-picking." If we haven't maxed out our weights yet, start bringing in some kettlebells. This would also be the first thing I would add to that getting started if you have a little bit more gap in your budget.

Brianna 25:31

Okay.

Victor, BS, CSCS 25:32

All right. So then we have performance tools. Now, these ones are really important for me for that reducing risk of injury and the whole lifelong longevity kinda thing. So speed ladders are huge. I know Brianna loves speed ladders. She's always got out there doing them. With our hands, we do a lot of fine motor movement skills. Gross motor movements are big, swinging my arm, big movements. Fingers typing, eating, writing, these are all fine motor movement skills that give us dexterity in our upper extremities, right? When we are athletes or when we were in athletics, if we played sports, we tended to have better lower extremity dexterity and fine motor movement skills because we trained it. If you're playing soccer, you're moving your feet. If you're wrestling, you're shuffling around, right? If you're doing football, you're doing chop steps and you're always moving. We kinda tend to forget that in the traditional general population adult workout world. I always encourage people to bring that back. Hey, you need to learn how to move your feet and how to move them well and accurately. So going in and out of a speed ladder or an agility box, whatever you wanna call it, doing little drills like that only helps build that mind-muscle connection. And again, if you're hiking with your grandkids, if you step off a, off a step or curb, you know, you're gonna have a better chance of not getting injured'cause your body can fire those neurons much faster because you've trained them. You've built those efficient pathways,

Brianna 27:05

I was just gonna, this is total side note. When I am looking at the majority of people that come into the hospital for like broken hips or joints or like injuries, it's usually older people. And when I say older, I'm talking 50 plus. No, but Okay. So what I'm trying to get at is it's a lot younger than we think of as older. And it's things like that. Like I tripped, or I like was walking my dog and I fell off the curb or I tripped over the step, bringing in the groceries. And it's like that, I guess. Is it neuromuscular where you're like, you just aren't used to like moving your feet as well, or as fast as you should?

Victor, BS, CSCS 27:47

the neuromuscular system's gonna

Brianna 27:49

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 27:49

that.

Brianna 27:50

Yeah. So I'm just trying to tie it into like why that's important.'cause I think when we're thinking like, oh, football and stuff like that, like dub like, do I need that? As I'm getting older, yeah, probably.

Victor, BS, CSCS 28:01

Yeah, and a little aside analogy for that from a book I'm reading called Coach Your Brains Out, they also have a podcast. If you're into coaching, go there.

Brianna 28:09

Okay.

Victor, BS, CSCS 28:09

When they talk about neuromuscular systems, they talk about it as a field of grass, right? And when you first walk a path through grass, it kinda beats it down, and you can kinda start to see it. Well, that's how our brain works. When we are, when we are moving our feet, if we're stepping up and down, specifically stepping up and down with load, right?'Cause you, you hit on the key one. A lot of individuals can step onto a curb. It's a different stimulation or stimulus there to step up on a curb with load,'cause now your body's trying to calibrate and adjust how much force it needs to produce to get that foot up. Well, if we're not stepping up on load consistently, that grass field is overgrown, and you're, you're beating through brush trying to find it, and then you trip and fall. But if we're sitting there training it and we're doing dumbbell step-ups, even on a six-inch, kinda like the old studio workout style platforms, right? Well, now you walk that path over and over, and you, and you stomp that grass down. You get nice cut lines that your brain is able to follow and get there faster. So yes, the neuromuscular system, just training it,'cause your body is only as strong as it has to be, as weak as it can be. If you're not pushing it to maintain neural connections or strength, it's gonna get rid of it. It doesn't want to have those because those have a higher energy demand, body is about survival. So- After speed ladders, we're looking at floor slides. Now, what's cool about floor slides is one-- another area that tends to be a little bit harder to hit in our posterior chain is those hamstrings. So floor slides allow you to do a lot of leg curls and different movements like that, you may not have a leg curl machine and, you know, we can only do so many variations of a deadlift before it's kinda like, okay, you know. So it kinda gives us the ability to start doing more hamstring work, and they're very low cost. I think we got ours off Amazon for, like, seven bucks, right? They're not, they're not, like, super expensive. And then the, the last two are kinda have a little asterisk next to them in my mind because one's gonna be performance, one's gonna be budget. Treadmill is a big one. This is where we start talking about that VO2 training and different stuff. Depends on y-where you live as well. You know, I have clients that live in San Diego, They don't necessarily have any issues walking outside, and they also have hills, right? in Texas. The hills are debatable, right? I don't know if I'd call them-- definitely not mountains. And then for me, again, I'm bougie, I'm kind of a complainer, the-- it gets too hot, right? And I have that with a lot of clients. Like, we're coming off of a lot of winter storms right now. We've had a lot of clients not be able to do their cardiovascular conditioning simply'cause they're like,"Hey, I can't go outside. It's too cold. There's snow on the ground. It's not safe." This is where a treadmill can be awesome. And I know, again, you guys have talked about weighted vests, so we won't go down that rabbit hole. But throwing on a weighted vest, cranking your treadmill to six to eight percent incline and walking, there you go. We got it, right? And again performance is gonna be on the individual on what is difficult or not. But then I have a lot of people doing sprint work on treadmills as well just because, again, it's... it allows you to get that movement, right? That neat movement in. It allows you to facilitate your training protocols, all that kind of stuff. But treadmills are big. are expensive. So that's why there's an asterisk And then the last thing, another one of Brianna's favorite things when she sees it on a plan, a plyo box.

Brianna 31:53

No.

Victor, BS, CSCS 31:54

a plyo box can be Brianna showed me a video of a motivational one about this older gentleman who's jumping up on a plyo box in- well into his seventies,

Brianna 32:05

Oh yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 32:05

And it was awesome. He's doing like a twenty-four inch plyo box jump. He started at twelve. It's like, it's so cool to watch that happen. Plyometrics are gonna go into that, that, hey, I need to be an athlete. I need to be explosive. What are some things that I can use for that, right? D- depth drops and all kinds of different things you can do. Obviously, box jumps, things of that nature, goblet squats. I have an- another side note to plyo boxes, especially as they get less and less expensive. I have a lot of clients, or not a lot, maybe a handful of clients that their bench is a little bit wobbly, so when we start doing like dumbbell step-ups up and down, they don't feel very confident'cause it's one of the bars with the, with the two little, like a T at the bottom. It just kinda rocks a little bit, and they're like,"Eh, I don't know about that," right? Whereas a plyo box is very stable. You can use it to gauge distance on your squats, right? There's a lot of stuff, again, that we can do with it. That would be like, hey, I'm ready to advance. I've expanded. But it's on the bottom of the list if we've up- if we've brought in kettlebells, have we increased the dumbbells? Did we get those low bar to entry items like our floor slides, our speed ladders, things that are gonna cost under twenty bucks? we're still looking to expand, the next one's gonna be a plyo box.

Brianna 33:25

I like it. I don't, I mean, I don't, I don't like P play boxes, but I can see where they're very useful. Remember when I said like, dream team, if we listened, there's like, you know me, I'm forever like. What's gonna give you a good butt shape and work your butt, eh, every single time it's Bulgarian split squats. And every single time I'm like, okay, I'm not doing those. And then I'll re-ask the question. You know, so

Victor, BS, CSCS 33:48

else.

Brianna 33:49

similar to you in like, you're snacking, you know,

Victor, BS, CSCS 33:52

my

Brianna 33:52

we just don't wanna hear it. It doesn't make it not true. Okay,

Victor, BS, CSCS 33:57

Mm-hmm.

Brianna 33:57

so increasing your dumbbells, starting to get kettlebells speed ladders, floor slides, p fly a boxes, some of those more functional type things.

Victor, BS, CSCS 34:10

And again, caveat, just because you're a female doesn't mean you stop at thirty-five. These are just general recommendations. And then for our cardiovascular conditioning, if you have room, and again, this could be something, there's a lot of people who already have treadmills, but if you don't, consider a treadmill or something we didn't talk about, was any cardiovascular equivalent, a rower, a stationary bike, if you have a Peloton, you know, an Airdyne bike or an AssaultBike, anything like that. We're just looking for some sort of cardiovascular conditioning.

Brianna 34:41

Or even like much cheaper.'cause there's, there are stationary bikes that are very nice. That are way cheaper than Peloton.

Victor, BS, CSCS 34:47

I cannot stress enough, Facebook Marketplace. People get rid of cardiovascular equipment on Facebook Marketplace.'Cause w-w... We got our treadmill for, like, hundred and fifty bucks,

Brianna 34:58

Yeah.

Victor, BS, CSCS 34:58

hundred dollar treadmill.

Brianna 34:59

Also too, if you do live by a Costco or if you have a Costco membership, I feel like around the springtime they start to have some actually pretty cool deals on workout equipment. Like I know every year they'll have some sort of stationary bike or dumbbell set or like medicine balls. So, but that, we didn't get into medicine balls, but I'm just saying Costco has some good workout equipment

Victor, BS, CSCS 35:18

the Bowflex has a cool adjustable kettlebell that goes from eight to forty pounds. I think it's like a hundred and fifty bucks. And then, you know, Titan Fitness and stuff have them. Now the big take-home message the one I wanna leave kind of everybody with is that the best home gym isn't always the biggest one it's the one that's gonna allow you to train consistently and cover the basics and keep you progressing. Best gyms aren't the biggest one. It's what fits you.

Brianna 35:45

Yeah, I like it. So hopefully you guys found this helpful. If you are wanting that little handout, I'll put it in the show notes so that people have it to. Use as like a resource. Shameless plug. You know, Victor does do personalized workout plans with a cool little fun app for people if you want it. If you're interested, you can reach out to me on Instagram and I can get you guys connected. But hopefully this was helpful, gave you guys some direction on like what to really prioritize. I know there's a ton of information out there, so hopefully hearing it from someone who knows what they're talking about and does this. That's reassuring. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us Instagram at mocktail minutes. You can also reach out to me personally on my Instagram and we'll do our best to get all, any and all questions answered. But thank you guys for joining us. I'll be back next week at the brand new episode. Until then, bye.