Training Gear - What we use

No matter how much you renounce on training gear (not roids) and equipment, there will always be that one lifter who uses less than you and calls you out on it. He is the rawest of all raw lifters, as raw as you can get, rawer than a vegan's diet. 

But does that always make sense? Do you really need to do without everything that helps you perform in the gym? 

Of course not! Here's an overview of what we use, why we use it and what we think gives you a positive benefit on your training.

Belt

We use a belt on heavy lifts only. There is actually no point in using a belt while squatting 50 kg (110 lbs) or deadlifting 70 kg (154 lbs). How many times do we see other gym goers in our gym wearing belts for biceps curls? It's ridiculous!

So when we use a belt (which we currently don't do because the weight on the bar is not nearly heavy), we do it for better bracing and protection reasons.

There are surely 1000+ posts, videos or comments about "how to use a belt" and "why to use a belt", but for us, the thing that mattered the most was better stability around the core. If you know how to brace, you can put so much more pressure on the abdominals and it feels like you decrease the pressure and stress put on your lower back.

Lifting Shoes

We currently both use the Adidas Powerlift 3 and are very satisfied with them. The shoe is really light and smooth, but still, provides lots of stability. The built-in wedge is about 1cm high (~0,4 inches) and gives us a nice angle to work with. While we use the shoes for the squat and the bench press, we take it off for deadlifting. On the DL you don't want to stand 1cm higher with your heel, you want a flat foot.

Chalk

Chalk is really nice for someone like me, who doesn't have the best grip and starts sweating easily, especially in my palms. We got us some liquid chalk, which was actually made for rock-climbing, therefore really provides nice dry hands. Here's the link to our chalk. It's a little bit more expensive than alternatives from MyProtein for example, but I thought to myself, why take chalk form a protein producer and not from a company that specializes in climbing, where they really need some good chalk

Wrist Wraps / Straps

We have both. As I already mentioned in the chalk paragraph, I have a bad grip, therefore straps were the only possibility for me to do triples or more reps with heavy weight on the deadlift. But then I came to the conclusion, that my grip will never get stronger if I always use straps, so they're now lying around in my gym bag and will probably not come out for a long time. Some grip work really helped and since then, I never really had a serious problem with my grip anymore.

And what comes normally with a weak grip? Weak wrists. Got them too. So I got myself some wrist wraps, which I sometimes still use for heavy bench sets or heavy overhead pressing exercises. They just make me feel safer and it feels like I have the weight more under control. The other times (lighter weight), I just figured I had to be a little bit more aware of my wrist angle and needed to actively correct my wrist posture.

Bands

We actually don't have bands. They are on our wishlist though. In our current state of strength/training, we feel like there is no need to implement bands yet. Although the resistance bands would be nice for shoulder work, we can easily substitute those with some machine work on the cables.



So that's about all we use or want to use. With other training equipment we have actually no experience, this is why we won't talk about it. Unlike other sites or blogs, if we don't know something about a certain topic, we will admit it and don't talk shit about stuff we don't understand.

We hope you enjoyed your read and invite you to comment on what you use or what you think about training gear!

CHEERS
Amin