What To Bring To The Gym

What should you bring to the gym?

A change of clothes and shoes seem like obvious things. As does your gym membership card so you can get into the gym! But what else?

Condoms just in case your gym crush finally wants to sneak off with you for some sweaty locker room sex? Candy to lure kids into your white Econovan?

Possibly, but here are the three major necessities and some other ideas!

DRINKING BOTTLE

Nutrient timing, or the post-workout window, is a myth. Simply stated, the long held view was that you had 45 minutes after your workout to eat and provide the body with needed protein and carbs to aid with its recovery or your training would have been all for naught. Boo hoo hoo (sniff)!!!

Thankfully, rather than having to live in fear of not seeing gains because you weren’t able to eat until 45 minutes and one second later, current research suggests that the anabolic window is really open for 24 hours, with your body prime for nutrients no more than four hours removed from the termination of your workout.

With that said, for a quick recovery meal before you go home and prepare something more elaborate, you should bring a shaker bottle with you.

If you have a protein powder with poor mixability or want to thoroughly blend your protein, peanut butter, glutamine, and other contents together, one of those shaker bottles with the metal ball that you have no idea what it’s for is great for breaking up clumps.

Your shaker bottle can also double as a water bottle.¹…and placeholder on a station while you disappear lord knows where for 5, 10, a fuckload of minutes, as people line up to use it but can’t because, you know, you have a reservation.

Or just get a separate bottle.²Matter of fact, make that a jug. Or better yet, a barrel. That is, if you feel like being real douchey and showing everybody how serious you are about hydration.

Sure, gyms have water fountains in them but you’ll do nothing but break the flow of your workout when you make the arduous journey to the water fountain alllllllllll theeeeeeeeeeeeee waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy on the other side of the gym, with you stopping along the trek to engage in conversations with countless people.³As far as I can recall, only ONE gym in my years of experience didn’t have a drinking fountain in it.

SIDEBAR: I was visiting relatives in New Jersey and linked up with my old training partner from when I used to live in New York. At the time, he was training out of Colosseum Gym in Newark. He picked me up from where I was staying and we drove over. Upon arriving, he told me that the gym didn’t have a water fountain and that I should get a bottle of water from the grocery store in the plaza. My ears were obviously deceiving me, so I said “What?!” After going back and forth with each other several times because my brain couldn’t wrap itself around the existence of a gym without drinking water, we went to the grocery store and bought water.

So yeah, it had that going for it.

What else it had going for it is was the live DJ playing music, but that’s another gripe for my Yelp review of that establishment if I ever get around to writing it! A large enough water bottle that you fill up beforehand can prevent you from disrupting your workout.

TRAINING LOG

Because your memory sucks, you should take a notebook to document your workout.⁴Hey, you should look at your bad memory as more of a gift and less of a curse because it helps you forget how much your daily life blows.

See, the object of the game is to keep challenging the body to force growth. That can be accomplished by adding more weight, performing more sets and/or reps, changing the tempo that you pick up and lower the weight, cutting down rest periods, etc. A training journal can help you keep track of that information so you can make the proper adjustments when need be rather than guessing or not making any adjustments at all.

SMARTPHONE

Last but definitely not least is the smartphone, a telecommunication device that has a butt-full of important uses for total gym domination.

Other than possibly downloading an app to use your phone as a workout log, the camera comes in handy as another way of documenting your workouts.

How?

Oh, so we’re playing dumb, huh?!?!

Okay, my naïve friend.

Well, while you work out you can spend more time taking pictures of you working out than actually working out so you can flood the feeds of your five followers with the daily updates of your fitness journey, of which each and every one of them were waiting for with bated breath.⁵As we all know, your workout didn’t really happen if you don’t record and share pics and vids from it on every social media platform known to man.

As if that weren’t enough goodness, your phone provides an easy way to take down the names and numbers of the cute boys and girls you meet who are sooooooo nice to you so that, unbeknownst to you, when your body transformation is complete they’ll appear as being supportive of your goals right from the jump, effectively skyrocketing their chances of giving the new and improved you a thorough working out.

But wait! There’s MOAR!!!

The gym isn’t a gosh darn social club, nor is during your workout the best time to have someone you don’t really give two shits about knowing talk your ear off about something you don’t really give two fucks about.

To take your anti-social behavior up a notch and thwart people from talking to you and you from talking to them, thus breaking your intensity, plug a pair of bullshit blockers into your ears and zone out to whatever it is that gets you amped to do epic shit.⁶If you can’t tell by the context clues, “bullshit blockers” are headphones, which are the universal “don’t talk to me” sign, though some motherfuckers will still try to spark up a convo with you like you’re not in the fucking middle of selling dope in your trap song.

…or you could just use your phone’s stopwatch function to time your rest periods between sets in order to ensure that you’re not lollygagging.

But why be practical?!?!

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

Now you know what you should bring to the gym with you.

But what are you going to stuff some, if not all, of that shit in?

Well, you should place whatever goodies you find conducive to your training in a gym bag — a gym bag that would ideally be large and sturdy enough to also serve as a money bag were you ever in the mood to rob a bank and get away with a hefty score.

That’s just a very, very helpful description of what you should look for in a gym bag. By no means is it a suggestion for you to go and break the law!

I’m appalled that you would even think so!!!

…but for shits and giggles, let’s say you did rob a bank.

Before fleeing to Cape Verde — there’s no extradition treaty with the US (wink, wink) — just remember to cut me in on the take.

That would only be the proper thing to do!

Glossary: fitness, gym, gym bag, intensity, journey, reps, stringer, training partner, work out, workout

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.

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