How Are You Improvising A Home Gym?

Life’s tough right now if you’re missing the gym, and we’re all finding creative workarounds to deal with it. Just among my friends and the folks I follow on Insta, I’ve seen people squatting their pets, their children, bags of kitty litter and weirder stuff still. I’ve seen pull-ups performed on odd equipment and dumbbells improvised. And here’s where I bring the question to you, dear readers: How are you making do?

There’s still some gym equipment available from scattered vendors; if you were lucky enough to be able to put an order in, what were your must-haves? Or what did you have to settle for? Are you doing lifts with an axle bar instead of a standard barbell? Trying to add kilo and pound plates together and totally confusing yourself with plate maths? (That one’s me.) Or maybe you snagged a kettlebell but now you’re having to make that one weight stand in for a whole gym’s worth of equipment.

And speaking of equipment, I’ve heard about people raiding their basements for long-unused exercise gear, or even renting from gyms that had to close. Did you uncover a hidden stash of weights? Score a pull-up bar in an unlikely place?

Whatever it is, we want to be inspired by your ingenuity. Let us know in the comments how you’re making use of what you have—whether it was originally intended as workout equipment or not.