A dilemma I am facing here is designing my home gym. Part of the dilemma comes from I have never designed a facility exclusively for myself. The other part of the dilemma is that my default is to design facilities for not only other people, but large groups. I am being pulled in multiple directions which makes this really hard to unpack.
There is a model in mathematics termed fractals. Fractals are simple rules repeated. What is true on one scale will be true for smaller or larger versions. So if we break down me designing a facility for myself, in theory that should be the fractal version of the larger weight room. But is this an opportunity to break that rule?
Facilities I have designed are based on a this philosophy:
TEAM BASED STRENGTH & CONDITIONING PROGRAM
THAT WILL UTILIZE MULTI JOINT/ CLOSED KINETIC CHAIN/ MULTI-PLANAR/VECTOR MOVEMENTS
ALWAYS ADHERING TO FIRST PRINCIPLES OF PHYSICS AND PRINCIPLES OF TRAINING
What ends up looking like is this:
Racks, barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and medballs are the foundational tools to execute on the above philosophy. At a certain point we will need enough of each of those items to accommodate larger groups. Enough options to facilitate progressive overload, progression, and work to rest ratios with large groups.
There is another concept I think a lot about with facility design, it comes from ride sharing programs. A central concept behind ride sharing is that 90% of the time personal vehicles are parked. We spend large sums of money, for a depreciable asset, that is a greater liability the more you drive, that is the majority of the time is actually parked. At its core, communal based ride sharing is more economical and efficient than sole ownership of a car.
This is why having a group based gym concept is so foundational to program design. Facilities that are designed for a single person are not economically strategic. Nor is it as effective as facilities designed to accommodate more people. We can leverage yet another model of the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) that 80% of percent of things we do come from 20% of the things we have. This translates to needing higher utility equipment to facilitate greater diversity of exercises that bring larger return on investment of time such as BBs, DBs, KBs, MBs. With that being said, maybe fractals are not a good model to design a private/personal facility. To be economically viable or more effective, it has to be based on a larger scale entity. They are completely unrelated to each other.
Which brings us to the idea of designing a weight room that is not based on its larger counterpart and maybe needs to be revisited. Fractal design of larger to smaller weight rooms is predicated on replicating the program from small to large or large to small. The larger or smaller version of the program is the same version of itself. I program nuance with variables (sets/reps/tempo/intensity/rest), not exercise selection. But this is not the same as designing a weight room to accommodate one person’s needs, nuance is not exclusive variables. Nuance is based on the direct need of the individual.
Form is based on function. If we need to do compound-closed kinetic chain movements we need free weight tools such as racks, barbells, plates, benches, dumbbells, kettlebells, and medballs. If we need to do that with a lot of people we need a lot of those things. If we need to support and accommodate growth and innovation, we’ll need a different thought process of designing a weight room.
Over the next months and years I will make purchases for equipment. Understanding this is a paradigm shift for myself. I have to learn to think selfishly and break away from this notion that this has to accommodate several people at once. My plan is to review various pieces of equipment: what is the tool’s purpose, why this brand/product over another, planned usage amount, how it fits in a smaller footprint. If you are familiar with me and my blogs, nothing is random or by chance. I am thorough to a fault. If you are into that process, strap in this will be a wild ride.