This is the Jocco Underground Podcast number 206 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. We have questions from you all out in the field and we will provide courses of action recommendations, possibly answers. Let's go. True. All right. First question. Uh, hello, Jocco. I'm a dad who works long hours. Also have a six month old daughter. It's been a struggle for me to spend valuable time with my wife and daughter after waking up early for the gym and coming home exhausted. I've been listening to your podcast for the few years and have finally made space for a home gym. That's what time it is. What, what do you guys think are the must haves for, for a beginner gym? Not sure where to even start looking. I appreciate all your hard work. Thanks in advance. So out of the gate, uh, I'm going to go, you know, right out of the gate, if you get rings, you got a lot of stuff covered, right? So if you got rings, you got pull-ups covered, you got dips covered, and then you can do all kinds of calisthenics. And there's a bunch of other kind of like functional strength training that you can do with rings. So that's out of the gate. For me, if I was going to be on a desert island and I could only have one piece of exercise equipment, it's going to be rings. If I didn't have rings, a pull-up bar, because once again, if you have a pull-up bar, you can do pull-ups and then you can always do push-ups and you can do squats and jump squats and sprints and stuff like that for your legs. So you're good there. After a pull-up bar is a dip bar. Now again, rings cover both those. If you have a place to hang rings, then you can do pull-ups. You can do dips. You can do, uh, ring push-ups. There, you can do, there's so much stuff that you can do with rings. So rings are really good, but if I don't get rings and rings aren't that expensive either, like a hundred bucks, you get a nice, nice, get wood rings too. Don't get plastic rings. Don't get metal rings. I went through a time in my life where I thought everything should be made of metal. That makes sense. I was trying to, I was trying to, if you were to make something, it had to be, it should be metal, I thought to myself. Well, it turned out I was wrong. This was probably when I was like 22. Hey, everything should be metal. But rings, definitely metal is worse. Wood is optimal. Absorb sweat, better traction, the whole nine yards. So that's why I'm out, out of the gate. My next thing would be, we're starting to get into some kettlebell because kettlebell, you can do a lot of very good conditioning and you can do some strength training with a kettlebell. So that's kind of the basic, uh, confined space, confined budget scenario. Now, what the next, the next step from there is kind of a big step in a way. What do you think it is? Yeah. Squat rack. Yep. The next thing you're getting is squat rack and a barbell with bumper plates. Right. And that's, that's going to be, you know, now you're into this thing for a couple grand, you know, when you start talking about a good squat rack, good, probably two bars, two barbells and some enough bumper plates, you're talking a couple grand, a couple thousand bucks. So, but once you have that, and also by the way, when you have that, usually a squat rack comes to the pull up bar on it. Usually it comes with some kind of a dip bar attachment. So you kind of are covering all those things, but those things are so inexpensive compared to a squat rack. But yeah, once then it's squat rack time. And when you get a good squat rack, you're kind of set for life. Honestly, I had one of my squat racks. I had like a kind of a crappy old squat rack that I bought in 19 and 98. And that thing lasted me 20 years, you know, just GT. And it was just a piece of, you know, whatever low quality squat, squat rack, but it still lasted a long time. And so squat rack should, if you get a quality one, you'll be good to go for a really long time. You get like a rogue or a SORA next, you're kind of set for life. By the way, both of those American made. So, you know, then, and you might have thrown this in there earlier. And it kind of comes in the same time zone, but, you know, you're going to need a bench at some point, because there's a lot of an adjustable bench that you can do decline, flat bench, inclined bench all the way up to some kind of shoulder press scenario. Good to have. And with that, now we're starting to talk about dumbbells, you know, and I actually have this kind of dumbbells, adjustable dumbbells. What are they called? Rep, Pippin or something like that. They were really expensive, but they seemed like they were pretty good. I'm liking them, you know, there's no adjustable dumbbell. That's perfect. I think these might be the best of the adjustable dumbbells, but, you know, they're just not perfect. But, you know, you save a bunch of space and you do essentially save money because you're getting whatever 20 dumbbells for the cost of one really expensive one. I mean, they were like a thousand bucks. Yeah. Well, what's the weight limit? What would it go up to? They go to one 10. Oh, okay. Yeah. They're in there. How much? Like 1200 bucks. That's very cheap. Yeah. It's very cheap. Cause what do you pay? Like a, what is it? A buck a pound, two bucks a pound. Yeah. Give or take. When I was in, when I was a team one, back in the day, we went on an ARG deployment and we brought dumbbells on the ship with us and we got up to 120s. So, but, but I had to buy them. And that's what I remember. The pricing was all like kind of by the pound. Yeah. So. And the higher you go up the higher the, the per pound gets. Oh, I didn't know that. I don't remember that. Oh yeah. Oh, Jack. So, but we had a lot of, we didn't have to buy the lower end of dumbbells cause they were kind of already on the ship and their regular ships, Jim. But if you want to get out those buck 20s, yeah, yeah. They're good to go. And then one more thing I added, I mean, there's, there's some little, you know, there's like a jump rope. There's a plial boxes, right? Having a plial boxes, you can do a lot of stuff with that as well. So what is it? They're 20 inches on one side, 24 inches on the other side and 30, 30 inches on the other side of 36 inches on the other side. So there, you can do a lot of different stuff with a plial box. So that's good thing to have. But that's kind of where I'm at. You with me? Yeah, I'm with you, but, you know, like I would always say it, if you can determine what kind of, even on a general, generally speaking, like what your goal is, like, what are we working out for? Cause you're right. Cause if this guy wanted to be a triathlete, I didn't talk about any, you know, having a, having a treadmill, having a bike, whatever, having a rowing machine. Cause I got a rowing machine and I got an aerosol bike and I've got a C2 concept two freaking ski erg. Yeah. And I've got a swim erg. I got some ergs in my house. I got a lot of ergs in my house. But I'll tell you what, what's interesting. I was talking to the dude, the other day he's running, he's running a thousand miles and I don't, I don't, I don't think I've ever actually run again. I won't like make a sworn statement on this, but I don't think of there's a chance I've never run on a treadmill for more than like, maybe I've done it for at some point, but even on the Navy ships, I wouldn't run on the treadmill. I'd go run around on circles on the flight deck. Oh, just cause you don't like it kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then on the aircraft carrier, you don't run on the flight deck itself. You run below the hangar deck and you have this little map little course. I just run around in circles on the, on the amphibious ship. You're running on the flight deck because the flight deck doesn't get used as much, but it's a lot smaller. She's just running like just in circles, tight, tight, tight circles, tight circles. So I would rather, I think there's so much to do with cardio. Like if you have a jump rope and you can do runs, do you really need a card? You would really need to invest because those machines are expensive. Like those are all $1,000, right? Any kind of treadmill, rowing machine, those things are all like a, like a, like a rack, itch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even more for sure. The running kind. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're fitness goals, even though you have everything. It seems like you have this real general, um, like capability, fitness pursuit, you know, like, and it made sense to me when I kind of figured this out on my own, where I was like, you know, like, uh, going into, um, the Navy SEAL scenario, you kind of got to be able to do everything. Generally speaking, versus a guy who just wants to get bigger muscles and cut up a little bit, or the person who wants to do a triathlon or just lose a lot of weight. You know, like there, these are completely different things as far as like how to do it or whatever and what equipment you need. But if you're like, oh yeah, just general fitness, right? You don't, you barely need anything. And if you want to add resistance training, then yeah, you, you actually don't really need that much. Let's just, let's just say you want to increase muscle mass. You want to lose body fat and you want to have some, a general, uh, level of cardio health. We'll say I would go squat rack first. This is, this is why, because just like how you said, even the cheap ones, by the way, they come with a pull up bar usually even mine. Mine is like a cheap one because I needed space. I couldn't get the big, you know, thing and it's like cheap. It's flimsy for the pull up bar, but I already got a pull up bar, a regular one. Um, but you do have to check. Like when you get a cheap one, you, there's a, there's a 50% chance, maybe even a 70% chance that the pull up bar is not, not what you're looking for. Yeah, it'll be even the old one that I just talked about, that I had bought in 1998. I put my own pull up bar on that. I just went down to Home Depot because the pull up at came bar, it came with, was like skinny. Oh yeah. Too narrow. Yeah. Too skinny. And so I just went and saw that thing off and just got a pipe from Home Depot and just put that pipe on there. And I used 550 cord, like paracord, just to tie it on there. I drilled the holes through it and that thing I was good to go. Yeah. I don't like, I don't think I have that pull up already more dude. Unfortunately, that's a damn shame. Got some nostalgia on that one. But pulling the pulling exercises is going to be the hardest one to go just find in the wild, you know, like to, to get it. So that's why I agree with you with the rings situation. But if you get the squat rack, the squat rack does not, does not necessarily have to be in the thousands of dollars. It can be like actually a few hundred dollars, but with that, it'll be super cheap and it'll be flimsy, but you got it done a hundred percent. And you still got the squat situation. You have the pull up situation. And then you can buy it just a flat bench or adjustable bench or whatever. Now you got bench shoulder. You have everything now in there. There's also, if you're, if you have a little bit of patience, not even a lot. Sure. Offer up. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. My kid be buying. He's got all kinds of crazy exercise equipment from offer up. That's a good market place for sure. In there, just driving out to whatever East County and grabbing old whatever. He's getting it together. Yeah, especially like the weights, weights. So like anything with cables, I, I, I, I very much like to get the brand new stuff with cables just cause, you know, just with the wear and tear and, you know, the reliability, but oh yeah, plates, bumper plates, freaking dumbbells, you know, all this stuff would offer up all day. You don't need them to match or be gold or, you know, branded or nothing like this. So there's that. I personally invested in the full dumbbell set early on just cause you can do a lot of stuff with dumbbells in like a bench or whatever. Um, but really that squat rack bar plates, a set of plates. That's kind of really all you need. Bumper plates, by the way. Bumper plates is ideal. But it really is a big deal though. It's not just ideal. It's kind of a big deal. Cause if you don't, cause if you don't have bumper plates, bro, it's just, it's just chaos when you start, you know, dropping. If you're doing any, like any clean and jerks, any snatches, any really dead lifts, like high poles, you know, rack poles, like everything that you're doing is kind of, you're just, you're not being a good neighbor. I understand what you mean. And I, but I do suspect that you're used to this stuff. Like, you know, you know, let's face it. You know, we got, you got your own full setup. You're going nuts. You're just like, bro, this is like, you're in it. You know, so you're dropping weights. You don't got to worry about your neighbor. You don't got to worry about damaging the concrete or whatever. You know, that, you know, the normal thing is you're just kind of going and to get, and to say goodbye to that kind of stuff is probably a big deal for you. And I understand. But I will tell you this, like, I don't have bumper plates, but when I do deadlifts, I have never been a big slammer of weights, except when I was doing, we were doing Olympic lifting, like for football, but we had full bumper plates the whole thing. But that, but that wasn't really part of my normal routine. So the difference between being able to drop the weights full speed or saving money, that's going to be up to you. You seem saying so if we're, if we're concerned about budget, maybe we can start just laying the weights down a little bit more gently and be more friendly to our neighbors and family or whatever. Um, so yeah, that's the way I see it. So that's squat rack group right there. Even the cheap one is really kind of that, that, that lynch pin of every, and then everything kind of branches off from there. In my opinion, everything else you can do in the environment or at your home, any kind of like cardio, even like legs. Well, you got the squat rack, so you're good to go. But, um, cardio, you can run, you do jumping jacks, calisthenics. Like there's a lot of cardio options in the wild burpees. Yeah. Without the, you know, so you can kind of make do, but it's really hard to, to, uh, replicate pull-ups, um, weight, like loaded squats and pushes and stuff. Like it's, it starts to get hard. So if you have that squat rack with the adjustable bench and you know, the squat rack things can adjust, you know, you're kind of good to go. I did make one more note. That is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jocko underground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control. And we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. 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