The chain yoke is the pendulously evil, redheaded step-brother of the yoke.

So you’ve got your home gym started, maybe even built yourself a nice platform to lift on, but what about all those bumper plates you just bought? Unless you found a used plate tree for a really good price, you likely don’t want to shell out the dough for a non-essential piece of equipment like that. Not to mention that plate trees don’t work well for bumper plates. You want your fancy home gym to be the envy of fellow lifters. A personal haven for iron destruction and physical construction. Most bumper plates are usually stored in a horizontal rack that lays somewhere near the platform for easy access as you slap more and more weight on the bar...

This article includes another option for making your home gym lifting platform submitted from a fellow lifter, JC. 

Individual needs will vary when it comes to building a lifting platform, but if you've got to build around an uneven floor or in an area susceptible to flooding, look no further. This is how I built my garage lifting platform to support weightlifting, powerlifting and strongman lifts. 

"You're going to hurt you back deadlifting that much weight."

"You can't deadlift that much weight, it's too noisy."

"There's no chalk allowed in the gym."

As a strongman, if you don't have the luxury of a strength training gym around you or have spent any time in your average local fitness centre, you've probably dreamt of starting a home or garage gym. 

These are my thoughts and experiences with building a minimalist home gym that still allows me to get stronger and make progress with very limited space.

Do you take your health and athletic performance seriously? One of the most important things you can do to nutritionally to improve your overall health as well as maximize your athletic performance is to include probiotics in your daily practice, either through fermented foods or a supplement. Amongst many other emerging discoveries, probiotic bacteria found in fermented foods help to optimize your digestive system health. 

One of the beautiful things about wooden strongman logs is that each one has its own character. Every homemade strongman log is a little bit different and it’s good to embrace that fact and have fun with training. However, if you’re training strongman events in order to be competitive you need to pay a little more attention to the detail that goes into your homemade wooden log.  

When it comes to training for strongman technique is critical! There's only so much that brute force strength can do for you with implements that you've never seen before. You can try to replicate the movements as close as possible in the gym, but eventually if you want to move up the ranks then you need to invest in buying or building some strongman equipment. It can be difficult or expensive to find someone who sells or is willing to make strongman tools. Here in Ontario there are a couple of resources available, but logs are very popular and tend to sell out quickly or be unavailable. Therefore I decided to make my own classic strongman log! If made correctly and taken care of a wooden log should be almost as durable as a steel log.