Stall bars are an excellent tool for developing strength, conditioning, and flexibility. A set of stall bars looks like a wide ladder, typically about three feet wide and eight feet tall, with round steps, mounted to a wall. Good stall bars are heavy and robust, and they are made to handle any person or activity without failing. They are valuable to athletes, gymnasts, physical therapists, military and police personnel, martial artists, weightlifters, and to anyone who wants more function than the “all-in-one” fitness machines can provide. Over 100 years ago, stall bars were common equipment in YMCA and college, high school, and private gyms, but their popularity waned during the middle of the last century. However, growing health consciousness, along with the popularity of gymnastics, has brought about a renewed appreciation for stall bars.

In the late 1700s to early 1800s, the word gymnastics was used to mean physical education and development generally, rather than to describe a specific sport. Johann Guts Muths, who is sometimes called the grandfather of modern gymnastics, started a new movement in physical education for school-age boys and young men in Germany and published a book titled Gymnastics for Youths in 1793. He built a 20-foot-high wooden frame outdoors for climbing, and suspended climbing ropes, a rope ladder, and a climbing pole from it. He had a wooden ladder that was used to climb to the top of the frame when needed.

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Parallettes training is fun and highly developmental. Without gymnastics training we opt out of the most potent neurological training (coordination, accuracy, agility, and balance) available to an athlete, and parallettes training is essential to your gymnastics development.

We hope our fervor for parallettes training specifically and gymnastics training generally will inspire all of you to get hold of a pair of parallettes and begin your gymnastics training in earnest.

To that end we offer this month step-by-step instructions for building a great set of parallettes out of PVC pipe available wherever building supplies or landscaping materials are sold.

Four things inspire this project: 1. They’re dirt-cheap ($10-20), 2. ANYONE could make them, 3. They come out not just good but fantastic – you couldn’t ask for better parallettes; we’re shocked at how nice they are, and 4. It was a lot of fun building them.

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It has long been said that necessity is the mother of invention and this month we give support to that adage with two exceedingly simple inventions. Both devices address problems that have long plagued our training efforts.

The first problem in dire need of remedy was how do we bring the pull-up to people who've never done one? Our first and easiest solution was the use of an assisted pull-up device like our favorite, the Stairmaster Gravitron, and we have long made regular use of the Gravitron with all our pull-up initiates.

There are several aspects of the Gravitron, though, that make its use problematic. First, the Gravitron is outrageously expensive. At nearly $3,000 after shipping, few pieces of gym equipment come even close in price. The steep price is perhaps particularly foreboding to someone relatively new to serious strength and conditioning training as are most people working to develop their first pull-up. Imagine if your first weight set had to be an Eleiko; there'd be a lot fewer weightlifters!

The second major problem with the Gravitron and all other assisted pull-up devices is that they are about as portable as your kitchen refrigerator.

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Plyo boxes are very popular in CrossFit gyms. They're great for all kinds of workouts—or for just sitting on after a good workout with your head cradled in your hands waiting for the room to stop spinning. However, commercial plyo boxes can cost as much as $100 to $200 each, plus shipping. Homebuilt equipment—a favorite CrossFit brand—can be constructed with quality at least equal to that of the best commercial designs and at significantly lower cost. Square boxes and open-sided boxes take a bigger toll on the shins from missed jumps, and slant-sided boxes are stackable, so they require less floor space for storage. So this month's journal brings you the do-it-yourself CrossFit custom plyo box with slanted sides. Your friends, relations, workout buddies, and clients will be sore impressed! Or just plain sore after a hard workout on one of these babies. Total cost for this project should be in the neighborhood of $40-60 per box or less, depending on the size and your bargain-shopping abilities

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There is actually very little personal equipment that is absolutely necessary to take to the gym. But it is surprising how much stuff some people carry with them. As a general rule, some equipment is useful, some equipment is most definitely not useful—and in fact is a bad idea—and some is just absurd. In order of most useful to most silly in the gym bag we have squat shoes, chalk, a lifting belt, lifting straps, knee wraps or knee sleeves, wrist wraps, elbow wraps or sleeves, gloves, devices such as a “Manta Ray” or a “Sting Ray” that hold the bar for you, and anything you intend to use to shave anything but your face.

I had a member named Lonnie a while back. Nice guy, lovely wife (whom he met there in the gym), and strong under the bar, but with a few annoying habits. One day I walked out of the office and saw him doing incline leg raises on the incline sit-up board, holding on to the bar behind his head with his hands strapped to the bar. I, of course, approached him to question this behavior. He said that he was using straps so he could concentrate on his abs better, which is, of course, very important in an ab exercise. I made fun of him for several weeks...

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Hardly a week passes that I don’t hear someone say, “I hear you opened a gym. That must have cost a fortune.” My usual response is, “No, not really. You would be surprised at how small the start-up costs are relative to mainstream commercial fitness facilities.” Typically, their eyes glaze over at this point, their eyebrows wrinkle, and I suspect that they walk away thinking, “Yeah right, no need to play it down. There is no way you can own a gym without spending a bundle.” Well, there is.

Part of the start-up process is not only to plan gym layout but to prioritize equipment purchases by determining which are required for the exercises that are most important and used most frequently—the staple movements that make up the core of our core.

In my analysis, the core movements boiled down to the pull-up, squat, handstand push-up, and running—all things that require no significant cash outlay and are enough to establish an initial client base around. For the items that do require fairly large expenditures, there are often creative work-arounds, what I like to call the circumnavigation of retail purchases.

This article is essentially the story of how we at newly opened CrossFit San Diego effected such a circumnavigation and managed to open our doors with a minimum of cash outlay–and a minimum of construction aptitude.

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The CrossFit Journal was launched in 2002 with an issue titled “The Garage Gym.” In that premier issue we decried the lack of efficacious programming in commercial gyms and proffered a solution with the promise that “you can build, rather inexpensively, a world-class strength and conditioning facility in your garage!”

Now we revisit the CrossFit garage-gym concept to report on the successes of what may be hundreds of CrossFit start-up gyms and the aspirations and motivations of the people behind them.

CrossFitters are holding court in London, New York, New Brunswick, Puerto Rico, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and Qatar. CrossFit crews are convening in public parks, garages and carports, basements, barns, deposed tyrants’ homes, commercial gyms, storage lockers, martial arts academies, and universities, under bleachers, and on military bases.

Three years ago we saw the CrossFit movement as an alternative to the prevailing commercial gym establishment and its signature “big-box,” machine-based, bodybuilding approach to fitness. We promoted the garage-gym notion in large part to provide refuge for our more athletic programming, which couldn’t find quarter in the commercial gyms.
Today we see ourselves as part of a wider war between the big-box franchises such as Gold’s, Bally’s, and 24-Hour Fitness and the small-box facilities of which the Curves chain is the best-known example.

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The Need

The ideal gym would be located close to home or work, well equipped, clean, and manned by knowledgeable helpful staff. Our ideal gym would also not be overly crowded yet available to friends and family that we'd like to workout with. An ideal gym would be supportive of hard-core fitness, a la CrossFit. As long as we're dreaming it might also play only the music that we want to hear.

Many of us are blessed with gyms we love dearly. If that's your situation, great! For the rest of us our gyms are very different. Often the drive to the gym is 20-30 minutes coming and going, the music is worse than annoying, the staff are less than worthless, the place is packed with selectorized equipment for which we've no use and the few pieces of equipment thatyou want to use are in near constant use...

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