Did you know that the right training gear and fitness accessories can make a huge difference to your results? Of course, regular exercise with a solid workout plan and a healthy diet are the main building blocks to your success. You should always focus on getting those two elements right before anything else. But you’ll be surprised how much easier and faster your progress will come along when you also add the right equipment to your training routine. Having trained clients for over a decade and trained myself for almost two, I’ve learned that fitness gear can be separated into two categories: the Essential items and the Optional/Next Level items.

The first list describes gear that you need as a bare minimum to be able to do your workouts effectively, eg. towel and water bottle. The second list includes accessories that you may not feel the need to invest in immediately, but over time you’ll most likely have to get to be able to take your results to the next level.

ESSENTIALS

Towel

This is a no-brainer and as I tell all my clients, a requirement for every session. If you’re serious about training to achieve results in the gym, you are most likely going to sweat during your workout. When you exert effort on each exercise, your body temperature rises and sweating is almost inevitable. Do you really want to be standing there in the middle of the gym, shirt soaked in sweat and face and body dripping, without having something to wipe it off? Not only is sweat uncomfortable and distracting if not dealt with, it’s also uncomfortable for the other people in the gym if you leave traces of your sweat all over the benches and equipment. This works both ways. If you find an empty machine that was recently used with someone else’s sweat all over it, surely you would want a towel handy to clean it.

Add in the obvious hygienic reason of having an extra protective barrier to stop your skin from contacting potentially dirty equipment, and there’s no reason at all you shouldn’t bring one with you for every workout. Lastly, as I warn everyone that trains with me, you’ll need the towel – if you’re training hard enough to actually make a difference you will definitely break a sweat. I recommend a medium-sized towel (not a beach or bath towel) large enough to cover your entire face in one wipe, yet compact enough to not be an inconvenience to carry around. A towel with a zip pocket to store your phone/keys etc is also a wise choice. 

Water Bottle 

Another often overlooked yet essential training accessory is the humble water bottle. Dehydration can impact the quality of your workout hugely, and while proper hydration should be done by drinking enough fluids well before your workout, drinking water during your workout can extend your endurance by allowing your body to cool down faster in between sets.  I can’t tell you how many times new clients have been unable to complete their first workout with me because they didn’t think they needed to bring a water bottle with them, only to be struggling to cool down and wishing for some cool liquid within close reach. I recommend a water bottle with at least 1L in capacity with a clear material so you can see how much is left. Drinking more water throughout your workout is a proven way to boost your performance at a very low cost.

Compression Pants/Shorts  

One underrated item of training gear is compression pants and shorts. Compression clothing are made of fitted material that has much more beneficial properties than regular exercise clothing. The positive effects stem from increased blood flow to your muscles due to the compression fit, as Dr James Broatch from the Australian Institute of Sport explains: “A lot of the benefits associated with compression relate to an improvement in blood flow, including both the delivery of blood to the exercising muscle and the return of blood back to the heart. As a result, compression is thought to improve the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the muscle to improve performance, and aid in the removal of waste products after exercise to speed up the recovery process. Other benefits include greater proprioception (ie. body awareness) and reduced muscle damage and inflammation post-exercise.” Research from the Australian Institute of Sport has shown  proven benefits of wearing 2XU compression include “reduced muscle soreness by 47%, increased blood flow to the muscle by 18% and reduced heart work rate by 2.5%”.

Personally I use compression pants and shorts at least 3 times a week - on every lower body strength session, running or cardio day and especially when I play my sport (basketball). I’ve found that I definitely get less DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) the next day and seem to recover from my lower body workouts faster, needing only 1 day of rest between sessions instead of 2 or more. For this reason I consider these types of shorts to be an essential staple for anyone who plans on doing intense exercise involving their legs. Expect to pay $60 for compression shorts and $90 or more for compression pants, not cheap but well worth the investment. In my personal experience the brands Supacore and 2XU are the highest quality and gave me the most noticeable performance benefits.  

OPTIONAL

Lifting Belt

This is a belt that wraps tight around your waist and is intended to give you significant protective support for your lower back and core. Most people new to gym training will be starting with light weights as they learn important exercises like squats and deadlifts, and so won’t need to use a lifting belt straight away. Indeed, you should avoid regular use of a belt too early as it can cause a mental reliance on a piece of equipment to protect you against injury, instead of using the best method of protection: injury prevention through learning the proper technique for each lift. Inevitably though as you get stronger the weights you’ll be handling will get significantly heavier, so once you’ve mastered correct technique for exercises that involve the lower back (such as barbell squats, rows, deadlifts, overhead presses) it’s time to invest in a quality lifting belt to help you continue making progress safely. 

A good lifting belt will be made of leather, which is both more durable and supportive than the cheaper neoprene versions. You can also spot the better belts as they are thicker and wider to provide support across a greater area of your back/core; they will also be the same thickness across the whole length of the belt rather than being wide in the lower back area but then taper off to be thinner at the front of the belt. This is important as you want an even level of support throughout your whole core, which includes your obliques and abdominals, not just your lower back. I personally use the lifting belt only for my heaviest sets on compound exercises, and if the lift doesn’t involve the lower back much at all (eg. seated/lying down or machine exercises) I forego the belt altogether. Expect to pay at least $50 for a good leather belt, but this will last you for years and help give you priceless protection from potential injuries.

Dip Belt 

 The dip belt has a much different purpose from the lifting belt. This belt is used to make bodyweight exercises more challenging by allowing you to attach extra weight on yourself. The belt comes with a chain which you loop through the additional weight plates you want to add, once attached to the belt it’ll be secure enough for you to do moves like pullups safely but with added resistance. As with the lifting belt above, most beginners to strength training won’t need this belt as they most likely won’t have the necessary technique or strength yet to handle extra weight on exercises like pullups and dips. But if your goal is to progress to a more advanced level of strength and continue to gain lean muscle past the beginner/intermediate level, I highly recommend investing the $50 on a leather dip belt. I bought mine 10 years ago and still use it every week to this day!

Wrist wraps

One of the challenges that many new gym trainees run into is that their grip strength often doesn’t progress at the same rate that their larger muscle groups do.  This can lead to the muscle they are targeting being strong enough to handle increased weights (and indeed needing heavier weight to continue progress), but their wrists and forearms not strong enough to hold or stabilise the weight during the exercise. For example during a dumbbell chest or shoulder press, your upper body may not find a 30kg dumbbell challenging but you find you can’t get the dumbbells into position due to your wrists giving way. You could fix this problem by doing a few dedicated exercises specifically to make your hands and grip stronger – indeed this is the long-term solution that I recommend anyway.

However in the short term, a pair of inexpensive wrist wraps are a great option to allow you to continue training hard without letting your wrists be the inhibiting factor. These thick wraps fit tight around the base of your wrist to limit any accidental and distracting shaking in the wrist, giving you much more stability while handling dumbbells and barbells. If you’ve been stuck at the same strength level on many upper body exercises but don’t find the weights challenging for the actual target muscle, it could be wrist stability that’s impeding your progress. Buying a pair of $30 wrist wraps is a simple fix around this that you definitely won’t regret.    

Resistance Bands

These bands can actually serve multiple purposes. The most common one is to use the resistance band as a stretching tool, to help you maximise the range and intensity of a stretch when you don’t have a training partner available to help you. Using the band to open up your hips and rotator cuff before weight training can go a long way to preventing injury and improving your performance. Another great function for the resistance band is to use it as an assistance tool to help you work your way up to bodyweight exercises you don’t have the strength to do fully yet.  For example it’s common for beginners to struggle with bodyweight chinups; using a band helps you regress the move to a level that your body’s strength level can handle. Since resistance bands come in a wide range of thicknesses and thus resistance levels, you simply choose the band that gives you the right amount of assistance where the chinup becomes easy enough to complete with proper technique, yet still challenging enough to make your body progressively stronger.

As you get better at the movement and your strength goes up, you simply progress to the next lighter resistance band that gives you less assistance, and so on until you can fully support your bodyweight and no longer need the bands. An individual resistance band is very affordable at $30 or less, so if you want a band just for stretching purposes you could get one on its own. If you’re looking to progress your strength gradually on certain bodyweight exercises, you’ll probably need a set of 3-5 different levels of resistance bands that will cost you around $50 or more.      

 Stretching Mat

You don’t need to be into yoga to make good use of a yoga mat. Mobilization exercises and dynamic stretching before your workout can significantly boost your performance, and post-workout stretching can also speed up your recovery. But you don’t want to be doing your stretches on the bare floor of a gym which may or not be clean, and some gyms have a shortage of mats or don’t supply them at all. Bringing your own mat (which can be rolled and stored easily) is the easy solution to this and can encourage you to make stretching a regunlar part of your fitness routine at a very modest cost, usually no more than $20 - $50.