With Chris LaLanne (Jack’s grandnephew) at LaLanne Fitness CrossFit in San Francisco, October 2008
The category of how to build a home gym is so broad in scope that I’m going to focus more on old-school fitness and weight training. Think along the lines of picking things up off the ground and putting them overhead rather than contorting your body on machines.
Granted, I used machines when I first starting training in 1998 because, like most people, I didn’t know any better. On my first day, I had a free training session with a guy whose calves Rep. Steve King would envy. He took me through the machine area of the gym and showed me how to use the lat pulldown machine, the leg curl machine, and the leg extension machine, etc. Of course, he used free weights to look as impressive as he did but that was a small area of the gym where I, as a lanky newbie, I feared to tread. I spent the next eight years wasting time with various Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal workouts as well as consulting a champion natural bodybuilder trainer. He got me not skinny-fat using machines and then bulked me back up using free weights.
