Home Gym: Australians Build Gyms At Home To Maintain Fitness

By the looks of things, by the time all this is over, we're all going to be 'prison fit'...

Home Gym: Australians Build Gyms At Home To Maintain Fitness

Australia's most embarrassing home gym belongs to DMARGE's Founder.

Australians are taking desperate measures to stay fit without angering their neighbours or spending a fortune on equipment. This is the conclusion DMARGE has come to after analysing (and let’s be honest, comparing our own setups with) the latest of the two million ‘home-gym’ hashtagged posts on Instagram. The main takeaway? Though there is some gold, Australia’s current workout situation, generally speaking, is more ‘prison chic’ than ‘bountiful and beautiful.’

From sofas to pets to doorways, no household implement is safe. Kicking off the craze, we found Scott Henderson from Men’s Health Australia turning your ‘workout from home’ stereotypes upside down with an exercise that requires zero equipment whatsoever.

Grim? Perhaps. But effective. This exercise, also, for those of you like DMARGE founder Luc Wiesman (who told us, “My reasoning for starting my own grim gym in the garage was because we were told off by the neighbours below for being too noisy with burpees and skipping at 7:30am”) makes very little noise.

Then there are the clanky maximum security-esque gym setups that really inspired us to give this craze its name, with everything from deserted barbells…

… to unraked leaves…

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… to those where the caption says it all.

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Shittest gym ever but it’ll have to do #shitgym

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Then there were the grim optimists, who had some equipment but not everything…

… the truly sparse…

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#coronagym πŸ€·πŸ½β€β™€οΈ

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… and this goddamn genius (though we aren’t 100% sure where he hails from).

Oh, and Australian Olympic Gold medalist and World Champion Michael Klim had quite a smart, creative solution as well, working those triceps with some super serious hose pulls…

Unsurprisingly, it appears Americans are taking the ‘aesthetic’ of their morning body busting more seriously, and – it must be said – glamorously. Whether it’s yoga…

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… or high-intensity bodyweight workouts…

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… our friends across the pond are (stylistically) putting us to shame. That’s not to say we aren’t staying sharp (this all comes in a context where Australian gyms are offering classes via zoom, and where Chris Hemsworth’s health and fitness app Centr is seeing “double typical volume“), but that we are embracing a spartan mode de vie. Who knows: by the time all this is over, maybe we’ll all be prison fit?

Here’s hoping.

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