The most comfortable tool for something uncomfortable
My favourite equipment does one thing really well. Why single-purpose beats the do-everything machine.
Posts tagged equipment
Ikea has no patina
On being a discerning consumer: what it really means to ask how the things we use are made.
Don't just brace, embrace the curve
Why we run both back-extension machines and add Jefferson curls. The spine is built to move, so we move it.
Details matter
The hand-laid knurling on our bars, and the machinist who has been laying it down, by hand, since 2016.
The weights that anchor me
100 days outside Madras in 4,200. Owning a gym is a maximalist life that weighs you down in literal tonnes.
It just works
Designing a pivot that never fails: stainless bushings, sea air, and putting function ahead of form.
Building tools is being human
Reverence for tools and how we make them is as human as it gets. On why building equipment satisfies so deeply.
My own museum of failure
Seventeen gym-equipment builds that didn't work, and what every one of them taught me.
Why we make our own equipment
The question we get asked most: why not just buy it? Control, cost, proportions, durability, and fun.
The spinning dumbbell
Machining a bearing-free rotating dumbbell to spare the wrist under heavy overhead load.
The nice things always ran out
A 90s childhood of imported chocolates and toys that always ran out. Why I would rather make things than wait for them.
Make in India, not mimic in India
A real reason for a subcontinent equipment brand: design for the bodies it actually serves, not the ones it copies.
The margins for getting it right are tiny
Grip thickness, bar width, plate diameter. The details mass-market gym gear quietly decides don't matter.
Seven years of the t-bell
How our hand-built t-bell evolved from V1 to V2.2, and why it makes loading a deadlift so accessible.
The infinite monkey bar, start to finish
A long, honest build log of one machine. 'Made in India' is never quite made in India. Everything is made on Earth.
Mistakes
Sixteen ways I've been conned or screwed up in twelve years of building a gym. We powered through anyway.
Literal product-market fit
Copy-pasting equipment dimensions builds uncomfortable tools. The safety squat bar, resized for Indian frames.
Nine inch fails
A client's safe miss on the lever squat, and why a loaded barbell sits exactly nine inches off the floor.
The idiot index, applied to barbells
Musk's cost lesson, borrowed for a gym: why I make a stainless barbell for ₹7,500 instead of buying one.