What actually lives in my gym bag

Sunday night I was packing my bag for the morning and found something in a side pocket that I’m fairly sure used to be a protein bar. It had gone hard enough that it made a noise when I set it down on the counter. Lana looked at it, then looked at me, and said nothing at all, which is somehow worse than saying something. haha.

So I tipped the whole bag out onto the kitchen floor and went through it properly, which I’d guess I do about twice a year whether it needs it or not. Two odd socks. A membership card for a gym I haven’t set foot in for years. Loose change. Chalk that had given up being chalk and turned into dust, and gotten into everything. And underneath all of it, the handful of things I reach for every single session.

That’s the part worth writing about, so I’m going to write about that.

Pack it the night before

I’m not an organized person in general, so this one gets to be the exception that carries the rest.

The reason isn’t discipline. It’s that the decision to go gets made the night before, on the couch, when it’s easy. If the bag is packed and sitting by the door, going is just picking it up on the way past. If it isn’t packed, going means finding a clean towel first, and finding a clean towel first is how you end up not going. I’ve lost more sessions to a missing towel than to being tired.

My son has decided this part is his job now. Sunday evening he’ll turn up and ask me if it’s packed yet, and then go and look at the doorway himself to check I wasn’t just saying that. He’s getting into training, and right now most of what that looks like is copying whatever his dad does. I’ve been at this a long time, and the thing that gets me is watching somebody else start from the beginning.

What goes in, in the order it goes in

The order matters more than the list does, because the order is what stops you forgetting things.

Shoes first, flat at the bottom. They’re the biggest thing in there and the dirtiest thing in there, and everything else sits on top of them. Put your shoes in last and they sit on your towel, and then your towel smells like your shoes, and you only make that mistake about four times before it sticks.

Clothes next. Shorts, shirt, socks, and one spare of whatever you sweat through worst. Roll them instead of folding them. I picked that up off a video about packing a suitcase for a vacation and it’s the most useful thing the internet has ever given me, which probably says something.

Towel on top of the clothes, because it’s the first thing you want when you get there.

Then the small stuff goes in the side pockets, and this is where the bag itself starts to matter. Mine is the SwoleAF gym bag, which is a duffel, polyester, black straps, and it has a name tag sewn inside it. That sounds like nothing until you set yours down next to three other black duffels that look exactly the same. It comes in a small and a large, and I’d go a size up from whatever you think you need, because everybody underpacks once and then overpacks forever after.

What’s in my side pocket: El Chapo, which is the pre-workout that lives in the bag rather than in the kitchen cabinet, because the kitchen cabinet is where things get left behind. A shaker. AMINO AF goes in there too. Headphones. A pair of wrist straps that have been in there so long they’ve molded to the shape of the pocket.

That’s the pocket. It doesn’t change much.

The stuff people always forget

Socks. Everybody forgets socks, and I don’t know why it’s always socks.

A plastic grocery bag, folded flat in the bottom. Wet gear goes in it and then the wet gear isn’t touching everything else. Weighs nothing and it keeps the rest of the bag dry.

Deodorant, and I’ll leave that one right there.

A padlock, if your gym has lockers and doesn’t hand them out.

Tape. Not for anything dramatic. For when a callus goes and you still have half a session left.

And a water bottle, which sounds too obvious to write down, except I forget mine roughly one week in three.

The stuff you don’t need in there

I’m hardly the person to tell you to carry less when I sell half of what ends up in the bag, haha. But the bag got a lot easier to carry once I stopped treating it as overflow storage.

A laptop, unless you’re going straight somewhere afterward. A second pair of shoes. Four tubs when one would do. Old receipts. Whatever that protein bar was.

None of that’s a rule. It’s just that a heavy bag by the door is a bag you leave by the door.

Where the bag lives between sessions

By the door, and not in the car.

The car feels like the clever answer, and it was mine for about a year. The problem with the car is that a bag in the car never gets emptied and never gets repacked. It slowly turns into the thing I tipped out onto my kitchen floor on Sunday.

By the door, you walk past it. You see it. You notice the towel is still damp and you swap it out, and the whole thing stays in a state where picking it up and leaving takes no thought at all.

Empty it the same day when you can manage it, and repack it the same night. Then it’s ready, and the next session has sort of already started, while you were standing in the kitchen doing nothing much.

That’s the system, and the rest of this is detail.

One last thing and then I’ll leave you to it. If the bag you’re carrying is still the one your old gym handed you at signup, mine is on the site, name tag and all, and it’s here if you want it. Go pack yours and put it by the door.

Stay Swole,
Justin 💪