Make no mistake — you’re the one lifting those weights. Despite what you might hear from a high-and-mighty gymgoer, wearing a belt to squat or strapping up for a set of deadlifts isn’t cheating.
The right gear in your gym bag can help you perform better as an athlete, achieve your athletic potential, and get you closer to your goals. But you can’t just strap, bind, notch, or wrap yourself up and expect to set new personal records across the board; you need to know how and when to use lifting equipment.
DMoose's weight lifting bundle contains everything you need to train successfully and sustainably. Pick up everything you need from head to toe with top-class wraps, straps, and a nearly-indestructible lifting belt, all at an unbeatable price.
If you’ve been stalking for new gym gear, you can save time and money by purchasing a bundle from an industry-backed brand like DMoose. Kill five birds with one kettlebell and head into your next weightlifting session prepared to push your limits. This is everything you should have in your gym bag if you love to hit the iron, plus some helpful tips on using gym equipment and top-tier picks for you to consider.
Best Lifting Accessories
[Read More: The 15 Best Triceps Exercises for More Mass and a Bigger Bench Press]
Lifting Belt
Whether squatting, pulling, pressing, or rowing, midline stability is the common denominator across all heavy compound lifting. You need a strong and stable core.
Most folks who hit it heavy in the weight room, whether competitive strength athletes or recreational lifters, use lifting belts to augment their performance by giving their cores a surface to brace against.
Benefits of a Lifting Belt
- A lifting belt provides a stable surface to contract your core against.
- It helps you engage your abs and teaches you how to brace for heavy lifting.
- It protects your spine from bearing too much load during compound exercises.
- A belt allows you to express more power and speed during lifts like the squat and deadlift. (1)
Note: Research shows a learning curve to lifting belts, so you shouldn’t expect to add pounds to your barbell immediately until you learn to work with one properly. (2)
How to Use a Lifting Belt
Fasten your lifting belt around your torso above your hips but below your sternum. If the belt is too low, it may collide with your hips when you squat and limit your range of motion. Bind it too high up, and you may not be able to generate sufficient intra-abdominal pressure.
Make sure that the belt isn’t notched too tightly. A good general rule is that you should be able to fit one finger between your torso and the belt, providing sufficient space to inhale and expand your stomach when you brace.
If you want a solid all-around lifting belt, consider picking up a DMoose Leather Lifting Belt. It can serve you well at five millimeters thick and four inches wide, regardless of your type of lifting.
Lifting Straps
A strong, immovable grip is a status symbol in the weight room. Your ability to hold onto the weights you use to build muscle or strength affects the results you get from your workouts.
However, grip strength is finite, like muscular endurance or cardiovascular capacity. Your training shouldn’t grind to a halt just because your hands run out of gas — if the barbell slips out of your tired hands long before your posterior chain hits its limit during a set of Romanian deadlifts, well, that’s bad for business.
Benefits of Lifting Straps
- They help you secure your hands to the bar during pulling exercises.
- Straps allow you to focus on contracting your muscles rather than maintaining your grip.
- Lifting straps may help you lift heavier weights at high intensities.
How to Use Lifting Straps
Straps come in various forms; closed-loop, lasso, figure-eight, or “free” straps that aren’t bound together. How you use them depends on the type you have on hand. Generally speaking, you wrap one end of the strap around the shaft of a barbell or dumbbell and then close your fist (as you typically would).
Straps are handy during heavy pulling movements. If you do many deadlifts, rows, or loaded carries, use DMoose Heavy-Duty Lifting Straps during your workouts.
One noteworthy drawback of certain lifting straps is their intricacy; they can take some finesse to use well and apply quickly. If you want to bypass that learning curve and get the grip-related benefits immediately, you can also use lifting hooks, which provide a divot to hook a barbell or dumbbell. DMoose Lifting Hooks help you hold onto a heavy bar and support your wrists.
Lifting Shoes
Soccer players wear cleats; bowlers have specialized footwear too. If you take weightlifting seriously, wouldn’t you want footwear designed to augment your performance in that area? Lifting shoes strengthen the foundation of your performance in the gym.
Benefits of Lifting Shoes
- Lifting shoes provide a stable surface for your feet rather than the rubbery soles found in most trainers.
- They help you generate and transfer force during explosive movements like the Olympic lifts.
- Shoes can artificially improve mobility during most squatting exercises by elevating your heels.
How to Use Lifting Shoes
Weightlifting shoes, sometimes casually called “lifters,” aren’t an all-the-time thing for the gym. You don’t put them on for an arm workout. Generally speaking, you should wear lifting shoes if you practice the sport of weightlifting or for your leg workouts if you perform lots of free-weight exercises like squats and lunges.
A higher-heeled shoe (some brands will add over an inch of heel height, but most fall around three-quarters of an inch) will provide more range of motion if you have poor ankle mobility but may affect your balance, especially if you’re tall. Also, don’t bind the straps of the shoes too tightly — you need to be able to move your ankles.
Knee Sleeves
Your knees can take a beating in the gym. They often bear the most load when you perform leg movements like lunges, step-ups, or heavy squats.
“Heavy” is relative, but a 500-pound barbell on your back will undoubtedly stress your knees more than if you were working with one plate. The stronger you get, the more you should pay attention to knee health and stability.
Whether you’re attempting a new 1-rep max back squat, it pays to pull up a pair of knee sleeves to feel confident and in command under the barbell.
Benefits of Knee Sleeves
- Knee sleeves provide extra cushion to your knees during lower-body exercises.
- Depending on the material, certain sleeves can add some extra “bounce” to your squats.
- They may help you move more confidently under heavy weights, increasing your strength. (3)
How to Use Knee Sleeves
Knee sleeves are very straightforward: Pull them on and start training. You should ensure that the sleeve fully covers the knee joint and doesn’t compress your knees enough that you can’t bend them. More of the sleeve should be above your kneecap on your lower thigh than down on your shin.
If you’re new to knee sleeves, a good all-purpose pair should be made of neoprene and have a thickness of about seven millimeters. Luckily, DMoose makes a pair for when you want to take your leg days up a notch.
Elbow Wraps
Elbow pain can be particularly frustrating to deal with. Your elbows and the associated musculature enable you to perform nearly every upper-body exercise. You need strong, healthy elbows to bench press well, of course. However, weakness, instability, or an injury in those joints may also impact your arm or back training.
Benefits of Elbow Wraps
- Wraps protect and cushion your elbows during most pressing movements and triceps exercises.
- You can adjust the tightness of the compression to suit your comfort level, something you can’t get from sleeves.
How to Use Elbow Wraps
You might need a friend’s help to apply elbow wraps. Start right below the crease of your below and wrap up the joint, covering half of the previous wrap with each new layer. Tuck the end of the wrap in at the end and ensure that you aren’t preventing circulation to your forearm.
A good pair of elbow wraps can help you press powerfully, confidently, and, most importantly, comfortably. Try DMoose 40-Inch Cotton/Polyester Wraps for yourself and see.
Wrist Wraps
For a relatively small joint, your wrists have a lot of work to do in the gym. Every weight you hold in your hands, be it a barbell, a heavy dumbbell, or a kettlebell, applies some stress to your wrists. Certain bodyweight exercises — like handstand push-ups — can also be quite taxing.
Wrist wraps are ubiquitous in strength sports, with observational studies showing that their prevalence is nearly universal among powerlifters during the bench press. (4)
Benefits of Wrist Wraps
- They protect and cushion your wrists during heavy lifting.
- Using wrist wraps can help properly position your wrist during chest and overhead press variations.
- Most wrist wraps are ergonomic and easy to put on quickly.
How to Use Wrist Wraps
The position is the primary factor to remember when working with wrist wraps. If you wear them high on your wrist (as close to the palm of your hand as possible, as illustrated in the photo below), you’ll have an easier time keeping your wrists in a neutral position and may even help your grip slightly.
Wearing them lower on your wrists will provide joint support while still allowing you to extend your wrists backward. Wear your wrist wraps lower if you train in Olympic lifting, as the snatch and jerk movements require some degree of wrist extension overhead.
Lifting Chalk
Sweaty palms are a downer whether you’re walking into a big job interview or have just loaded up a new one-rep max deadlift. If you’ve never used lifting chalk before, you’d be surprised at how much better you perform with your hands chalked up.
You may not need chalk to land your dream job, but if you want to lift a new personal record in the deadlift, a vice-like grip is non-negotiable. Chalk can help you lock in those gains.
Benefits of Lifting Chalk
- Chalk dries your hands and clears sweat or other residues, improving your grip.
- It is particularly good for helping you feel connected to barbells with sharp knurling.
- Chalk is essential for performance in strength sports like Olympic lifting or powerlifting.
How to Use Lifting Chalk
When it comes to lifting chalk, less is often more. Chalk is meant to dry your hands and increase the friction between your palm and the surface of whatever you hold onto. Applying too much chalk to your hands (or worse yet, scraping a block of chalk onto the shaft of a barbell) can hinder this and weaken your grip.
Apply a light dusting of chalk to your hands. Get between your fingers, in the nook of your thumb, and up to your fingertips, but don’t go so heavy that your hands are white. Do not apply chalk directly to a barbell; the chalk will “fill in” the knurling grooves and make the bar smoother.
Liquid Chalk
Your gym may have policies limiting (or prohibiting) the use of chalk, usually because it can be messy if you aren’t careful. You may want to consider liquid chalk, which comes in a tube.
Liquid chalk works the same way; squeeze a nickel-sized dollop onto the back of your hand and then dab it around each of your hands. Don’t spread it around; use your fingers to “tap” it all over your palms and then allow it to dry over two to three minutes.
Best Lifting Accessories Bundle
You shouldn’t spend your time and effort fretting over what gym equipment belongs in your gym bag. That effort is better spent on the actual lifting, after all. You need a one-stop shop for your lifting equipment that covers all the bases (and then some).
DMoose’s weightlifting bundle contains everything you need to train successfully and sustainably. You can cover your head to toe with top-class wraps, straps, and a nearly-indestructible lifting belt. Here’s what they have to offer:
DMoose Weight Lifting Bundle
- 5-millimeter, four-inch double-notched leather lifting belt to protect your spine and help you perform better on squats, deadlifts, and more.
- Neoprene, polyvinyl chloride, and nylon lifting hooks are designed to help you hold onto any barbell or dumbbell without being limited by your grip.
- 7-millimeter neoprene knee sleeves to protect and stabilize your knees on leg day.
- 40-inch long heavy-duty polyester-cotton elbow wraps to bulletproof your bench press workouts.
- Lasso-style lifting straps to shore up your grip and help you pull on heavier weights.
DMoose's weight lifting bundle contains everything you need to train successfully and sustainably. Pick up everything you need from head to toe with top-class wraps, straps, and a nearly-indestructible lifting belt, all at an unbeatable price.
Gear Up for Gains
The right equipment in your gym bag can take your workouts from “good” to “great.” Sleeves, wraps, straps, and a sturdy belt are invaluable tools for the serious strength athlete and the recreational lifter. Luckily, DMoose has you covered. Get everything you need to crush your next workout all at once from DMoose’s weightlifting bundle and gear up for more gains than you know what to do with.
References
- Zink, A. J., Whiting, W. C., Vincent, W. J., & McLaine, A. J. (2001). The effects of a weight belt on trunk and leg muscle activity and joint kinematics during the squat exercise. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 15(2), 235–240.
- Miyamoto, K., Iinuma, N., Maeda, M., Wada, E., & Shimizu, K. (1999). Effects of abdominal belts on intra-abdominal pressure, intra-muscular pressure in the erector spinae muscles and myoelectrical activities of trunk muscles. Clinical biomechanics (Bristol, Avon), 14(2), 79–87.
- Machek, S. B., Cardaci, T. D., Wilburn, D. T., Cholewinski, M. C., Latt, S. L., Harris, D. R., & Willoughby, D. S. (2021). Neoprene Knee Sleeves of Varying Tightness Augment Barbell Squat One Repetition Maximum Performance Without Improving Other Indices of Muscular Strength, Power, or Endurance. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 35(Suppl 1), S6–S15.
- Harris, D., Cardaci, T., Cintineo, H., Pham, R., Dunsmore, K., Funderburk, L., & Machek, S. (2023). A Cross-Sectional Examination of Wrist Wrap Use Prevalence and Characterization for Ergogenic Purposes in Actively Competing Powerlifters. International Journal of Strength and Conditioning, 3(1).
Featured Image courtesy of DMoose
