How to Turn Your Garage into a Crossfit Gym

This is a pictorial showing the 2 weekend adventure of converting my garage into a micro-gym worthy of CrossFit.



First you must find a friend willing to help, or as in my case.... one NOT so willing to help. Enter my best friend, Alex.






Want a recipe for fun? Take 20 rubber mats at 100 pounds a piece, add a healthy dose of rain..... then then try to move them.







To help reduce mildew and to make the mats easier to work with, we first blew them off with a shop-vac blower, and then hand dried them with towels.









After all the whole mats are in place, then we get to cut the 3/4 in hard pressed rubber with none other than a utility knife. This joyous task was left to the very bald, yet very cool guy Alex.






Do take note of the presence of the 2v6 under the mat to provide tension against the cut, and to keep the blade from slipping out and cutting him.

Also Take note of the amount of pressure he is applying to cut the rubber.









While Alex was in the garage cutting mats, I was in the attic preparing the mounting blocks for our gymnast rings.




Just to give you an idea of whats going on here. I have 2x10 beams going across my attic. I wanted to secure my rings using a 12 inch eyebolt for each strap. To accomplish this I had to notch almost 3 inches into the 2x10 and set a crossbeam of 2x6 on top of that as the weight bearing structure.

For stabilization I stacked 3 cuts of 2x6 on top of the sheetrock that is the garage ceiling and secured everything with 3 inch wood screws, 4 count in each piece of wood.

I then drilled my 1/2 hole that would fit my eyebolts, and secured them with a lock washer and washer.








AS you can see from the Garage level, it is a very clean install, with only slight cracking of the popcorn ceiling that we attributed to a large amount of plaster mud build up in that section.










Now we needed to test the strength of the rings, so we enlisted the help of my 2 year old daughter, who was dying to play with the rings anyways.


Yep they hold!





More pictures of the rings:








Now came the joyous task of assembling the following equipment: c2 rower, york press squat stands, york ghd, york commecial 2 tier db stand.

I wont bore you with all the pictures of the process but I will warn you... York's GHD instructions were lacking in instructional department. They rated high in confusion though.

Here is me putting together the 2 tier DB rack:






And now the finished project:












Any questions or comments are appreciated.

Thanks!

Chris Drewry - CrossFit Alpha
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