The Garage Came First: Building Muscle At Home, And How Britain Was Sold The Gym

Britain was building bodies at home, with a book, a pair of dumbbells and lessons by post, generations before the chain gym. What the home lifter lacked was heavier iron, and for more than a century the market sold them springs.

In the spring of 2020, Britain found out it could not buy a dumbbell.

The country went into lockdown on 23 March. By July the price comparison site Idealo was reporting sales of home gym equipment up 5,813% since that date, and said that more weights had sold in the first weeks of July than in the whole of 2019. When the country locked down again in January 2021, a number of dumbbells were showing out of stock at Argos, and weight benches were selling out there and at Amazon.

Spare rooms filled with iron. Cars were evicted from garages. Plenty of people who had always been told that muscle was made in a building with a turnstile spent a year finding out what a pair of dumbbells could do on the living room carpet.

Then the doors reopened, and the country went back.

By March 2025 the UK had 11.3 million gym members, more than it had ever had, paying into an industry worth £6.5 billion. The average monthly fee at the low-cost chains passed £25 for the first time, and three companies, PureGym, The Gym Group and JD Gyms, owned 94% of those clubs. In the industry’s own annual report, the chief executive of JD Gyms, Alun Peacock, reflected on what putting the price up had done to his membership.

“Members aren’t as price-sensitive as we expected.”

He is right. They are not. A sixth of the country now pays every month for the use of a barbell, a little more each year, without a murmur.

Training at home is older than the chain gym by a century. Its most famous early salesman made his name on a music hall stage in Westminster, in evening dress, without a word of English.

A young man in evening dress

In the autumn of 1889 the strongman act at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster belonged to a man billed as Samson, who opened it with a standing challenge. Anyone who could match the feats of his pupil, a strongman called Cyclops, could have £100. Anyone who could beat Samson himself could have £500.

On a Tuesday night at the end of October, a 22-year-old Prussian walked up to the stage to take it. By his own account he had arrived in London that evening, spoke no English, and had brought a friend along to interpret. He was wearing evening dress. The audience took one look and shouted at Samson to ignore him and get on with the show. Samson laughed.

Then the young man took his coat off.

His name was Eugen Sandow. He matched Cyclops lift for lift, and when Cyclops put a 240lb barbell over his head with two hands, Sandow did it with one. Samson refused to pay and demanded the contest go on until one of them dropped. The Aquarium’s manager allowed two more feats instead, and Sandow matched those as well. Samson offered the £100 and put off his own challenge until Saturday.

As Sandow told it, on Saturday 2 November the Aquarium was so full that he could not get into it. The stage door was locked and the man behind it, under strict orders, would not open it to anybody. When the hour arrived, Sandow’s party burst the door off its hinges, settled the doorkeeper’s injuries with a ten-pound note, and reached the stage with half a minute to spare. Samson had spent the delay strutting about the stage, announcing that his challenger had lost his nerve.

The Marquess of Queensberry and Lord de Clifford judged it. Samson bent an iron bar over his arm and broke a cable around his chest, and Sandow did both.

Samson then produced a chain armlet that was too small for Sandow’s arm, and Sandow produced one of the same strength from the same maker, made to fit, and broke that too.

Then Sandow lifted a 280lb dumbbell with one hand, lay down on the stage with it, stood back up with it, and offered to call the whole thing a draw if Samson or Cyclops could do the same.

“I have had enough of this,” said Samson. “It’s all humbug.”

The judges gave it to Sandow. The £500 never appeared, and he later wrote that the Aquarium settled with him for £350. Outside, the crowd lifted his cab off the ground. He was soon earning £150 a week at the Alhambra.

Four pounds

Eight years later, the man who had stood up off a stage floor holding 280lb in one hand published a book telling the British public how to become strong at home. By its second edition, the dumbbells he told a grown man to start with weighed four pounds each.

The book was Strength and How to Obtain It, published in 1897 with an anatomical chart of the exercises, and the revised edition sold for two shillings and sixpence. Its tables told a man of seventeen or over to start with a pair of 4lb dumbbells and do the first exercise fifty times, adding five repetitions every day. Once he reached eighty, he was to stay there for six months, then add a pound to each bell and begin again. The heaviest bells he should ever use were 10lb.

The first edition had set the limit at 20lb. Experience in his schools, Sandow explained in the second, had taught him that this was far too heavy for most men. “It is always better to use bells too light than too heavy.”

Heavy lifting got a short chapter at the end of the instructions, with the advice that it was best left alone until it could be practised under an experienced instructor. Those instructors were to be found at Sandow’s schools: St James’s Street, Ebury Street, Walbrook, Tottenham Court Road and the Crystal Palace in London, and Oxford Street in Manchester. The heavy iron lived behind his door. The front room got four pounds and a chart.

His teaching travelled all over the world. The correspondence department, Sandow wrote, had become the most important part of his work, with letters arriving from India, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the Klondike, and a course of instruction by post available for another half a crown.

Some of the letters were not what he wanted to read. Men wrote in to say they were doing the exercises an immense number of times, for three or four hours a day and more, and not getting much better. Sandow’s diagnosis was a lack of willpower. They were going through the motions, he said, and a quarter of an hour of conscientious work beat an hour of that.

He was half right, which in the fitness business counts as a distinguished record. The half he missed has nothing to do with willpower, and it is the subject of the volume myth.

The spring

By the second edition he had a solution for sale. The Grip dumbbell came in two halves with a steel spring between them, and the pupil had to squeeze the halves together and hold them there for the whole exercise, so that he gripped hard whether he felt like it or not. It solved a second problem too, which Sandow pointed out with some pride. Instead of buying heavier dumbbells as he grew stronger, the owner would buy a stronger spring, and “one pair will suffice him for all time.”

The Smithsonian has one of these in its original tin. The label on the lid says it was supplied to King Edward VII by Royal Letters Patent.

The Army liked light kit too. Printed in the book was a letter from Lieutenant Colonel G. M. Fox, the Inspector of Army Gymnasia, praising Sandow’s light dumbbell exercises and the absence of “expensive and cumbrous apparatus”.

What the pupils measured

Also printed in the book were letters from pupils, and one of them measured the thing that actually mattered.

Thomas Fox of Church Row, Limehouse, was nineteen, five feet tall and seven stone. He had bought the book about two years earlier and practised its drills “incessantly”, and he was pleased to report that everything he needed to train with had cost him a few shillings. When he started, the heaviest dumbbell he could take from the ground to arm’s length overhead with his right hand was 56lb. Two years later it was 100lb.

He did not send Sandow the strength of his springs.

Mary Adams of Watford wrote in March 1899 from the other end of the scale. She had spent much of the previous year so ill that it was feared she was going into consumption, and her measurement sheet at Sandow’s Ebury Street school carried the remark “This is the weakest case I have ever had to treat”. After three lessons and what she called “persistent home work” she began, slowly, to gain. Three months later she was 7lb heavier with two and a half inches on each upper arm.

Sandow gave women a chapter of their own, set out to correct the impression that his system was not meant for them, and noted that applications from women to his postal department were rising steadily.

The Great Competition

In 1898 Sandow’s new magazine, Physical Culture, announced a contest to find the best-developed man in Britain. To enter, a man posted in a photograph of himself and six coupons cut from the magazine. Twelve county contests followed, five in England, four in Scotland, two in Ireland and one in Wales, and 656 men took part.

Then the war in South Africa pushed the final back into 1901, and gave it a purpose. The newspapers filled with stories of young men turned away by the recruiting sergeants, and the Army’s own Director-General of medical services later told a government committee that “from 40 to 60 per cent” of the men presenting themselves for enlistment were physically unfit. Sandow offered to train would-be soldiers for nothing.

The final was held at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 14 September 1901. Tickets ran from a shilling for the promenade to three guineas for a box, and one local paper put the crowd at between 7,000 and 8,000. The Band of the Irish Guards played Chopin’s funeral march for President McKinley, dead at the hands of an assassin. Orphan boys drilled, Army gymnasts performed under Colonel Fox, wrestlers wrestled, and Sandow posed on a Roman column.

Then sixty men in black tights and leopard-skin singlets were brought on to be judged by the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes and Arthur Conan Doyle, with Sandow as referee. At one point Sandow went down on his hands and knees to inspect their legs. A reporter noted that “the weakness of most of the strong men proved to be in their legs”, which will surprise nobody who has stood near the mirrors in a modern gym.

Sixty became twelve, and twelve became three. The gold statuette went to William Murray of Nottingham, a Paisley-born dyer’s apprentice turned all-round athlete, who later said he had built himself on a system of his own. The statuette was a figure of Sandow by the sculptor Frederick Pomeroy, advertised as solid gold and valued at £500.

Conan Doyle described what happened next in his memoirs. Leaving the banquet, he saw the winner walking off into the London night with the statue under his arm. Murray had no money, only a return ticket north, and planned to walk the streets until a train left. Doyle took him back to Morley’s Hotel and told the night porter to be civil, since this was the strongest man in England. By the morning the news had gone round the building, and Murray was receiving maids and waiters in bed with the statue beside him.

Murray asked whether he ought to sell it. Doyle told him to open a gymnasium in his home town and put the statue on show as an advertisement. “This he did,” Doyle wrote, “and I believe he has been very successful.”

He hadn’t. Murray went on the music halls instead, balancing a Roman chariot on his chin, and Nottingham remembered him as the Bulwell Hercules. He went to the First World War with the Canadian army, had his lungs damaged by gas, and ended up back in the dyeing trade. When a historian finally traced the statue to his family in Nottingham, it turned out to be gold-plated.

A spring in a tube

Sandow had another invention for the home, the Combined Developer: rubber cords that fixed to a door, with detachable dumbbell handles, sold as a small outlay that would do for a whole family and constitute “an entire athletic outfit”.

By the 1960s the spring had moved into a tube. The Bullworker, invented by the German Gert Kölbel in 1962, was a pair of sprung cylinders that you squeezed together and pulled apart, and it sold across Europe on the strength of magazine adverts. A 1975 advert in Ireland’s RTÉ Guide promised that five minutes a day would start turning “pipe-stem arms into massive, rippling biceps”, many times faster than conventional methods. Its popularity faded in the 1980s.

And in 2020, when the country was shut indoors and went shopping, Idealo’s figures had steppers up 6,500%.

For more than a century the home lifter has been sold the light version. The four-pound bell. The stronger spring. The rubber cord on the back of the bedroom door. Five minutes a day with a tube. The heavy iron was always somewhere else, first behind Sandow’s door in St James’s Street and then behind a turnstile, and the country drew the obvious conclusion that muscle was made wherever the heavy iron happened to be kept.

The iron fits in a garage. It always did.

What the gym actually sells

There is an honest case for the gym, and one of Sandow’s own pupils made it in 1899.

Arthur Foulkes of Bayswater wrote to say the course had done him a lot of good, while confessing he had not done a single exercise outside the school in three months. Attending, he said, cured three defects of working by yourself. You learn the way to do the exercises. You get an instructor who knows his work and keeps you at yours. And you are stimulated by seeing others working in the same room.

That is still the list. Somebody to show you, somebody to keep you at it, and a room of people doing the same thing. Add the machines, which are a real advantage: a leg press, a pendulum squat or a chest-supported row lets you load a muscle hard without your balance or your lower back getting a vote on when the set ends. I coach in a commercial gym in Wrexham and I rate all three.

What the gym does not own is the thing that grows muscle. In 2023 a group of Norwegian researchers pooled every trial they could find that compared free weights with machines over at least six weeks. Strength gains leaned towards whichever tool people had trained on, which surprised no one, and in a straight comparison of muscle growth there was no difference between them.

The muscle has no idea what it was lifting. It knows how hard the last few reps were, and tension close to failure is a thing a barbell, a pair of dumbbells and a bench can deliver to every major muscle you own.

So can a garage build a body as strong and as muscular as a gym can? For almost everyone reading this, yes, and the limit will be years of hard sets and good food long before it is the equipment.

The gym is a convenience with an excellent sales department. For some people it is worth every penny. For the person who keeps paying every month to queue for a bench they could have bought outright with four months of fees, it is a habit with a direct debit.

The garage, answered

The least kit that does the job

A barbell and plates. A pair of dumbbell handles that take the same plates. A flat bench. A few bands for warming up. The 16-Week Garage Programme runs on that list and nothing else.

The barbell does the heavy pulling from the floor, where it will always carry more than anything you can hold in one hand. The dumbbells do the pressing, the rowing and the single-leg work. The bench turns both into dozens of lifts.

Buy handles that take plates rather than a rack of fixed dumbbells. Every plate you buy then raises the bar and the dumbbells together, and you never again have to buy an entire new pair to go up two kilos, which is the problem half the country discovered in 2020, when the next pair up was out of stock.

You do not need a rack. In the Garage Programme every barbell lift starts on the floor and every press is done with dumbbells, so nothing ever has to be lifted down from above you.

Training heavy, alone, with no rack and no spotter

Sandow’s chapter on heavy lifting contains the best safety advice ever given to the home lifter, and it runs to two sentences. Never lift in a confined space, or where the weight cannot be readily dropped. Practise dropping a weight safely from any position.

A garage plan is built on exactly that. A deadlift or a row that will not come up stays on the floor. A dumbbell press that runs out on the last rep comes down to your chest and goes to the floor beside you. Nothing pins you to anything.

The lift that does pin people is the barbell bench press done alone without safety bars. The arms give, the bar comes down, and it rolls towards the neck. Forensic pathologists have published the cases, and one of them was a boy of sixteen found in his room under a bar loaded with 72.6lb, about 33kg. Hand the pressing to dumbbells, which you can always let go of, and the risk leaves the room.

The everyday danger at home is duller. In American emergency department records, the commonest way people get hurt with weights is having one land on them. Put collars on the bar and the handles, wear shoes, keep the floor clear and keep the dog out. On the big lifts, stop a rep short of failure; on the small ones, go all the way. That is the rule the four-day plan uses in the gym, and it travels perfectly well.

Is it cheaper than a membership?

On Decathlon’s British site in October 2026, a 1.75m bar cost £29.99, a pair of short dumbbell bars £17.98, cast-iron plates about £2 a kilo, and a fold-down bench £89.99. The bar, the handles, the bench and 100kg of plates come to about £340. Some small plates for the dumbbells take it to around £380.

The average low-cost gym now charges more than £25 a month, and the average private club £48.45. The kit costs about fifteen months at the cheapest chains, or under eight at the average club, and then it is yours. Iron does not wear out, does not put its prices up, and has never once asked to see your membership card at the door.

The bar in that list is rated to 160kg, which will see most people through years of training. The strongest will eventually want an Olympic bar and plates, and will have earned them.

When the dumbbells get too light

Sandow’s answer was a stronger spring, and before that, more repetitions: eighty of the first exercise, six months at the top, then one more pound. The answer most people reached in 2020 was a heavier pair of fixed dumbbells, which were out of stock.

The right answer is more iron on the handle. Run the rep ladder: hold the weight while the reps climb from four to five to six over three weeks, then add load and drop back to four.

On the barbell that jump is 2.5kg for the upper body and 5kg for the legs. On a dumbbell the same jump is a far bigger share of a far lighter weight, so buy the small plates: a half-kilo disc on each end adds a kilo to the dumbbell and keeps the ladder climbing. The Garage Programme has a section on exactly this, which it calls the dumbbell jump problem.

When the handles are full, move the load to where it can go. The floor lifts go on the barbell, which takes far more than any dumbbell. A split squat holding both dumbbells puts the weight of the pair through one leg.

What you never do is go back to twenty reps. Sandow tried that at eighty, and his own pupils wrote in to tell him it was not working. If you are stuck with a light fixed pair until the plates arrive, this is how to make them count.

How often

Whole body, every other day: train, rest, train, rest. Every muscle is worked again every forty-eight hours, and every session has a day off behind it for the building to happen in. Twelve or thirteen hard sets, four to six reps, two or three minutes between them, the four big lifts at the front and the smaller work at the back. The session is over in well under an hour, and nobody has asked how many sets you have left.

Sandow wanted his pupils at it every day, and he was nearer the truth with his minutes than with his days. The rest day is when the muscle gets built, and recovery is not the place to economise. The bar sends the request and the food fills it, which is what the muscle-building cheat sheet is for. Take the strength test before you start, so the logbook has something to beat.

His chapter for the middle-aged has aged better than the rest of the book. As long as life lasts, he wrote, exercise is as necessary as food. If you are coming to the iron after fifty, the garage suits you better than most, and the argument for lifting heavy as you get older is stronger than anything in his tables.

The bronze

Sandow died at his home in Kensington in October 1925 and was buried at Putney Vale in an unmarked grave, at his widow’s request. Since 1977 the winner of Mr. Olympia has been handed a bronze of Pomeroy’s figure of him, and it is the most coveted prize in bodybuilding.

He got a good deal right. He took strength off the music hall stage and into the front room, he told women it belonged to them as well, and he told the middle-aged it was never too late. What he got wrong was the iron.

“One pair will suffice him for all time,” he promised the buyers of his spring dumbbells. He was wrong about the springs and right about the room.