It’s difficult to find quality products from all the choices out there. There can be a lot of trial and error and disappointments.
Well, we’ve done a lot of product vetting over the years (all of us on Team GMB have close, personal relationships with our mail carriers from all our Amazon orders), and the list below reflects the products and brands we love the most and want to share with others.
Despite being active and generally healthy, decades of abuse and injury take a toll. This is the approach that helped both Andy and Ryan the most. Bonus: Eric has become a good friend in recent years.
Kelly has spent over a decade focused on injury prevention and recovery for athletes. The Mobility Coach app in particular makes it dead simple to target specific pain points for better performance.
Despite some similarities with our programs, Animal Flow is a fun and unique system for building strength and fitness. Mike is a good friend of ours and a fantastic teacher.
Autoregulation is a key part of our approach to training, and Whoop ads some objectivity to measuring your readiness. GMB friends get one month free.
Background music for managing your attention and mood – great for focus, meditation, or winding down to sleep. Use the coupon ‘gmbfitness’ for 20% off.
Ryan’s been recommending Headspace for years now, and dozens of our trainers and clients have told us it was the thing that helped them finally build a meditation habit.
We read a lot. A LOT, a lot. No way we can list every book we love, but this is a selection of some that have had an impact on how we teach.
Everything from lacrosse balls to pull-up bars and Ryan’s favorite hiking shoes. We try to update this periodically and keep it up to date.
Our recommendations:Â
These are easily the most comfortable and durable rings we’ve used. They’re not cheap, but you’re going to love working out with them. Though we prefer wooden parallettes, the ones we use are no longer available, and we can confidently recommend Rogue as a dependable supplier of high-quality gear.
If you’re in the U.K., we recommend checking out Wolverson Wooden Rings.
(Not sure where to hang your rings? We’ve got you covered.)
Our recommendation: CAP Barbell Exercise Stand
Ever since releasing our Integral Strength program, which features a lot of pulling movements on a bar, we’ve gotten a number of questions about a pull-up bar we recommend.
Really, anything sturdy will do, but if you’re looking for something relatively cheap and easy to assemble, this exercise stand from CAP Barbell is a great option.
We are all about quality food and drink, so we’re picky about the source, how it’s prepared, and what goes in our mouths.
Andy’s our resident beer man, so this recommendation comes from him.
Beer is subjective. Even beer snobs argue over the relative merits of IPAs with differing hop profiles. But none of what we enjoy of the craft brew scene today would be available without pioneering breweries like Sierra Nevada.
Beer Camp is their yearly experimental line of new brews, and they run the gamut of types and flavors. If you enjoy beer and want to broaden your horizons, beer camp is a great way to do it.
Okay, this one’s not really a brand, but seriously, butter is delicious and makes everything better. It’s a kitchen staple.
Jarlo has tested out a whole bunch of protein powders over the years, and frankly, most of them are terrible. If they’re not chalky, they’re hard on the stomach or just taste bad.
We’re including 3 options here because they’ve all worked for Jarlo, but you may need to experiment a little to find one you like. Skoop and Vega are both vegan, and Jay Robb’s is an egg white protein powder, so all three work well if you don’t tolerate dairy well.
A rice cooker is a must-have appliance for any fully stocked kitchen. Can you make rice the old fashioned way on the stovetop? Sure, but why would you want to?
Seriously, though, a rice cooker will do a better job in less time, with no need to keep an eye on your rice.
Zojirushi makes a top of the line product, so you can have as much perfectly cooked rice as you like for a LONG time. It’s Jarlo’s favorite rice cooker for a reason.
If you’re a tea drinker, Rishi is a great company with a vast selection of quality teas. They sell a lot of the more commonly available options, like green tea and black tea, but they also have some more unique options if you’re looking for something a little different.
The Turmeric Ginger is fantastic. It’s spicy and citrusy and is perfect for waking you up in the morning.
Our developer Gene loves the the Cocoa Mint. It’s like the liquid version of Trader Joe’s Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s which everyone knows are the most delicious seasonal cookies on the planet.
Rishi products are high quality, organic, and brilliantly paired. No powdery nonsense or broken, overly dried herbals.
This category speaks for itself. We all wear clothes, and we all know what a difference it makes when something is made well vs. cheaply.
The products below are some of our favorite options for high quality gear.
This is Ryan’s favorite bag. The company sent him one to try it out, and he raves about it. Its sturdy design and makeup fits everything in his active lifestyle
511 Tactical sells a slew of other products, but the only one we’ve tested is their backpack, so that’s what we recommend.
If you can’t do it in jeans, you can’t do it.
Jarlo says, âRevtown has been the best jeans for my big legs Iâve ever had that also look good.â I also wear RevTown jeans literally every single day. Get $15 off.
In a lot of our videos, Ryanâs wearing prAna Jeans.
Not only are Patagonia clothes well-made and long-lasting (Ryan still wears some Patagonia gear he got as a teen!), the company is amazingly passionate about environmental causes and leaving the world a better place.
The company donates 1% of sales (and employee time and resources) to support and campaign for preservation and restoration projects all over the world.
Patagonia has also influenced many companies to evolve their corporate policies to better support their employees (and they were one of the first American companies to actively promote better conditions for working mothers, like generous maternity leave and on-site child-care centers).
They make really nice clothing, and actually, Jarlo prefers their jeans over Prana. But their bread and butter is outdoor gear – jackets, base layers, that kind of thing.
Andy and Ryan wear Vivobarefoots. They like them because they’re well made, while having a thinner sole than most shoes, which can help avoid some of the orthopedic issues many people encounter from regular shoes.
Jarlo’s shoe of choice is from Lems, this minimalist brand provides quality footwear with an environmental consciousness and frankly is the most comfortable on Jarlo’s wide monkey feet. He’s been wearing them for the past two years and are the only shoes he wears aside from slippers.
Read our article detailing the difference between going barefoot and using minimalistic shoes.
As an online company, we depend a lot on apps, gadgets, and other techy stuff to help us communicate, stay on top of our work, and keep our company going. The products below are some of our favorites, and even if you don’t work online, you can benefit from all of them.
We shoot a LOT of video and pictures around here, in case you haven’t noticed. Ryan’s favorite camera at the moment for indoor and outdoor use is the Canon EOS 60D but since that’s been discontinued, we recommend the next model, the EOS 70D.
This is an expensive camera (He actually got his used at a local camera shop in Japan), but you get your money’s worth with this top notch DSLR.
Of course, our main standby camera is the good old iPhone. There’s a lot you can do with your phone’s built in camera, so if you’re just taking simple shots for personal use, don’t go spending a thousand dollars on a separate camera. It’s really not necessary.
We’re all a bunch of Mac-philes around here. Sure, Apple’s markup is ridiculous, but they make powerful, reliable, beautiful machines that get the job done. We all have at least one Mac, and almost all of us (with the exception of Jarlo, who has yet to see the light) are permanently attached to our iPhones.
Working on a Mac is a must at GMB and we do what we can to make sure everyone on our team has fully functional gadgets at all times.
Reading is a hugely important part of all of our lives here at GMB, so much so that we cover the cost of any Kindle books our team members want.
Kindles certainly don’t have the charm of old fashioned books, but they’re really convenient and most books are cheaper if you buy the Kindle version instead of the hardcover or paperback version. That means more books for your buck.
If you’re looking for something to read, here are the books we love.
Ryan, Jason, and I have all been using this app for a while, and can’t recommend it highly enough. Headspace is an app that makes meditation as accessible as possible, and has built-in accountability, making consistency less of a hurdle.
After using Headspace, we started hearing about people in the Alpha Posse, and other friends using it as well. This has made the accountability piece even easier.
Since starting Headspace, we’ve all noticed better clarity throughout the day, and feel calmer and more centered.
We wrote about F.lux and how it can help your sleep in this post, but basically, when activated, this app eliminates “blue light” from your computer screen at night. Blue light has been shown to decrease your body’s production of melatonin, so being exposed at night can negatively impact your sleep.
It’s a simple app, but it could potentially be a big contributor to your overall health.
Here are some other things we love.
His Paisley Majesty was one of the very best musicians of our time. He had more range than Mariah Carey and played more instruments than most jazz combos – and played them better, too.
Purple Rain is, to be honest, badly acted, with a plot to match. But it captures Prince’s musical universe at a pivotal time in his career and introduced the world to what a real rock concert should look like. Also, everyone needs to say the phrase “that’s not Lake Minnetonka” at some point in their lives.
Jarlo is our resident knife man. I’m not even sure how many knives he owns, but he recommends Spyderco’s knives for general use.
As Jarlo puts it,
It’s the Honda Civic of knives; reliable and gets the job done.
As much as we all love our Macs, there’s really nothing like good ‘ole pen and paper.
Ryan does his journaling, to-do lists, and training logs in a Moleskine notebook, with a regular Uniball pen. Andy does the same, and both of them find that this really works best for certain things.
One of our mottos at GMB is “buy quality.” It can sometimes be tempting to buy an off-brand to save a couple bucks, but really, if you can’t afford to buy the trustworthy, high quality brand, you’re better off not buying it.
We’ve tested out all the products above and can recommend them confidently.
