Home Gym • 8 Min Read

I Tried Matt Damon's Minimalist Garage Gym Setup For 60 Days. It Only Cost $99.

Before The Odyssey started shooting, Matt Damon was 54 and about 180 pounds. He trained in his own basement with dumbbells, a cable pull-down and a barbell, and came out around 165. I copied that setup in my garage and ran his trainer's week for 60 days. The only thing I had to buy was a $99 set of dumbbell handles.

By Ryan Maddox

Staff writer · Oct 5, 2026 · 8 min read

The Gym His Trainer Called "Crappy"

Christopher Nolan wanted Odysseus thin and hard, not huge. Damon put it plainly on the New Heights podcast: Nolan "wanted me lean but strong." The man who got him there is Dr. Gabe Stump, a physical therapist who has trained Damon since 2022.

Stump laid out the job to Vogue in July. They had five months before a 91-day shoot. The goal was to drop about 10 pounds of fat and keep every bit of muscle. Damon started around 180 pounds and finished around 165. He told the podcast he played the whole movie at 167.

You can see the result in the shirtless photos from Ibiza that the photo agency Backgrid posted on Instagram in August 2025, about a week after filming wrapped. Lean, veins in the arms, abs showing at 54.

Here is the part that caught my eye. They did not train at some Hollywood studio gym. They trained four to five days a week in a modest home gym in Damon's basement, and Stump did not dress it up.

"You'd be shocked at how crappy it is."

Vogue lists what was down there: dumbbells, a cable pull-down machine and a barbell. That is the whole gym. One of the most famous actors alive got ready for a three-hour epic with less equipment than a lot of garage gyms.

That is roughly what three pieces of kit look like in a plain basement. Not much to look at.

What They Actually Did Down There

I am not going to print a "Matt Damon workout plan." Nobody has published one, and anything sold under that name is a guess. What we do have is what Stump told two outlets, and it is specific enough to learn from.

The week was an upper and lower split. Per Vogue, Mondays and Thursdays were upper body, Tuesdays and Fridays were legs, and Wednesdays were cardio, like incline walking in a weighted vest. Each muscle got 8 to 10 hard sets a week. Weekends were off.

Stump gave Tom's Guide the lifts. Upper days were dumbbell bench press, supported rows, pull-ups, pull-downs, presses, then curls, triceps work, flys and reverse flys. Leg days were heavy Bulgarian split squats, trap bar deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts. About eight moves a day, mostly 8 to 12 reps, and every set stopped two or three reps short of failure.

He also told Tom's Guide what was in the rack. "We had a trap bar, so we could go heavy with that, and we had heavy dumbbells up to 100lbs." The one thing he missed was a way to squat heavy, so the Bulgarians did that job.

Now go back down that list with a pencil. Take out the pull-ups and pull-downs, and a doorway bar covers those for the price of a pizza night. Every other lift on it can be done with one pair of dumbbells. The trap bar deadlift is the closest call, and a heavy dumbbell Romanian deadlift was already on his list.

The Expensive Part Is The Dumbbells

This is where copying a "crappy" gym gets pricey. A pulldown is optional. A bar is optional. The dumbbells are the gym, and a real set of them costs more than everything else combined. I priced the usual ways to get there on the makers' own sites on October 5, 2026.

• REP rubber hex set, 5 to 50 lb, plus REP's rack$1,309.98
• REP rubber hex set, 5 to 100 lb, no rack$3,699.99
• Titan rubber hex pairs, 55 to 100 lb only, on sale$2,699.97
• Bowflex SelectTech 1090, one pair, 10 to 90 lb$799.00
• Bowflex SelectTech 552, one pair, 5 to 52.5 lb$479.00

Each of these wins something. A hex rack is the fastest thing in any gym: grab a pair, drop it, grab the next. Nothing breaks and nothing needs adjusting. The Bowflex 552 changes weight with a twist of a dial and fits in a corner. The 1090 does the same thing all the way up to 90 pounds.

But look at what each one costs you. The rack eats a wall and over a thousand dollars before it gets to 50 pounds. Going to 100 like Damon's basement is real money. The 552 tops out at 52.5 pounds, which is light for Bulgarian split squats and Romanian deadlifts after a few months. And the 1090 is $799 for one pair you still cannot load past 90.

What A Guy In His 50s Actually Needs From A Pair

Strip Stump's program down and it asks four things of your dumbbells. These are the four I would hold any pair to before I spent a dollar.

1. It has to go heavy for the legs and back. Bulgarians, Romanian deadlifts and rows are where a dial set runs out first. A pair that stops near 50 pounds is a pair you outgrow.
2. It has to go light in small steps. Two or three reps in reserve means you add a little at a time. Flys, reverse flys and presses need small jumps, not big leaps.
3. It has to be one pair. One pair fits in a basement corner. Ten pairs need a rack and a wall.
4. It cannot cost more than the rest of the gym. If the dumbbells cost more than the bar, the bench and the pulldown together, something is off.

Here is the part most people miss. If you already own a barbell, you already own most of the weight. Plates are the expensive metal, and they are sitting in the corner. What is missing is a short handle that loads them.

The Pair I Use Now

The only pair I found that clears all four is the Kensui AdaptaBELL. It is a short dumbbell handle with a threaded post at each end. You slide on the plates you already own and spin a collar down to lock them. It takes both 1-inch standard plates and 2-inch Olympic plates. I bought the PRO bundle, which adds four longer posts and sixteen centering adapters to the pair of handles.

Our pick for a one-pair basement gym

Kensui AdaptaBELL PRO Bundle

$99 · a pair of PRO handles, 4 extensions, 16 centering adapters · holds 140 lb a pair · ★ 4.51 from 627 reviews

• Goes heavy: up to 70 pounds in each hand, past where the Bowflex 552 stops.
• Goes light in small steps: it takes plates from 1.25 pounds up, so a jump can be 2.5 pounds.
• Costs less than anything else on this page: $99 for the handles, extensions and adapters, using plates you already own.

Get the AdaptaBELL Bundle

One honest limit. The PRO stops at 70 pounds a hand, and Damon's heaviest dumbbells went to 100. If you are rowing 100s today, you want the metal MAX, which holds 300 pounds a pair, but it was sold out when I checked. For most of us in our 50s, 70 a hand is a long way off on presses and flys and a solid working weight on legs.

The other trade is time. Changing plates takes longer than turning a dial. On an upper day with eight moves, I set up both handles for the heavy lift first and strip them down as the moves get smaller.

A Basement Week With One Pair

This is not Damon's program. It is Stump's structure as he described it, with every lift done on one pair of handles and a doorway bar.

• Monday Dumbbell bench press, chest-supported rows, pull-ups, seated press, curls, overhead triceps extensions, flys, reverse flys.
• Tuesday Bulgarian split squats, dumbbell Romanian deadlifts, goblet squats, calf raises.
• Wednesday A brisk uphill walk.
• Thursday Upper again, with the presses on an incline.
• Friday Legs again, heaviest on the Romanian deadlifts.

Keep Stump's rules. Most sets land in the 8 to 12 range. Stop two or three reps before failure. When a set feels easy, add a small plate, not a big one. That is the whole trick, and it is the part a fixed 5-pound jump makes hard.

What 60 Days On It Looked Like

I ran that week in my garage for 60 days. Same five days, the plates I already owned, one pair of handles and a doorway bar. Damon had a basement. I have a garage with a car in it.

Three things stood out. Loading the heaviest lift first and stripping plates as the moves got smaller kept every session moving. The extensions earned their place on leg days, when my thick Olympic plates ran out of room on the standard posts before I ran out of plates. And the centering adapters stopped the 2-inch plates from sitting crooked on the post.

What did not happen: I never needed the 100-pound dumbbells Damon had. My heaviest sets were Romanian deadlifts, and the PRO still had room to spare at the end of week eight. I am not going to tell you I look like Odysseus. I will tell you I trained five days a week for two months and never once wished I had a rack.

Owners say the same thing in their own words.

One Pair Against The Rack

Prices from repfitness.com, bowflex.com and kensui.com, checked October 5, 2026. Plates not included in the AdaptaBELL price.

Questions I Had Before Buying

Top photo: Matt Damon at The Odyssey press conference in Seoul, August 3, 2026, by the Republic of Korea (Korea.net), cropped, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.