There are a few essential tools I believe every lifter should keep in their gym bag to keep them ready to smash their lift.
In this article, I list every useful thing I carry with me along with some other items I would have.

Lifting Straps

Arguably, one of the most important accessories a lifter could have.

If you’re unfamiliar with lifting straps, their essentially two straps of hardened fabric that your wear as cuffs on your wrists and you wrap the end pieces around a bar.

Lifting straps help you remove the fatigue from your grip strength, forearms or hands. This allows you to do more reps and lift more weight, especially on back exercises.
If you’re doing pullups/pull downs, rows, deadlifts or RDLs, your grip can fail before your back muscles, making your drop the weight before your back even begins to feel it. Using lifting straps helps you effectively remove the limit from your grip and transfer all the work directly to your back.

They can also double as wrist wraps to help you strengthen your wrists on chest pressing movements.

Spare headphones

If you’re someone who needs their music to go hard in the gym, a spare pair of headphones/earphones can come in absolutely clutch.

It’s easy to forget to charge or carry your headphones with you - at least if you have a spare pair in your bag, you’re not stuck listening to the vanilla gym music or the obnoxious Zumba class over the speakers.

Lifting belt

I can’t speak about the usefulness of a lifting belt enough. They’re pretty pricey (anywhere from R500 to R2000) but I do believe their benefits justify their cost.

Lifting belts help support your lower back and provide extra abdominal bracing. This then gives you a really decent boost on all your strength-focused lifts (squats, RDLs, Deadlifts and even bench press). I would include a picture of mine, but unfortunately it was stolen lol.

Using a lifting belt helped me squeeze out anywhere from 1 rep to 5 reps more on squats and helped reduce my lower back stiffness/pain post-workouts.

Wrist and Knee Wraps

Wrist wraps help strengthen and support your wrists during pushing movements.
I often see people use wrist wraps for any lift that they’re doing. Truthfully speaking, wrist wraps only help give you that tiny bit extra stability and strength during pushes like bench press or incline bench. On other movements they can become restricting on your ROM (Range Of Movement) of your wrists. All that being said, wrist wraps could still help you squeeze out and extra rep on your pushes.

Knee wraps are used similarly to support and strenghten your knees. I’d even argue that they’re more essential than wrist wraps. Knee-related issues are pretty common and if you’re doing heavy leg presses and squats, knee wraps can be a really useful tool to support your knees and prevent incurring/worsening injury.

Resistance Bands

Resistance bands come in various sizes - the thicker they are, the more resistance they have.

They’re great for warming up your shoulders, rotator cuffs and hip joints. Additionally, you can also use them accessories on machines to add more resistance/weight or used by themselves as resistance for accessory exercises.

Another benefit of resistance bands is that they can help you with assistance on bodyweight movements like pull ups or dips - this is what I use them for. If you struggle with bodyweight pull ups, they’re excellent to help you get started. All you have to do is wrap them around the pull up bar, and wrap them around your back or legs to help get your reps up.

Deoderant

No one likes a stinky gymbro.

I always recommend carrying a small bottle of perfume and/or roll on. Summer’s coming up and we all the bad B.O. can be in the pits.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy - just something to stop your fellow gymers from holding their breath around you.