My good friend, Seth Crooks, created two pieces of homemade exercise equipment. In keeping with the mission here, he spent $0 to make both of them. Like most of us, he had scrap materials lying around his house.
The first piece of equipment was a homemade heavy rope, while the other is something I hadn’t seen before. We call it a Heavy Bar.
See, Seth didn’t have a heavy rope just lying around his yard (who does right?). What he did have was a skinny little rope from a playground set or something (I never did ask him where he got it from). To make it heavy, he added small sections (about 3-4 inches) of PVC pipe, interspersed with sections of wood that was duct taped to the rope. It looked like my kids’ beaded necklaces, but it worked perfectly. The PVC withstood the slamming on the ground during the jumping and the wood added the perfect amount of weight.
Seth knows that you have to name your homemade equipment. So the heavy rope is now officially called “Rocky.”
But the highlight of his ingenuity is Rocky’s partner…yep you guessed it…”Apollo.”
Seth had a long section around 8 or 9 feet long of landscape lumber – 3 pieces nailed together to be exact. After shaking out all the bugs and critters living in the creases, he attached two pieces of that rope to some plywood, and then screwed those on to make handles. I know…awesome, right?
But Seth didn’t stop there. He also had to come up with a unique exercise just for his homemade Heavy Bar. There are 2 versions so far. The Wall Touch and the Row Boat Wall Touch. They look easy on the video, but trust me they are not. The wall touch in and of itself takes a lot of strength. To make it more dynamic, we tried to pick a mark high on the wall and touch that for the Row Boat Wall Touch.
And of course there are tons of the usual movements you can do with the Heavy Bar such as a Press, Floor Wipers, etc. Just think of most things you can do with a barbell and you can do it with the Heavy Bar.
Yet, that is still not the end of it. To round things off, Seth came up with his first workout with the Heavy Bar. He named it Apollo 1000. That post will be coming soon!
Now you have to leave a comment about what you think of all of this because it is just so cool. Does it inspire you to go treasure hunting out behind your shed?
Is rope jumping more fun with a heavy rope? I just find it super boring…
The heavy bar looks intriguing. Anyhow it’s another super big tool and i had to find out that i can’t even get a slosh tube because I have no possibility to get a 8′ pipe to where I live…
However I just built a homemade TRX suspension system for just 10 bucks. Rediculous considering that the real deal costs 200$ + over here. I’m not sure yet how usefull it will be. I have the feeling most exercises are the sissy version of normal bodyweight exercises. Nevertheless there’s one exercise I already love: pushup position with hands in the slings and feet on a physioball and then push ups – really fun. I’ll have to play around with it some more.
I also built a foam roller… just without the foam… so actually I just bought a short plastic pipe… I also don’t really know what it’s for but I guess I’ll find out. 2$ instead of 40$… insane.
Don’t worry Pat,
Harvey is working on short “Slosh Bells,” which are basically rock and water filled pipes to be able to bring a Slosh Tube down to a managable level. He is still fine tuning the rock/water combination to get sufficient weight.
As far as the TRX suspension system (homemade version), check out my friend at Fit Fury here: http://www.youtube.com/user/FitFury for some reason awesome stuff. You won’t think sissy version of bodyweight after seeing his stuff!
The foam roller is great for working out muscles after a workout. http://www.coreperformance.com has tons of info on using the foam roller. Or check out one of their books if you can’t get what you want from the website (I found one at the library).
Thanks a lot. I will check it out.
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