Introducing: farmers’ walks

As I promised in my article yesterday about more interesting ways to do cardio, here is a brief guide to how to set up a pair of dumbbell handles to act as farmers’ bars for doing laps of the garden with in the summer…

I have since had a go at making a pair of farmers’ bars that are a bit bigger, using some spare pieces of wood but I’ll write about that next week…

What you need

You don’t really need very much.  That is the attraction.  However, you will need:

• 2 dumbbell handles (with or without the collars)
• Four 2ft slings or similar lengths of rope
• 2 carabiners (ask a friend who is a climber if you don’t know where to get them)
• some weights plates (but you have these already, right?)

How to set up the dumbbells for farmers’ walks

First, put a prussik knot on one end of a dumbbell handle using one of the slings.  A prussik knot (also known as a lark’s foot) starts like this:

And then you do this:

Once you’ve got one end on tightly, then you can do the other.  Together, they should look like this:

After that, repeat with the other dumbbell handle and one of the slings so that you have two the same.  You can slot the carabiners on at this point too.

Once you’ve got your farmers’ bar handles, you can add your weights.  You can do this by looping your other 2 slings through some weights plates and then clip them to the carabiners like this:

You’ve finished!  All you have to do now is take them for a walk.

I hope you found this useful and if you know of any other easy ways to make farmers’ bars or other strongman implements, please do let me know.

I write a post every day so don’t forget to subscribe or you’ll miss out