How to make round-up

Yesterday, I explained how I had a major set-back at the weekend.  How I sat down on Friday evening, made a cup of coffee, cracked my knuckles and settled down to a couple of hours uninterrupted writing.  Only to find that my computer refused to boot up.

***

Don’t panic Mr Mainwaring!

As I said yesterday, the first thing I did was to panic.  After all, it’s a British tradition.

Once I’d done that, I put together a few emergency posts on a borrowed computer that I hope you will enjoy instead.  I think I broke several records just typing these in the time I had available.  Normal service, as they say, will be resumed next week.

***

A round up of my “how to make” posts

Following the theme set in yesterday’s introducing round up post, I’m doing another round-up of my “how to make your own gym equipment” posts for homemade gym equipment.  While I’m not quite in the same league as Pat Hodgson, I hope you’ll see that garage gyms don’t have to be limited by the lack of variety in the types of exercises that can be done.

***

How to make Farmers’ Bars

How to make farmer’s bars – I really enjoyed making these farmers’ bars over the summer.  They really didn’t take that much time or effort to make, either.  Once I’d worked out the basic design, it was just a matter of drilling the holes to slot the dumbbell handles through and loading it up.  The only thing I will change about them if I have the time is the handles.  The slings are OK but they are a bit fiddly and sometimes, if you don’t get the right angle on them when you pick them up, they can slip a bit.

Homemade farmers’ walk bars

***

How to make farmers’ bars out of dumbbell handles - these just sort of happened while I was fiddling around in the garage trying to sort out some way of increasing the amount of weight I could load onto a dumbbell.  Once I’d decided that it didn’t work for whatever it was I was doing, I realised that it would work for a quick and easy way to make farmers’ bars.  They won’t be the heaviest weights you’ve ever carried but they’ll be better than just using dumbbells.

Very primative farmers’ walk handles

***

How to make a Sandbag

How to make a sandbag - it’s an army duffle bag, filled with plastic bags of sand.  I think the bag cost about £5 from an on-line army surplus store and the sand cost £1.50 or so from a local DIY shop.  I used some twine to help it keep its shape.  I’ve since put a bit more sand in mine and tied it up a different way.  It’s more short and squat now, rather than long and thin, and I use it for lifting and carrying in a similar way to Atlas stones.  I’ll do another post on that sometime soon.

Very simple and very cheap sandbag

***

How to make a Glute-Ham Raise machine

How to make a Glute-Ham Raise - there are actually two different ways to make a Glute-Ham Raise in this article.  The first is with a resistance band and the second is the one shown in the picture below, with a pulley and some weights plates.  What is interesting about them is that the resistance is even throughout the range of motion for the pulley but not for the resistance band.  It increases towards the bottom with the resistance band (as it stretches more and more).

This means that with the pulley, you tend to find the movement really easy at the top and quite challenging at the bottom.  With the resistance band, the movement is roughly the same difficulty all the way through.

Dead easy and really cheap to make

***

I realised that there a few other exercises that I use the pulley for that I haven’t talked about, including:

• face pulls;
• seated rows; and
• assisted one-arm chins

I’ll do a round up post of how to use a pulley for various exercises soon.  And don’t forget to check out my other round up of homemade gym equipment or visit my homemade gym equipment page for more information.

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