Archive for October, 2008

Welding A Workout Widget

Almost a year ago now my good friend Harold (co-star in my Russian adventures as well as many other adventures that I’ve been too lazy to write about on this blog) brought up this crazy internet work-out he’d heard about. This confused me greatly; the internet’s natural tendency is of course to lower one’s levels of exercise. Harold nevertheless talked me into trying to follow the site with him. The site is crossfit.com and since then I’ve been following their workouts almost religiously during those brief times that I’ve been static enough over the past year to have access to weights.

If you’re interested I highly recommend you go exploring their site. In the meantime I can summarize to say that the idea is they post daily workouts that are really really hard and then explain how to scale them down to something you can handle in terms of weight, intensity, time, etc. With clear goals in mind you get awesomely fit and gradually scale less and less until you’re actually doing those really really hard workouts (eventually – mind you I’m still doing plenty of scaling down!). The most important aspect of these workouts is that they’re somewhat randomized, with the idea being that when you plan your own workouts you very quickly fall into routines to which your body naturally adapts so they lose effectiveness. Following a randomized workout routine keeps your body guessing and really does mean, overall, more productive workouts in far less time per day.

The specifics of the exercises that comprise these workouts I won’t go into, except to say that literally the only machine they’d have you use is a rowing machine – and there are substitutions for that as well. If you have access to a weight set, one ten-foot olympic bar, two dumbbells, a pull up bar, and some creativity you can do 95% of the the crossfit workouts. One thing that falls within that 95% are kettlebell swings since one can approximate them by holding onto one end of a dumbbell. But that sucks a lot, especially if you have adjustable weight dumbbells and as you are swinging the thing over your head some of the weight plates seem dangerously close to slipping off and cracking open your skull. I looked online at how much kettlebells cost, and the cheapest was about $40. Unfortunately, the crossfit workouts often call for different sized kettlebells, so to be properly equipped I would have to shell out more like $100+. Since the website only calls for kettlebell swings a couple times a month, I decided this was absurd. So I started looking at alternatives and found these adjustable kettlebells. Really a great idea, but still more than I want to spend on something I won’t actually use all that often, especially considering I would also have to get new weight plates to fit it.

The makers of the adjustable kettlebells brag that since they’re still shaped like real kettlebells they can be used for all sorts of kettlebell moves – moves that I’d never heard of that take advantage of the kettlebell’s roundiness. So it occurred to me that if all I’m doing is holding the handle and swinging, it doesn’t much matter what shape the heavy thing is so long as it has a good handle and fits between my legs. With this in mind my research quickly led me to this T-handle concept.

The next day I headed down to Urban Ore with my dad to find some heavy old pipe fittings appropriate for the task. Digging around the unorganized piles of pipes big, small, and medium, I discovered a mildly rusty old ten-foot Olympic weightlifting bar.

“Nothing could be more perfect!” I exclaimed. “But can we cut it?” I asked my dad.

He looked at me with a grin, “I can cut anything!” My dad has quite an assortment of tools. “We can have James Cline weld it for us. He owes me some favors.” (My dad somehow still lacks his own welding equipment.)

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Cutting the end of the bar to make the piece that holds the weight plates.

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About to cut the handle at the bit where it’s all nice and beveled. We cut it to be exactly two of my hands plus the bottom part in the middle wide.

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Polishing.

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Pre-weld.

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My dad’s friend James warming up the metal before welding.

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Welding takes a lot longer than I thought. (I bought James lunch for his troubles.)

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Polishing the weld.

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Tah-dah!

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Painting it for that final something.

The old bar cost me $4.35 incl. tax.

These and a few more pics here, scroll to the bottom for a few pictures of my current ghetto-fabulous but actually really awesome home gym on my parents’ back deck.