Looking for a particularly evil bodyweight exercise? Try the Pull-A-Burp, a superbly cruel combination of a Pull-up and a Burpee. According to Kelly Mills :
Do a push-up, jump to your feet, squat nice and low and spring up to the bar and pull yourself up. Then drop down, and jump down to a push-up again. Sound hard? Now do ten.
Love it.
This is definitely on my list of things to make for the home gym. Inexpensive, comparatively simple to put together and multi-purpose. The Home-made Medicine Ball.
The one here has been constructed by All Around Strength's Jason Kirby, involving a couple of modifications to the method employed by both Jim Biancolo and Pierre Auge (instructions available via Mike's Gym).
Nice and simple. The next step - turning it into a Tornado ball. Looking forward to it.
John Fike has done it again; this time reconstructing that staple of many a home gym : the heavy bag.
Many years ago my dad put a large punching bag in the garage, and filled it with coarse sand. It was like punching bricks, and bleeding knuckles were a regular thing.
John's softened the blow using various materials (although still using sand at the centre of it all) :
If you want to try building one of thse for yourself, I basically took two bags of tube sand and wrapped them in carpet and carpet padding. Then covered it in 3 mil plastic to resis moisture and finished it off with a layer of duct tape. The carpet is in two layers; the first layer has the soft pile facing the sand bags to minimize abrasion that might tear the bags, the second layer faces outward to give more cushioning to the hands when striking the bag. Between the two layers of carpet is where I wrapped the rope for hanging the bag. The rope is covered with duct tape to keep the carpet backing from fraying it. Tube sand was out of season at local stores when I finally got around to building this, so I made my own from heavy-duty 3 mil plastic garbage bags (box of 12 for about $8) and duct tape. In all, I used 120 yards of duct tape.
As the video shows, it moves just enough. No more wild swings.
Update : John now has detailed instructions for making the bag on his site.
This week on Straight to the Bar - a couple of great entries to the DIY Equipment competition, the largest rack I've ever seen and lots more :
Eric 'Bender' Godfrey has amassed a wealth of information on bending, tearing and sledgehammer training over the years. Enjoy.
When I'm searching for something online I nearly always jump straight to Google (and I'm certainly not the only one). However, for dynamically generated sites - especially the various medical and health sites - it isn't quite as effective as it could be.
Just came across Mamma Health - a search engine specifically for these sites. If you're like me and have a strange obsession with medical journals, it may just be your new best friend.
Max performing the Turkish Get-Up with a barbell at Mike's Gym.
I love this site - this is a great way to find out how your body works. Get Body Smart.
Head over to Girevoy Sport, online home of Russian kettlebell afficionado Andrey Kuzmin. There's a wealth of great information on all aspects of kettlebell training; particularly in the forum. Enjoy.
