Hi,
Well yesterday was a no training day for me, I had a meeting in the afternoon and was pushed when I got back, so thought I would take a rest day, today was ok though, did some instruction this morning and then this afternoon hit the Gym, Pull ups, press up variations and some core stuff was the order of the day, it should have been a Lateral Speed Day, but my Achilles is still playing me up, so I had to change my structure.
After a couple of weeks circuit training preparing your muscles and your connective tissue(Tendons and Ligaments) you have quite a choice open to you.
You could join a Gym, and start to do some proper weight training, get a personal trainer and if you get the right one, the Sky is your limit. Or you can keep training at home, although this can give you a dilemma. Do you go out and buy a whole load of training equipment, such as Barbells, Dumbbells, a bench, a multi gym, or do you just stick to bodyweight training? There is another option as well and that is get some kit that you can use for minimal cost and create your own resistance training equipment.
I have covered the bodyweight option in an earlier blog, there are some fantastic progressions that you can use and you would never need to buy or make another thing and you can get stronger and more powerful than you can imagine, don’t believe me? Just look at a Gymnast, they probably have one of the best Physiques of all Athletes and are certainly incredibly Strong and Powerful. I can name at least 6 progressions for each of the 5 or 6 exercises I named in my earlier Blog, Training for a Healthy life that to reach the final progression for each exercise will keep you occupied for a long time. However they are for another article.
Here I want to give you some ideas for making resistance training equipment and buying a few essentials but keeping the cost down to a bare minimum.
First of all, a great piece of equipment that is extremely versatile is a rucksack, kit bag or canvas grip bag. It will need to be in a fairly decent state of repair.
Next, you need a quantity of small freezer type bags, best if they are sealable at the top. Also some black heavy duty bin liners and a role of black masking tape.
Fill all the small bags with sand or earth, weigh one of the bags, so you know the rough weight of each one. Let’s say they weigh 2 lb for explanation reasons.
You can now fill the Bin liners, double or triple bag them to a desired weight say 10 kilos each.
Once they are filled, wrap and seal all the bags with the masking tape.
Once you have the bags ready, you can pack them in the rucksack to any desired weight that you want. The large ones give you your bulk and the small ones will add the smaller increments so that you can improve and change the weights for different exercises.
What use is a bag you may ask? Well there is an incredible amount of different exercises you can do with it, here are just a few.
Power exercises
- Power cleans
- High Pulls
- Squat cleans
- Split cleans
- Split jerks
- Push jerks
- Hang Cleans
- Power snatches
- Hang snatches
- Squat snatches
- Split snatches
- Squat Jumps
Strength Exercises
- Over head presses (all types)
- Tri- cep presses
- Floor presses
- Bicep curls
- Squats, overhead, back, front, zercher, alternate
- Lunges
- Dead lifts
- Combination exercises.
Abdominal exercises
- Round the worlds
- Under over’s
- Rotational exercises
- Weighted sit ups
- Russian Twists
- Throwing exercises
(We will be adding all these exercises to the website over the coming months).
All with a kit bag, some freezer bags and some bin liners. The weights to do all this lot at different loads would cost you a fortune, so even if you are relatively skint, you can still afford your own gym full of all the necessary equipment.
The other advantage of this is, that because of the movement of the bags inside the kit bag, the lifts can become quite awkward, therefore requiring you to work harder to stabilize the load.
If you want to expand your gym even further, you can nip down to your nearest DIY store, get some plastic piping, cut it to different lengths and fill the pipes with sand and seal the ends, voila! Homemade Barbells and Dumbbells.
One other thing that I do recommend buying if you’re not really a handy man is a good sturdy chinning bar, you can get these on the internet fairly well priced. The rucksack can even be used on this bit of equipment for adding weight to your chins and pull ups when you get good at them.
So if you think you can’t train at home and have the equipment to do all the major lifts, you are wrong and it’s cheap too.
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds”
Well that’s about it for today, I hope you have a great one.
Steve
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