Home Gym

Finally moved into the new house.  One of the things the new house has is 10' ceilings in the basement.  There is lots of space down there, and one of the corners will be the new home gym.

The previous house I could do some stuff in the garage some of the time, and I will still have that option for some stuff, sledge strikes for example.

Below is the space I am going to use for the gym.  The total area is aprox 10' x 14'.

As it is concrete and I will probably train barefoot at home, I need some kind of mat.  At Costco today they had 8 packs of puzzlemats for $13.99.  I picked 3 up and I will need 2 more.  A total of 5, or about $70 for the floors.
I got two of the packs laid in today and tested out some jump rope and a few light Kettlebell snatches and presses, finished it off with a few burpees.

 So here is the floor after laying down one set of the mats.  I decided to lay them down 5 wide, but in the end they are going to be 7 segments wide and 5 deep, which should give me plenty of room for jump rope, burpees and a power cage.

And here is the current state of the gym with my kettlebells lined up (24, 20 and 16) as well as the foam roller.

The final addition today was to try and hook the TRX up again.  I tried to hook it up to the beam a few days ago and decided the beam was just a SMIDGE to wide.  Today I tried and was more persistent and got it attached.  Did a few sets of exercises just to test it out.  Pistols, rows, push-ups, atomic push-ups, jackknifes.  Currently it is sitting over bare concrete.  I am hoping I will be able to attach it to the power cage after I get that.

I will keep the blog updated as I work on the gym.  I am pretty excited about having a cool dedicated workout space at home though.

Weighing down the clubs

Recently a blog post over at www.diystrength.com prompted me to build a set of clubbells. My bells are made from ABS and are about 2' long.

I had orginally filled them with sand, but really they needed more weight. DIYstrength.com is a spin off from www.strongergrip.com. Stronger grip is a commercial site, where he sells empty clubs and media to fill them. On that site he suggests shot as a viable media.

I did some searching and sourcing shot through sports stores and had some luck. Then I went by Princessauto.com they sell sandblasting media. This stuff looks like sand, only made of metal. $40 gets you 50lbs of weight. Not too bad.

The next hurdle was installing the media. I didn't want to mix it with the sand. It would be nearly impossible to separate again.



Here is what I did.

Supplies
Baggy
Duct tape
strapping tape
steel media

I realize I don't have strapping tape in the photo, but it was a last minute addition.

Basically we are going to combine these items into a compact tube we can insert into the club





Step 1) Add media to bag.











Step 2) Create a duct tape wrapper










Step 3) Wrap the filled baggy in wrapper










Step 4) Use the strapping tape to tightly wind the tube so it will fit in the clubbell.










Step 5) Repeat...(harder than it sounds. Make sure the weight on the second baggy is equal to the first)

I ended up with two nearly 4lb (~1.7kg) clubs as my beginner set.