IOL Strength and Conditioning

The freeway from our house to The Weight Room is no longer a nightmare; it’s clogged 24/7. A trip to the gym can cost me three hours, and since I like to train in some fashion five or six days a week, well, you add ‘em up: 15 hours.

Time to re-think things. But switching from a commercial gym to home training is a head trip, messing up the thinking part.

I spent the better part of this year uncovering the following five mind benders.

1) While we owned the gym, training at home didn’t even occur to me, but once we no longer owned the gym, it was fear of failure that kept me from making a move toward a part-time home gym. Would I be able to recapture my successful gym flow if I couldn’t get my head in the home-gym game after I let the daily head-to-the-gym-habit lapse? I just didn’t know. And I was afraid to find out. Lesson # 1: Don’t let fear of failure hold you back.

2) Once committed, here’s what hit next, hit hardest and took the most purposeful effort to overcome: After 25 years as a gym member and owner, I felt self-conscious training at home, alone in the basement, almost like I was a kid playing house. That may sound as goofy as all getout, but the truth is, I was almost embarrassed. No one else was involved in this, just me and my mental weirdness. Lesson 2? Recognize and get over it.

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The wrist roller is a great forearm exercise. The usual apparatus is pretty simple – a short fat pipe with a cord attached to the middle. You attach a weight to the end of the cord, hold the pipe out at arm’s length, and lift the weight by twisting the pipe and rolling up the cord. When the weight reaches the pipe, you unroll it.

Simple, but limited; your forearms will soon be strong enough to handle weights you can’t hold out at arms length. There are commercial machines that let you duplicate the exercise, but you don’t have to have one if you’re up for a little rigging.

One easy way to overcome this limitation is to just rest the pipe on something. (You’ll probably need to make the wrist roller out of longer pipe.) Two handy resting spots you can find in many gyms: the pins of the power rack, or the top of the parallel dip bars. If you do the exercise resting this way, you’ll probably just want twist both hands back and forth together, so the weight just bobs up and down a few inches.

I have used a 3′ pipe resting across the top of dip bars many times and it’s a fine setup, but this one is even a little better:

This is pretty much self explanatory. It is made from a $2 nylon dog leash. A short loop of chain and a snap link are clipped where the dog’s collar would normally go.

The attachment to the bar took just a little work. I carefully cut the stitching of the hand loop with a razor, so I’d have just flat strap to work with. The nylon strap would slip on the sleeve without some treatment. I just rubbed some silicone adhesive into the fabric, which dries to a slightly tacky surface. (If you have ever used a plumber’s strap wrench, that is what I was going for.)

The knot is a clove hitch. For those of you who were booted from the boy scouts before you learned the clove hitch, here’s a picture:

That’s it, give it a go, for less than $5 and less than 15 minutes, you can’t go wrong!