Last week I posted part 1 of a workout using my home-made weighted PVC pipe exercise equipment. In this week’s video I do squat thrust variations with a 40-pound, 3-inch wide PVC pipe weighted with water and stone.
It’s really quite easy and inexpensive to make the PVC pipe exercise equipment. The unstable weight of the PVC combined with the long length of the pipe makes this home-made equipment quite challenging to perform any kind of exercise imaginable.
When the weather gets nice I try to do as many of my workouts outdoors as possible. Check out this video where I incorporate PVC pipes, weighted with water and stone, into my calisthenics warm-up.
These exercises can be used as a warm-up or as an entire workout and provide a unique training stimulus beneficial to people of all fitness levels. People have been using weighted PVC pipes as training implements for a while and I wanted to find out for myself what it felt like to use them.
In this video you will see two basic PVC pipes but check back regularly as I will provide more clips that utilize different sized pipes.
It’s really very easy and inexpensive to make this home-made exercise equipment. All you need is PVC pipes of various sizes and the appropriate caps, primer, PVC pipe adhesive and a hack saw – just as if you were doing some plumbing work. A scale will help, as you can load the pipes with the exact amount of weight that you want.
Cap and seal one end of the pipe and then load it with stone and water to the appropriate level. If you can, place the pipe on a scale as you fill it with water and you don’t want to fill the pipe all the way, as this prevents the water from sloshing around. Depending on the circumference of the pipe you should fill from half-way to three-quarters with water before adding the stone.
Drop me an email if you have any questions about how to put these babies together as I am glad to spread the word about the benefits of homemade exercise equipment.
The deck of cards workout is one of my all-time favorite workouts, and is the perfect way to exercise while on vacation. All you need is you and a deck of cards!
I’ve been using the deck of cards workout for almost 30 years and have performed an endless string of variations of this great workout. The basic deck of cards workout consists of doing body weight squats for every black card selected and push-ups for every red card, and there are no limits to the way this exercise routine can be tweaked.
While on vacation the basic deck of cards workout provides you with the perfect exercise routine because it can be done in just about any location and doesn’t require any equipment. Of course if you’re able to have a few pairs of dumbbells with you and/or a Kettlebell, the deck of cards workout offers an even more incredible training stimulus.
The deck of cards workout can be modified in any number of ways, but a few basic alterations are to substitute lunges for squats, split the red cards into push-ups and sit-ups and/or to split the black cards into squats/lunges and squat thrusts.
If you split the deck up and include one joker with the black and red cards, the colors account for 230 repetitions. Here are the rules and the basic breakdown.
- Jacks are 11 reps
- Queens are 12 reps
- Kings are 13 reps
- Aces are 15 reps
- Jokers – if you have them in the deck – are good for 20 repetitions
- For every red card turned you do push-ups – for the King of Hearts you do 13 push-ups
- For black cards you do body weight squats – for the five of Clubs you’ll do 5 squats.
- Each suit of cards contains 105 repetitions T
- The extra 20 reps come from the Jokers
Once you’re familiar with these guidelines you can make any adjustment that you see fit. No matter how you slice it – or cut it – the deck of cards workout will challenge even the fittest.
