Covid-19 has really brought out the extremes in people. You have people showing extreme caution and others being extremely stupid and helping the spread of the disease. You have people who are losing their minds while working from home and others who who are thriving in that situation. And you have people who are just laying around eating crappy food and getting fat because there’s nothing to do, and you have the people who are more active than ever, again, because there’s nothing to do.
I’m trying to increase my activity as I had recently found myself in a lull when it came to fitness. I haven’t been to a gym in years as I mostly do body weight exercises and just stay active any way I can, with help from the dog and toddler. But as my baby boy gets older, he’s probably going to tell other kids that his Dad can beat up their Dad, so I decided I needed to be as strong as possible to give the other Dad just enough doubt to not get into the fight before he ends up kicking my ass.
Initially, all I wanted was a pullup bar because pullups are manly and awesome. But decent pullup bars were like $50-$80, and that seemed a tad excessive to me. But then, something caught my eyes. Yes, it was about twice as expensive, but there was at least five times the exercises I could do with it. I had to have one (as long as my wife approved).
Luckily she did, and I had myself a POWER TOWER.
I also added some hand grips so the whole thing cost me about $125. I have a garage that I can throw the thing into, but if you don’t, it could easily take the spot of a living room chair, and you could have the meat(head) seat for anyone who wanted to blast through some reps while blasting through Tiger King episodes.
There are no weights with it, but you have all the weight you need with the magic of the human body. It’s got a pullup bar, pushup handles, dip handles, and you can do leg raises to crunch those abs. I added the handles so I could do inverted rows. There’s nothing special for shoulders, but all you need is a wall and you can do some handstand pushups. Just like that, your entire upper body can be shredded.
Everybody knows that you can’t make a muscle omelette without scrambling some legs. Legs ain’t complicated though. This machine has a spot for calf raises, and just do squats and lunges and your legs will be fine. This stuff isn’t complicated.
Slightly more complicated is putting the thing together. I would consider myself a novice handyman. If I have instructions, I can get it done, and I can consult my good friends at Youtube.com if I run into any issues. I definitely ran into issues. I put the thing together fairly easily, and it advised to let the nuts be loose until you get everything in place. I did that and most were easy to then tighten, but for some reason, the nuts at the bottom wouldn’t tighten because the screw just kept turning with it. I then had to put the fully built Power Tower on it’s back so I could get to those screws. But then I realized that they put rounded screws down at the bottom and my wrench was not going to hold onto that consistently despite my super manly grip strength. So I brought in some vise-grip pliers to help me with the job, and that definitely did the trick. I figured I should probably build this thing correctly if I planned on being in compromising positions with my entire body weight depending on it.
As I have told anyone who will listen when they ask what the best exercise is, it’s the one you enjoy doing, because that’s the only exercise that you will actually stick with. Now that I have a power tower, I can mix it up just enough in body weight exercises that I’ll be entertained for the foreseeable future.
Although COvid is what led me to this training, once I get jacked, I’ll be ready for Xvid.
There’s just onesmall perfectly average-sized problem that not even a Power Tower can fix.
I’m trying to increase my activity as I had recently found myself in a lull when it came to fitness. I haven’t been to a gym in years as I mostly do body weight exercises and just stay active any way I can, with help from the dog and toddler. But as my baby boy gets older, he’s probably going to tell other kids that his Dad can beat up their Dad, so I decided I needed to be as strong as possible to give the other Dad just enough doubt to not get into the fight before he ends up kicking my ass.
Initially, all I wanted was a pullup bar because pullups are manly and awesome. But decent pullup bars were like $50-$80, and that seemed a tad excessive to me. But then, something caught my eyes. Yes, it was about twice as expensive, but there was at least five times the exercises I could do with it. I had to have one (as long as my wife approved).
Luckily she did, and I had myself a POWER TOWER.
I also added some hand grips so the whole thing cost me about $125. I have a garage that I can throw the thing into, but if you don’t, it could easily take the spot of a living room chair, and you could have the meat(head) seat for anyone who wanted to blast through some reps while blasting through Tiger King episodes.
There are no weights with it, but you have all the weight you need with the magic of the human body. It’s got a pullup bar, pushup handles, dip handles, and you can do leg raises to crunch those abs. I added the handles so I could do inverted rows. There’s nothing special for shoulders, but all you need is a wall and you can do some handstand pushups. Just like that, your entire upper body can be shredded.
Everybody knows that you can’t make a muscle omelette without scrambling some legs. Legs ain’t complicated though. This machine has a spot for calf raises, and just do squats and lunges and your legs will be fine. This stuff isn’t complicated.
Slightly more complicated is putting the thing together. I would consider myself a novice handyman. If I have instructions, I can get it done, and I can consult my good friends at Youtube.com if I run into any issues. I definitely ran into issues. I put the thing together fairly easily, and it advised to let the nuts be loose until you get everything in place. I did that and most were easy to then tighten, but for some reason, the nuts at the bottom wouldn’t tighten because the screw just kept turning with it. I then had to put the fully built Power Tower on it’s back so I could get to those screws. But then I realized that they put rounded screws down at the bottom and my wrench was not going to hold onto that consistently despite my super manly grip strength. So I brought in some vise-grip pliers to help me with the job, and that definitely did the trick. I figured I should probably build this thing correctly if I planned on being in compromising positions with my entire body weight depending on it.
As I have told anyone who will listen when they ask what the best exercise is, it’s the one you enjoy doing, because that’s the only exercise that you will actually stick with. Now that I have a power tower, I can mix it up just enough in body weight exercises that I’ll be entertained for the foreseeable future.
Although COvid is what led me to this training, once I get jacked, I’ll be ready for Xvid.
There’s just one
No comments:
Post a Comment