ZappoMan.com - Fitness Blog

New Toys (part 2) - Weight Set/Strength Training Machine

January 27th, 2007

So yesterday I didn’t really get much done during the day. I took the kids to school in the morning, then came home to wait for my buddy Tyler to come by. See, Tyler has been telling me for about a year now that he would “loan me” his weight set. I’ve been telling Tyler, that anytime he wants to bring his weight set by, I’d be willing to let him store it in my garage for absolutely no charge, so long as he sets it up and I get to use it whenever I want… after all it’s in my garage, right?

Well, finally Tyler was ready to act on this idea… so around 9:30, I get the call, that he’s “on his way over”…. he just has to pick up his Dad’s truck, and then he’ll be right there. “What time are you really going to be over here? 4pm?” I ask… “I’ll see you in an hour, Dude! Oh yeah, why don’t I just pick you up on the way from my Dad’s and then you can help me load the truck up and it will take less time.”…. hmmm, I seem to remember the deal being he’d bring it over, I’d store it, now suddenly, I’m helping him load it up too… I suspect there’s more to the story. “Ok, if it speeds things up.”

Tyler did get to my house around 10:30, so he was on time so far… things were looking up. But on the drive over to his house he kept saying something about hoping he had all the parts, and being “pretty sure” he had organized things in his basement and had the bolts stored up on the window sill. Now, mind you, my garage had been filled with boxes for the last couple months because we had moved a bunch of junk out of a storage locker recently, and so I had spent the last week in preparation for this moving things out of my garage. Some stuff I had to throw away, some stuff I sold on Craig’s list, and some stuff I moved around to other parts of my house. The point is, I had prepared for this. (Notice how I am foreshadowing what I am about to discover in Tyler’s basement.)

The reason Tyler wanted to do me this favor, or I was doing him this favor, was that Tyler is remodeling his house, and it’s time for them to get cracking on finishing up the basement, which means they need to clean out the stuff they’ve been storing there. The fact is that they never use their basement at all… except to “store stuff”… and when I say “store” I mean throw in a giant unorganized pile on the floor. Isn’t that what you mean when you say store?

So when I arrive at Tyler’s basement, I discover that this weight set/machine is basically in a pile of partially assembled partially disassembled parts on the floor covered up with other random junk. Here are some things I remember moving out of the way to get to the weight set: a mountain bike, a broken floor fan, an old gym bag, some boxes of half used cans of house paint, a broken plastic kids tricycle, a laundry basket with god knows what in it.

Then we got down to the weights… and remember when Tyler said he had “organized” things. Apparently “organized” means something different where he went to school. Unless maybe things were sorted in piles of the ratio of their weight in troy ounces to their diameter in hands to their height in parsecs. Basically it was a giant pile that had no rhyme or reason to it. It took us till 12:30pm to sort through all this junk and load up his truck.

After all this work (which by the way, I decided counts as a strength training session for the day, since I was carrying dumbbells and weight plates up a flight of stairs and into a truck bed) we decided to grab some lunch. We argued about fast food (got stick to a schedule) vs. good food (who wants to eat fast food) and we decided to hit a local hole in the wall diner call “The Dish” where Tyler insisted they served the worlds best Tuna Melt. I’m not sure where Tuna Melt lands on the fast food vs. non-fast food spectrum, but it was good and we were out of there pretty quickly.

When we got to my place, the chore of assembling this beast started. The only time constraint was that we had to be done by about 5pm so I could take the kids to a birthday party for one of their friends. It turns out we needed almost all of this time. But when it was all said and done, we got the machine assembled without too much cursing, and no injuries.

 Actually, after the big pieces were in place, I left Tyler to finish the details while I worked on putting my handler bars on my bike.

When it was all said and done, we got the system setup and conveniently positioned in my two car garage so that my wife can still park her car in her stall, and I can workout, or set up my cycle trainer to get a quick indoor cycle ride in. The new machine is more than enough for me, and provides a good solution for 3 workouts that I was dependent on a gym to complete before, and another 3 workouts that I had to use a sub-optimal substitute for. It also adds a ton of versatility for when I want to mix up my strength training routine in the next couple months.

 For now I plan to use the following features:

The following Cable exercises I would emulate with dumbbell substitutes, now I can do the real thing at home:

• Tricep Pull Down with rope attachment
• Wide Arm Lat Pull down
• Seated Row

I used to have other sub-optimal replacements for the following: 

• I would do a dumbbell squat before when I worked out at home, but now I have a real squat “cage” and a good bar and weight set to do full body squats.
• I used to have to emulate dips by doing bench dips, but now I have a true dip bar setup to do dips.
• And finally I now have a true bicep isolation pad to do legitimate “Preacher Curls”.

I even have a weighted belt to add additional weight to my dips if I graduate to that level…

I already had dumbbells and a bench, but with the new setup I have additional dumbbell weights and a bench that I can setup in a flat, incline, or decline position. So I can add some variety to my workouts. The machine also includes a fly setup, so I can change my chest fly to a seated version instead of the dumbbell version I’ve been doing.

Here are some other shots of the setup:

Oh yeah, as long as your checking out my workout center, here are some more pictures…

To prove I love bikes, here are some bikes hanging from the ceiling, and my spinning trainer neatly stored on a wall hook:

Here is the TV/DVD for inspiration while working out, notice the close up, I watch the Spinning Videos, my wife watches spy thrillers.

Entry Filed under: Fitness, Weightloss, Cycling, Friends, Strength Training