GIBSON STRENGTH

Monday, March 4, 2013

No equipment? No time? No problem.


A lot of us have trouble getting to the gym. If you're going after you get off work at 5, traffic might be so terrible it takes 20 minutes to drive there. Once you arrive, so does everybody else, and it might take an hour to fight through the lines to the bench to get in twenty minutes' worth of workout. Factor in the drive back, and that's more than an hour and a half out of your day to devote to something optional you might not even enjoy all that much.

Another option would be to buy your own home gym. No, wait, don't stop reading, I can explain, it's not that outlandish.

Your buy list to have the perfect home gym:

One (1) dumbbell you can comfortably press overhead.

...and that's it.

A thirty pound dumbbell might cost you as many bucks, and you can buy small handles and plates to be used separately to account for your increasing badassitude. With that, you can do literally hundreds of exercises, and there are ways to put them together that can make a one-dumbbell workout substantially more effective than a slog through the gym floor.

A "complex" is a series of exercises done without rest, using the same piece of equipment, in this case obviously a dumbbell. I'm using a 35lb 'bell that i made from handles I got at Wal-Mart and some old plates my dad used to have (total cost: $12). Here are the exercises:

Curl and press x 3
Snatch x 3
Single leg Romanian deadlift x 3
Single leg reverse lunge x 3
Kneeling press x 3
Kneeling chop x 5
Renegade row x 3

Three rounds of this on each side would take around 10 minutes, and work every muscle in the body while also giving you some pretty substantial cardiovascular benefits. You can adjust the reps to make it tougher (I would suggest keeping it below 8, any more and you're using too light a weight).

Here's a video of the above complex. Sorry for the blurriness in some parts, it was filmed in my bedroom in a very cramped space...which is sort of the point.

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