Let's start with the obvious: I'm cheap. Or perhaps frugal. And lazy; we shouldn't forget that. I want to build some strength and don't want to bother driving to or paying for a gym, let alone waiting for equipment or listening to the awful music. However, my standard weights and barbell pose a few problems:
- The weight plates are too small to do deadlifts, about 8 inches in diameter less than Olympic weights, so the bar lays too close to the floor.
- It takes forever to change weight plates with the screw locking mechanism.
I have a history of hurting my back with squats and deadlifts at the gym. The last time I tried them I was out of the gym for 3 months. This time I'm following
Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and, surprisingly, his advice and instructions are more cohesive and useful than the "training" I got at my last gym. I highly recommend this if you plan to gain strength with free weights.
But my weights aren't the greatest.
To fix the height-off-the-ground problem, I built a simple platform using a single 4x4 (cut to 1 foot sections at Home Depot), a cheap rubber mat, a 3/4" x 1.5" piece of wood, and some scrap MDF:
This was a pretty simple project. My only mistake was gluing the 4x4's together before screwing them to the MDF. The glue seeped out and pooled on my
workbench. I made two of these:
These platforms work great and also help keep my deadlifts honest. I can see if the bar inches forward during my lifts by their placement on the blocks. If you read Starting Strength, Mark will tell you many times that there is a tendency to move the bar forward before, during, and after your lift, and I can see easily when this happens, prevent it, and learn to lift correctly.
In the picture above you'll also notice how I modified my bar. First, I got
Lock Jaw collars to replace the barbell screw locks. These save me many valuable seconds in a workout set since I can take the lock off in about 1 second instead of 10. While this is good, when changing weights they kept getting caught on the spiraling screw mechanism. My solution, again too cheap to buy a better bar, was to cover it up with duct tape. Now my weights move fairly smoothly and the bar looks bad ass. As a bonus, there is less space between the bar and weights so there's less slop in their connection. I'll soon be adding one or two more layers of duct tape to make this even smoother and create a better fit between the bars and the weights.
That's it. A simple project, but it made a huge difference in my happiness working out with these weights.
