We made a rig to do push ups, pull ups and isometric work.
We want to run a class without compromising on exercise selection.
What does that mean?
The strength level of the average trainee at our gym is highly variable.
You have folks who have never done a single push up in their lives working towards one. You also have people who are working on weighted pull ups. And single arm push ups. Or people with knee issues working on a squat isometric.
To accommodate all of these capacities and goals, we need tools that are not found in the marketplace.
And I am not talking India. Some of the stuff we make is found just in our space.
We need these tools since we don’t like compromise. We don’t want to run a random program with a pressing variant or just bicep curls.
When a client joins our space, we want a clear path from plank to floor push to dip to single arm push. Same for the pull up. A hang or row should lead to a pull up. It can take a while but we want tools that give clients a chance to work to it one incremental step at a time.
So I built one. It has plenty of parts. We can’t just weld the whole thing together. Since it needs to disassembled and reassembled on the third floor. Also stainless steel is ridiculously hard to weld without a jig to hold everything in place.
There’s a total of 66 parts secured with 70 bolts. That’s not counting all the sub-parts it takes to make each part. Each X bar has 17 components.
Here’s how we put it together. One piece at a time.
I’ll chronicle how we use this gadget in future videos. In this video I just captured the 6 hour assembly. It took 3.5 weeks from the first order for stainless steel to final assembly.
For anyone curious enough, here’s the final part list!
Two long base tubes 14 feet long
8 base pipes to keep the 8 uprights in place. 16 bolts to secure the uprights in the pipe.
6 pipes to support the 8 base pipes. These are welded.
8 uprights.
4 pull up bars 27 mm, 30 mm, 32 mm and 38 mm in diameter with 8 bolts to secure them in place.
20 adjustable sliding hooks to latch on pull up bars. 20 pegs to secure those in place.
2 cross bars to stiffen the whole thing. 8 bolts to keep it in place.
2 X bars to connect everything and also give you a cool new way to do pull ups. 8 bolts to keep this in place. A total of 16 bolts
2 connector pipes to attach the whole thing to the building frame so it does not move around when 20 people work in it. This needed 2 bolts. And two pipes.
2 base plates to connect the base tubes at the floor level
10 rods that can be used for pull ups, push ups, isometric work etc.
That’s a total of 66 parts secured together with 70 bolts.
There more complexity here too. The X bar is actually made of 17 different components. Each sliding hook is made out of 3 different components. So that’s 86 components right there. Each pull up bar is 3 parts welded together.
Unlike our usual work, the recycled steel count is only at 20 percent.