What equipment u got at home...

[Ka]

Toby
BarBell Roll Out is just a standing ab roll out with a BB instead,and a butt up is best demostrated by the lovely lass at BB.com,search Butt Ups and Bar Bell roll outs are there too.
Personally Saxons, Windmills,FC Ab Twist,plus Vups and crunchies and my Abs are toast.
Good to find someone who likes T-mag excerises.

[IronFist]

Toby said:
I also used to do Saxon side bends. Funny to struggle doing them with 15lb dumbbells in each hand.

Holy ****! You can do Saxon side bends with 15lb dumbells in EACH HAND? I never got past like 5lbs in each hand. Now, to make myself feel better, I'm going to say that I have a huge range of motion in this exercise and obviously this is a movement that gets exponentially harder with each degree you bend down.

[IronFist]

People said:
Janda situps

Ok. I think they are awesome, but it's to the point where I HATE showing this exercise to people. I try to explain to them how they work, and they're like "ok." So I get down and pull on their calves (doing it the partner way) and I tell them to contract their hamstrings as hard as they can and they say "ok." Then they go and crank out rep after rep and say "yeah, that feels a little bit harder than normal."



Then I say "no, if you were doing them right you wouldn't have even gotten one rep."

People will invariable pick up their feet while doing this, even if they're contracting their hamstrings, and the lifting of the feet activates the hip flexors and then *bam* you're back to a regular situp.

Telling people to push their feet diagonally DOWN into the ground and BACK toward them tends to get their feet pressing in the right direction and gets their leg muscles doing the right thing. Then they try to sit up, can't, and once again lift their feet. Well, they had it for half a second.

So once again, if you can do a complete rep on your first try, you're doing it wrong.

[Toby]

Originally posted by Serpent
I have a large brown bear chained up in the back yard that I wrestle every morning.

Just get your bear to hold on to your ankles and try out the Janda exercise to see if you like it.

If you do, I used 4 100mm bolts, 4 nuts, 8 washers, 4 6g x 50mm screws, a couple of metres of 40x30mm or 50x30mm pine and a spare bit of thick ply. Tools required? A saw and a drill. A 9.5mm drill bit for the bolt holes and the screws don't really need predrilling in pine. I also used a sander to round off corners on mine. I basically followed the dimensions on that link I posted, but ended up changing it a bit. E.g. you don't need the vertical part to be any higher than about 200mm if you put the dowel through the top part of the vertical bar instead of halfway up like on the website. I'm also going to put rubber on the bottom of mine to stop it slipping on our floorboards.

Iron,

Thanks. I always overestimate. Must be ego or something . Every now and then I need a reality check. I just thought (in my dreams) eventually I'd be using the No 1 and aspiring to No 2, and since 2 grippers will cost me AUD$100 to get here (~US$65) I didn't want to get 3 of them. If they were titanium, I'd understand the cost, but it sucks paying so much to get things down here ... I like having rough hands, so that doesn't bother me. I've had calloused hands for pretty much the last 15 years or so, so I'm used to it. My wife doesn't like it so much though Apart from the obvious reasons, just last week, I was trying to get crusty sleep crap out of my 2 boys eyes one morning and managed to draw blood on the side of both their noses with my rough fingerpads.

Re the Janda stuff: like I said, my form sucks. On contraction I find myself cheating and lifting my feet. I do 2 sets of 6 (the cheat's way). Still find them hard, though. At least I'm aware of the correct form and aspire to it. I realise that when I said "If you've got a training partner, it's easy to do them" that that sounded like Jandas were easy to do. What I should have said was the technique is easier to get right with a partner than with my homemade machine, not the exercise itself is easier. I've heard about the theory that you shouldn't be able to do 1 rep with proper form the 1st time. My abs (both lower and upper ) are reasonably strong to start with anyway compared to my fellow MA students so I was hopeful of completing a rep or 2. I feel I get correct form on the eccentric phase of the situp, but definitely not the concentric. Part of the problem is my homemade machine slipping when I pull against it (see my rubber comment above for a hopeful fix). Am I right in thinking that if I get maximal contraction in the hammies (like I'm doing a hamstring curl) in both concentric and eccentric phase, that I'm getting the right action? That's when it feels right to me, anyway. Thanks again for the tips.


Ka,

That makes sense. I had heard of those before but forgotten. I'll go searching for that BB.com lass now to read up on butt ups .

[Ford Prefect]

I don't have much:

1 pood Kettlebell
Dragging Sled
200 lbs of plates
Wrist Roller
Captain of Crush Grippers (Trainer and No1)
Mini Bands (jumpstretch)
Blue Bands (jumpstretch)
Chin Bar
Neck Harness
Agility Ladder
2, 5, 8, 10, 15 lbs dumbells
Ab Wheel
Power Wheel
Jump Rope

[rubthebuddha]

30 lb. dumbbell
10 lb. dumbbells (2)
lifeline tnt cables
ab roller
jumprope

and something we all need ...

my computer hooked up to a phat stereo with a zillion mp3s.

[FatherDog]

I have a big, hilly yard.

That's about it.

Fortunately, I also have cheap access to the Princeton University gym, which has just about every piece of equipment you can imagine.

Except a glute-ham raise bench.

[Toby]

Originally posted by IronFist
Holy ****! You can do Saxon side bends with 15lb dumbells in EACH HAND? I never got past like 5lbs in each hand. Now, to make myself feel better, I'm going to say that I have a huge range of motion in this exercise and obviously this is a movement that gets exponentially harder with each degree you bend down.

Yeah, it's probably due to the ROM. I do it in a mirror and get down to about 30-40 degrees off vertical. Doing it now with empty hands in the air, I struggle to get much lower than that anyway without compensating by moving my hips in the opposite direction. I must have tight obliques. I gotta say, when I first tried doing them I tried 22lbs in each hand and then 18.7lbs in each hand and hurt myself. 15lbs is really pushing it, right from the 1st rep. I break out in a sweat after my 12 reps. L-R is 2 reps for me, so 6 on each side. 2 or 3 sets. I'm relatively big, 6'3", 215lbs, so 15lbs for me is counterbalanced pretty well by my spare tire .

Did some more Jandas last night and yeah, I suck. I can't maintain form going up and struggle on the way down. I know what feeling I'm aiming for. I get it (like you said) for 1/2s at a time.

[IronFist]

Toby said:
Re the Janda stuff: like I said, my form sucks.

Dude, when I was talking about people not being able to do them, I was reffering to people in general, not you. You've studied them and know what to feel and what to do.

Yes, you want to keep your hamstrings contracted, and I find it helps a lot if you keep your feet pressed into the floor as this further contracts them and helps prevent you from trying to lift your feet.

[abobo]

Wrist roller (made a new one, slightly thicker)
CoC - T,1
Paralletes
Jump rope
hip belt

[abobo]

b) the aluminum (titanium?) knurled <sp> surface can be rough on the hands. [/B]

It only takes a couple of weeks to get good calluses.