Dufisthenics

Over the weekend I decided to hit the bars briefly.

First up I tried doing the one arm dead hang challenge utilizing some new Under Armour gloves I picked up at the outlet.   They are incredibly sticky so I thought they might be helpful trying to do the hold.

Unfortunately the sticky material started to stretch a bit as the attempt went on.  I wound up holding 7 seconds shorter than my bare skin and chalk attempt.

Next up I thought I would try some weighted pull ups, something I have not done on my home bars, only at the gym in the past.  I again utilized my new gloves.  For pull ups they felt good.

I worked my way all the way up to a 90 pound weighted pull up, slightly more than half of my 176 pound current body weight and 5 pounds heavier than my old personal record.  Very cool!

I was feeling pumped up by my success so I figured I would round out the effort with a matching 90 pound weighted dip.  I had never tried weighted dips at home before either.

When I built my parallel bars, I built them on the high side since I have very long legs.  Typically when I am dipping on them, I stand on the small cross support and do a small hop up and slightly back to get into position.

For whatever reason I didn’t think there would be any complications doing the same thing with 90 pounds between my legs. Boy was I wrong.

As soon as I did my small jump up onto the bars it set the weights below me into motion, my body became an unwilling counterweight and started to rock back and forth, out of control.

In the span of a couple seconds I had pitched too far forward to control it and I crashed downward, smashing my upper right arm into the one 4×4 support on the way down.

To be honest it scared me at first.   I did  a quick survey, wondering if I seriously hurt myself.  The only immediate damage I saw was a nasty brush burn looking type of injury.  So after gathering myself for a bit the pain from my arm mutated into anger.  Now I wanted to do the dip just because.

I got back up there, hopped, this time making sure to control the sway immediately.  Even being aware of it, I struggled a bit to hold it.  Once I got settled I went down but stalled out coming back up.  Damn.

Here is the video of the incident.

Obviously the next time I try weighted dips at home it will be with sort of step that allows me to simply step into position instead of jump there.

Afterward, the brush burn area got progressively nastier looking and more painful.  However today I was able to do a full workout without major hassle as long as I kept the brush burn area from rubbing against things.