Dufisthenics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfxWt3xxOdM

Last night I hit up a hard mode attempt of this month’s BB challenge, which is maximum dips in a 5 minute time period.

I was not sure if I wanted to make an attempt at all.  My shoulders and triceps felt mildly strained from doing slow negative HSPU’s on push up bars at the gym.  That extra height of being on the bars allows you to go extra deep.  That extra depth resulted on new levels of stress and strain on my shoulders and triceps that I had not experienced before.

I hopped on the bar and did a couple reps to see if I could dip.  It didn’t feel great but I was able to do the movement so I called it as good enough to go. I wanted to get a set in pretty badly since NOONE has even tried a dip set this month.  Participation overall has really been low.

I used the Round Timer app again to time the attempt, unfortunately I misused it.  I hit the stop/start button for the timer, heard the bell and started my first set of 25 dips.  When I was finished with the set I glanced down at my phone and saw the clock was still at 5 minutes, shit.  Evidently I hit the button to stop a round instead of start one.

At first I thought maybe I would just start the attempt over but I realized with that first set of 25 under my belt, a restarted attempt would result in poor numbers.  I wasted a lot of time screwing around with my phone.  Eventually I got it restarted and decided I will just keep dipping and whatever number I was at when 5 minutes expired on the video would be my attempt.  I wound up squeezing out 65 dips, not a good number in my mind at all.

Despite the relatively low number my tri’s were pretty burned up.  I imagine if I tried it again with fresh triceps, without the timing snafu delays I may be able to squeeze out another 10 reps or so.

Last night I harvested kale out of my garden for the first time.  I threw kale seed in the ground maybe a month and a half ago, unsure if they would grow or not in a hot Florida summer.   Well I was glad to see it did, I have 5 or 6 good looking kale plants at this point.

If you know a little bit about healthy foods, you know that kale is one of the healthiest greens that you can consume.  I threw a bunch of it into my juicer and used the rest on a veggie wrap I had for dinner.

I stopped at Home Depot to see if I could find some hardware that could help me make Lou’s parallelettes even better.  I didn’t find anything that seemed to fit the bill. However I was walking around I did come up with an idea.  I could use Lou’s design to make something identical out of threaded, galvanized 1.25″ pipe.

I could use a threaded flange to attach it to the wood base which would be rock solid. I would need a total of 6 lengths of pipe, two 90 degree elbows and four threaded flange pieces. The bad thing is that pipe is not exactly cheap.  I saw 1 inch threaded flange at HD for $10.50 EACH, ouch.

Of course I would be fine just using Lou’s bars as is and I will will continue to use them.  But now that I have this design in my head I want to make a set and document the process for both me to use and to share with the community if it works out well.