So I’m been making good progress in the pressing section
of gymnastic bodies foundations courses and was getting close to Russian dips
(search on YouTube if you need to). The problem was my old dip bar set up was
just too low for the bottom position of the Russian dip. I could have packed
the whole thing up higher but it was also to short for my arms to fit
comfortably at the bottom position as well. Obviously the idea would be full
size gymnastic parallel bars, but they are clearly cost and space prohibitive.
Another good option would have been an outdoor station, but again space is an
issue. After some thought, setting up something in a power rack was the best
option for me.
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| Clearly too short (And the camera person is making faces at me) |
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| A much better height (bottom of Russian Dip) |
It was a relatively simple build, I needed to cover the
spotter arms, to both protect the barbells, and stop them from rolling, and that’s
really all that was required.
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| Made to fit |
First step I built the staples to fit over the spotter arms,
the timber is all off cuts from work, ripped down to size. The spaces are the
same thickness of a barbell (28mm I think), so it was really easy to cut a
bunch, and use them for spacing out, while stapling down the others. The whole
thing is stapled together with 30mm wood staples, screws would probably work
better, but I just banged this together at work with the tools available at
hand.
So for Zero cost to me and less than 30 minutes of work I
have and adjustable set of parallel bars. They’re not perfect; they are limited
in their adjustability in terms of widths and height but they do the job I need
them to so I’m really happy with how they came out.
