How To Make Parallettes Wood

When I won the Parallettes ane course from GMB at the end of 2013, I only had little push up handles from Argos (left of the photo below) to do my workouts with. They were fine for some exercises, just the fact they were so close to the ground made it actually hard to do others, and almost of the fourth dimension I took them to the gym and put them on a couple of step boxes to add sufficient elevation (as you can come across here). Constructive only far from ideal.

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Being cash-poor but time-rich, I thought hard about whether I needed to spend £l-odd on a metal pair, or even more on a wooden ready, and decided I'd make my own. I mean actually, how hard could it exist?!

I discarded plastic piping, the most commonly used textile on the Font of All Knowledge (aka. Google) in favour of woods, which I figured would enable me to hands put together something that would take my weight and that of whatsoever hefty friends that desired to utilize them.

Since I've been asked a lot about them – a result of their appearence in several of my YouTube videos – I idea I'd share the details of their construction, which should give you lot enough information to make your own set, should you desire.

What I used:

1m of 38mm dowel
A 38mm apartment-caput drill bit
one.5m of 2×4 timber (C24 grade)
Advisable screws (or slim dowel and an appropriate drill bit)
Strong forearms and an electric screw driver
Sandpaper
Clamps, spare hands and/or a workbench with congenital-in clamps.

How I did it:

I started out past working out some dimensions and what materials I would need. I figured that 38mm dowel would be a prissy width for my easily – solid and wide enough to not cause discomfort on long sessions. I also knew that "2×four" (roughly 100mm wide ten 50mm thick timber) was cheap and easily obtainable, and that formed the ground for the residual of my design. Since information technology's my task, I spent a couple of minutes whipping up a model to visualise what I was going to brand. I have added some handy annotations (in red) so y'all tin can encounter what's what:

Dims - Parallettes - v2.2-crop

I originally planned to use slim wooden dowel instead of screws across the whole construction (looks much better), simply in reality, even with two of us working on them (I roped in the help of training buddy Chris, in render for provision of materials to make his own set and a takeaway Chinese!) it took a while so we went for convenient screws. You can run across the points I originally intended to prepare them at below:

Ex 3 - Parallettes - v2.2

Only in reality we ended up doing it slightly differently, using merely two screws on each terminate (see final photo) and one on acme, through the dowel to ensure it didn't move around (something which I hadn't idea almost):

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Below is the underneath, showing that the two flake of timber making the uprights are very much firmly fixed to the base crosspieces!

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The finished thing:

My verdict (afterward nine months of use)

These are what we Brits would describe as "solid as fuck". In that location is no move whatsoever. In fact I use them to stand on when I need to get something from the top of my wardrobe. I could probably throw them out of my 2nd floor window and they'd only sustain a few scracthes.

They practise, all the same, have a couple of downsides… The master 1 is the feet – if yous don't have the forcefulness/flexibility to get loftier when moving through the tucked position, you could scrape your feet against the tiptop of them. This hasn't really happened to me, but I would feel more comfy with less abrupt edges.

Which brings me to another downside, which can as well be an upside – the square uprights. They tin exist a flake scary with their pointy corners, but they can every bit be very handy as, er, handholds – they provide some other platform to place your hands on, and add a different dimension to some moves.

Plainly they are also not exactly portable! But for me they're a piece of kit that enables me to accept a killer workout without leaving the house.

If you've successfully made your own parallettes and so feel gratis to make any recommendations or even link to some photos in the comments! Or if you don't fancy all that endeavor and want to purchase a pair, then become in touch with Lee Wade Turner as he ordinarily has a few pairs of metal ones to sell.