The Sledgehammer Workout
So my friend Chris calls me up.
"I've got something for the blog," he says. "A workout."
"All right," I said. "I"m listening."
"Well," he said. "Do you have a sledgehammer?"
No, I didn't have a sledgehammer.
But I did go out and get one.
Why?
One word: Shovelgloving.
That's right. Shovel. Gloving.
No, you won't find it in your dictionary -- because it was invented and spread on the Internet, the weird little brainchild of Reinhard Engels. Reinhard is an odd duck who hates the gym, doesn't particularly enjoy sports, finds even pushups and situps degrading. So, in his twisted neurosis about forms of deliberate physical exercise, he asked himself: why didn't our ancestors need gyms?
The obvious answer: most of them routinely performed physical labor. They had to -- it was part of life. They chopped wood, churned butter, shoveled and lifted things.
And so he came to buy a 10-pound sledgehammer, wrap the end in an old sweater for cushion, and come up with an exercise routine that simulated the sort of manual labor guys like me and Chris might have done before we had desk jobs.
Here's what it looks like:
So -- Chris and I got together over the weekend, wrapped our sledgehammers and tried this stuff out.
How was it?
Exhausting.
Ten pounds doesn't sound like a lot. And it's not. Most reasonably healthy people could curl that, no problem. But put it on the end of a stick and begin swinging it around and suddenly you're working muscles you don't usually think about in ways they don't usually get worked. Here's what we looked like doing it:
Comments (1)
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I want to just add something from the female perspective: This will give you some jacked up arms.
And I don't need shoulders like Hulk Hogan.
Posted on May 16, 2008 2:55 PM