Manuel Fortin
Level 6 Valued Member
There were a few discussions recently about farmer's walks. If you don't have specialized equipment, one way of performing them at home it to load 2 barbells. However, I find that grip becomes a limiting factor really fast, especially if you are not perfectly centered on the bar. That's fine if grip is your focus, but if you want to load other muscles, you need something else.
I came up with a way of quickly making home made farmer walk implements that I never saw before. I take a dumbell handle, used to hold weight plates, and load only one side of it with plates. I found that having a large plate, like a 45, at the outside works well. This one needs holes so that you can carry the whole assembly.
Then, going towards the inside, I add a five or a ten, as a spacer, and one or more 25 or 35. In the pictures below, I have a 5lbs handle holding a 50 and two 25s, with a 5 as a spacer, for a total of 110 lbs. The plates are held between a collar, at one end of the bar (important to avoid scratching your legs with any protruding part of the bar), and the handle. If needed, 5s could be used as spacers between the central handle and the plates also. This is my first time posting images. Hopefully this will work.
The blurry image with a gray thing is my hand shows a way to prevent the angled shape of the holes in the 50s to be the limiting factor for weight. It's simply a piece of PVC pipe cut lengthwise in half that I use to better spread pressure on my hands. It is inserted between my hand and the plate, with the round part facing my palm.
Just make sure that your hand can freely get out of the way if you lose your grip. This is why there is a spacer and the inside plates are smaller than the outside one.One would thing that the whole thing would tilt too much when held by the outside plate, but I never found this to be a problem.
Also, I like to use a cheap bar in which the handle is simply a piece of plastic mounted to the bar, without metal flanges to center it. The piece of plastic can then slide to accommodate different number and width of plates. It is locked in place with another collar on the other side.
Hopefully others will find that useful. Don't hesitate to ask questions if this is not clear.
I came up with a way of quickly making home made farmer walk implements that I never saw before. I take a dumbell handle, used to hold weight plates, and load only one side of it with plates. I found that having a large plate, like a 45, at the outside works well. This one needs holes so that you can carry the whole assembly.
Then, going towards the inside, I add a five or a ten, as a spacer, and one or more 25 or 35. In the pictures below, I have a 5lbs handle holding a 50 and two 25s, with a 5 as a spacer, for a total of 110 lbs. The plates are held between a collar, at one end of the bar (important to avoid scratching your legs with any protruding part of the bar), and the handle. If needed, 5s could be used as spacers between the central handle and the plates also. This is my first time posting images. Hopefully this will work.
The blurry image with a gray thing is my hand shows a way to prevent the angled shape of the holes in the 50s to be the limiting factor for weight. It's simply a piece of PVC pipe cut lengthwise in half that I use to better spread pressure on my hands. It is inserted between my hand and the plate, with the round part facing my palm.
Just make sure that your hand can freely get out of the way if you lose your grip. This is why there is a spacer and the inside plates are smaller than the outside one.One would thing that the whole thing would tilt too much when held by the outside plate, but I never found this to be a problem.
Also, I like to use a cheap bar in which the handle is simply a piece of plastic mounted to the bar, without metal flanges to center it. The piece of plastic can then slide to accommodate different number and width of plates. It is locked in place with another collar on the other side.
Hopefully others will find that useful. Don't hesitate to ask questions if this is not clear.
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