Arkk's Weight Lifting / Fitness Thread

Lendarios said:

Contrast MRI on left should tomorrow, depending on results ill go back weightlifting or surgery.

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Good luck mate.

Update, looks like I'm plateauing at 227.

getting back into it!

i'm sure like other mid 40 year olds, making time for the gym has been a serious issue for me over the past few years. even w/ a decent garage gym, it just collects dust. one issue i've seen w/ myself is i'll try to add too much too quick. every week i add another lift into my routine. i typically do a PPL or a PPcardio routine.

w/ corona, i've taken my dip/pullup station and moved it into my office. for the past week, i've challenged myself to do 3 pull ups and 5 dips ever 2 hours. and aside from the weekend, ive been pretty close to this.

in the past, i've had injuries around joints. i've had tendinitis in the shoulder (one going through the bursa?), my ankles are shot, and my right wrist had pain w/ my curl type exercises. i found weight lifting gloves w/ strong wrist wraps helped a good bit.

will this repetitive daily routine help or hurt joint/tendons more than a normal routine?

I work a 10 hour shift 4 days a week. I try to do that with pushups. I started at 10 every hour until I got up to 30. 300 a day started to wear on me, now settle on 15 and it just feels like part of my daily life. The best part is if I miss and hour 30 isn't a huge deal to.crank out. The wife and I got the T25 DVDs last year and I really enjoy that also. I just turned 40 last month.

I haven't been to the gym in six weeks now. I'm starting to get that middle aged body, even with calorie counting, watching sugar intake and MINOR exercise. My arms are normal, and what definition I had isn't completely gone, but you can tell it will be gone in a month or so.

This sucks.

I love having a home gym, but it wasn't until the other day that I realized most gyms are closed. Now I feel like it's a necessity.

Gravel said:

I love having a home gym, but it wasn't until the other day that I realized most gyms are closed. Now I feel like it's a necessity.

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I went to go look for the basics. Bench. Dumbells. Bars etc. Even locally via lets say Craigslist or Offerup, people are asking way too much. Plus I haven't been able to find any 45lb plates. AND my basement has pretty much one decently even section.

Decided to bulk while in quarantine, got my garage clean and my gym setup so I'm good on gym, just struggling to get enough calories while still eating clean.

Has anyone tried making their own plates? I was googling the price of steel to be around 50 cents per pound. A cousin of mine has a machine shop and I might be able to talk him into letting me use a lathe to cut some steel down. Priming and painting it isn't a big deal. I'm an engineer and good with my hands so I was googling olympic plate dimensions (450 mm diameter), 2. something diameter hole and work up the volume of the flat plate with a groove in it near the outer lip to assist in lifting it, hit the edges with a sander... boom made my own plates.

I've been searching online: craigslist, fb marketplace, local fitness equipment shops and I'm seeing nothing reasonably priced, like absolutely nothing. If I can make my own plates at 50 cents per pound plus whatever my cousin charges to use his gear that would be pretty damn cool I would think.

How sad is that guy gonna be when he goes for a 1RM Deadlift, drops the weight near the top because he can't make it, and the concrete cracks in half?

Bumpers are where it is at but they are expensive as fuck

carefull with your home workouts and those bands bros

Tuco said:

Some people get real uppity about the "quality" of their weights, but it's all just heavy ass steel.

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/enginerd on

My cousin has a machine shop and he's been a professional machinist for about 50 years, even used to teach at the local community college. I'm an engineer so I googled up the dimensions of all the plate sizes. 45s have a std diameter of 17.5" but the thickness and other cutouts all vary by manufacturer, except inner diameter onto the barbell sleeve for olympic barbells is 2" (50.8mm) and the barbell sleeves are 50mm (1.97"). 35s and lower you can't even find a standard for outer diameter so I just ran an average and rounded to a diameter I felt comfortable with. The weight of steel from college memory and google is 490lb/cubic foot, exchange that to pounds per square inch and calculate the volume of the plates based on outer/inner diameters and some cutout grooves.

My goal is to purchase steel stock in 18" diameter and other diameters from a distributor that stocks and plasma cuts steel if it's reasonably priced. I wasn't at all thinking to weld random pieces of steel or melt anything down. I can weld but the time and cost would be exorbitant plus it would look like shit and not be balanced on the bar. I don't know anyone that has equipment to cast steel. As an engineer - making quality steel is a very, very precise process to nail the correct heat, non-iron very small amounts of chemicals and ensure they are well mixed and cooled plus formwork. Purchasing steel is the only way to approach this imo. It'd be cool to see someone weld their own plates and nail the weight.

Another reason I wanted to machine my own plates is there's a 3-4% variance in weight for any cast iron plate from almost any company you buy. I read a shitload of articles about 45 lb plates weighing as little as 38 lbs and as much as 59 lbs. As an engineer with knowledge how to create plates and a facility to do it - why not machine my own plates that have less variance in weight than Rogue's TOP of the line machined plates that might cost me a $1/pound finished cost with my own labor? Rogue won't even hit the weight exactly as close as I will. WITH finished paint I want 1, maybe 2 ounce, variance. Anything more than that and I'll be welding steel on or machining down the groove more.

The 45s I designed are only 3/4" thick with about a 2" groove on each side near the outer diameter of the plate. I didn't design them thicker for 2 reasons: 1) the more steel I cut out of the plates to make them deeper dished the more steel I waste, 2) my cousin will be pissed if I burn up all his tools that cut steel off the plates.

I don't care about 35s so I designed 25s and 10s also. I'll just buy 5s and 2 1/2s unless we have extra steel.

My cousin (2nd cousin) is in his 70s so he understood I don't want to pay $3 per pound (I can't find any plates in stock at rogue or any company to order right now) and all the plates I see on fb or craigslist etc are minimum $2/pound. The more important reason I wanted to make my own plates

Here's the calcs I ran to create these. I was going to buy a bar and take it to the machine shop with me to nail the inner diameter fit and get the process/weight down precisely.

45 lb Plate measurements
steel = 490 lb/cu ft = 0.283564815 lb/cu inch 1" = 25.4 mm

diameter 450 mm 17.5 inches

inner hole diameter 50.8 mm 2 inches the barbell sleeve will be slightly smaller in diameter

T45 = 0.75 inch

Volume of a steel plate = (Pi()*(d/2)^2-Pi()*(di/2)^2)*T-(Pi()*(16.5/2)^2-pi()*(15/2)^2)*.5 159.4849146 cubic inches
18" outer diameter, 2" inner diameter, 1.5"wide groove near outer plate on both sides 1/4" deep
Weight = Cubic inches * lb/cu inch 45.22431026 lbs (machine down from here)
likely a 1 1/2" wide groove from 16.5" outer diameter to 15" inner diameter
Start with 18" diameter steel stock
2.0" (50.8mm) diameter hole in the center, test fit of actual olympic bar to verify fit is snug enough, 50mm bar sleeve inside 50.8mm plates
Check the weight, the goal is never to cut the plate below 45 lbs
Machine down the outer diameter to 17 1/2"
Check Weight
Machine out 1.5" groove 1/4" deep on both sides checking the weight at a 1" groove, 1.25" groove and edging toward 1.5" or > as necessary

25 lb plate measurements
diameter = 11 inches
T25 = 1.125 inches
Volume of a steel plate = (Pi()*(d/2)^2-Pi()*(di/2)^2)*T-(Pi()*(10/2)^2-pi()*(8/2)^2)*.5
89.24086632 cubic inches
11" outer diameter, 2" inner diameter, 1.5" wide groove near outer plate on both sides 1/4" deep with outer diameter of 10"
Weight = Cubic inches * lb/cu inch 25.30556973 lbs (machine down from here, probably 2" diameter or > groove)
likely a 2" wide groove from 10" outer diameter to 8" inner diameter
10 lb plate measurements
diameter = 9 inches
T10 = 0.75 inches
Volume of a steel plate = (Pi()*(d/2)^2-Pi()*(di/2)^2)*T-(Pi()*(7.5/2)^2-pi()*(6/2)^2)*.5
35.93196598 cubic inches
9" outer diameter, 2" inner diameter, 1.5"wide groove near outer plate on both sides 1/4" deep
Weight = Cubic inches * lb/cu inch 10.18904128 lbs (machine down from here)
likely a 2" wide groove from 8.5" outer diameter to 6.5" inner diameter


York
Weight 2½ Lb 5 Lb 10 Lb 25 Lb 35 Lb 45 Lb
Diameter 5 ⅝” 6 ½” 7 ⅜” 11 ⅜” 14 ⅛” 17 ½”
Thickness ½” ¾” 1” 1 ¾” 1 ½” 1 ½”

Rogue
Weight 2.5LB 5LB 10LB 25LB 35LB 45LB
Diameter 6.3" 7.75" 8.9" 10.9" 14.0" 17.5"
Thickness 0.5" 0.6" 0.9" 1.4" 1.3" 1.3"

Fringe sport
Weight: 2.5LB 5LB 10LB 25LB 35LB 45LB
Full Diameter: 6.5 7.75 9.5 11 13.75 17.5

My plate diameters 7.5 9.0 11 17.5 I drew this shit up on autocad too (downloaded it free from work onto my work laptop but I don't have layers to draw dotted lines correctly so I drew these up by hand and mailed off my calcs/ hand drawings to my cousin)

/enginerd off