Making your own homemade suspension trainer is easy. *Note, Anchor strap and carabiner not shown.
Taking care of your health is very frugal thing to do. The idea being that by maintaining a healthy body, you’ll hopefully avoid getting sucked into that huge money sink none as the health care system. A few weeks ago, this realization, that some effort on my part, is required to stay healthy, led me searching for some inexpensive fitness equipment.
Now first off, I spent a number of years in the army, and so I’m familiar with the Army’s PT, that’s physical training, regimen and it’s a great one. You’ll need no equipment other than your body and the core exercises are running, push-ups and sit-ups, flutter kicks and side-straddle hops, aka jumping jacks. As great as this program is, it’s still nice to have some equipment to mix up your routine. The problem is, 1. To have a lot of gym equipment takes up a lot of space, 2. A lot of gym equipment costs a lot of money, 3. A lot of gym equipment is not portable so if you’re staying in a hotel for example, you’re either limited to their gym, if they have one, or you can go without.
I did find, one piece of gym equipment that passed requirements 1 and 3 and that was the TRX suspension trainer. This piece of equipment is kind of like a set of modified gymnast’s rings that you can setup anywhere. It uses your body weight as resistance and being rings and ropes, it packs up very small. The only problem it has really is the price. Starting at $189 and going up, plus shipping to Japan. Any handyman looking at this thing though will kick himself for not coming up with it first though because the product is so simple. And thus, the desire to build my own homemade suspension trainer was born.
Suspension training is not a new idea, in fact, health books going back to the 1800’s document man’s interest with these devices. Now putting one together isn’t all that hard but it does require a few things. Together with the parts, I’ll list the price as well so here’s what you need:
- 1. Two Cargo Straps 1300 yen or $15.46 – These nylon straps have a cammed buckle on one end and nothing on the other end, ie, no hooks, and were rated to 500 kg/1100 lbs. The ones I bought were 3 meters/ 9.84 feet in length.
- 2. 2.75 cm/ 1 inch OD PVC pipe (#1 in the photo below), 1 meter @ 199 yen or $2.37, The pipe was cut into 2, 15 cm / 5.9 inch handles. The size was really arbitrary and just a good fit for my hands. Photos of the real suspension trainer, show the handles to be only slightly larger than hands. I think the advantage of having longer handles is it holds the footstraps open wider, which makes it easier to get into them.
- 3. Foam Bicycle Handgrips (#3 below) @190 yen or $2.26. A lot of the other homemade suspension trainers I’ve seen are simply using padded tape but I thought the bicycle grips add a professional touch.
Parts of the suspension trainer disassembled
- 4. One carabiner (#6 above) @1500 yen or $17.84. The carabiner provides the anchor point for the device and was the single most expensive piece of the process. Normally, a carabiner wouldn’t be this expensive but I’m in Japan and so the stores can get away with raping their customers.
- 5. A 1 meter/ 3.28 foot length, 3 inch wide nylon strap (#2 above) – Free. For the anchor, I used a nylon shoulder strap from an old laptop bag. This will probably be replaced in the future.
Go Back to Frugal Health or go to How to Build a Homemade Suspension Trainer part II
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