The Rack

In my continuing quest to find my abdominal muscles again, I have purchased my largest and most painful workout toy yet...
Lovingly named "the Rack," it is actually a Torque Pull-Up System, made by Torque Athletic, and the rings are Xtreme Rings, from Gymnastic Bodies. We use it for pull-ups, dips, ring push-ups, body rows, and my personal favorite, hanging leg raises. So far, just about everyone hates it with a passion - which undoubtedly means it is working well.

We are all at different levels; some of our workout crowd can't even begin to do a single pull-up, while some of us can knock out half a dozen with ease. The nice thing about this set up is that we can cater the difficulty of the exercise to the individual's current strength level. For example, I am pretty far from being able to do unaided pull-ups so I'm doing a lot of body rows, while Miss N. is very close to doing a full pull-up, so she is doing sets of slow negatives, using just a little assistance on the "up" portion of the exercise.

I am incorporating body weight exercises - especially the leg raises - into my routine because I want to look like the gentleman to the right. Of course, my stomach will be much more fuzzy, since I could only achieve that level of depilatory purity by way of 20mg of Valium, a tub full of molten wax, and a staff of 3 very determined stylists... but in theory, this is what I want my stomach to look like.

The leg raises and all of the plank type exercises (push-ups, body rows, etc.) are definitely working my abs. After the first full workout with the Rack, I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach by all of the Budweiser Wagon team. I simply could not sit up at all; getting out of bed involved rolling over to my stomach and then doing a push-up, to avoid any movements that even vaguely resembled bending at the waist. Yes, this is an excellent new toy...