Jailhouse Workout

If you read this blog enough, you will probably get the idea that I enjoy going to the gym. In fact if there was one thing I had to say I miss most about home, it may just be my lovely 24-Hour Fitness located a mere minutes from my house by bike. Here at the Ashram I've had to make due with a shell of my normal workout. I brought Jo's set of exercise ropes out here with me which are pretty good - if you know the right exercises - which I don't. But I've figured out a couple good ones. Then I use an overhang above my room's door for a pullup bar, and rely on good ol' pushups for a chest burner. My brother doesn't have a gym membership at the moment where he's living in Boston so he does a makeshift workout in his apartment too. He calls exercising in this way the "Jailhouse workout" because it's a ghetto version of what you would do at a gym since you have inferior equipment, so you're forced to do old school stuff like pushups on cold floors and pullups with wooden planks and dips on two chairs arranged next to each other and the like. Anyway, I thought I'd take the time to document what I've been doing here so far.

I've established a decent circuit of exercises that by the end leaves me pretty spent. It takes about 15-20 min per circuit, with the first one closer to 15 and the last one 20. The circuit is:

1. 15 reps lateral chest press with ropes
2. 15 reps tricep press with ropes
3. 40-50 pushups (all)
4. 12 pullups (back/biceps)
5. 15 situps (abs)
6. 15 leg lifts (abs)

On a full day I do 3 circuits, in which i pyramid down the pushups so that by the end I do 100 in total, and pullup sets go to 10 and 8 in respective circuits. Here's the workout, in pictures:

The studio:
















The machines (rope for chest on right, triceps on left):
















The pullup bar:


























The prisoner: