Tricep dips using a chair. Photo Credit: plyometric-cardio-circuit.com

You’re running late.  And now the hour you set aside to workout at the gym is reduced to thirty minutes.  The drive to the gym takes about fifteen minutes so simply getting there and back will eat up the entire time budget.  You figure you don’t want to skip out on a good workout so you decide that a home workout will have to suffice.  Luckily you are a mechanical engineer so you have a few ways to maximize your home workout results.

1. Variable point mass resistance: Variable weight dumbbells allow the user to change the weight each dumbbell with the flick of a few knobs.  The five gallon water jugs in your home can be used as make-shift variable weight dumbbells.  Since the volume of the jugs are fixed at five gallons, the material you fill them with will determine their overall weight range.  The density of water will allow the jugs to weigh between 0 and 41 lb. However, an unused bag of cement can easily allow weight range of up to 100lbs.  Just be careful when handling the cement.
   

   Chest press with a 5 gallon water jug. Photo Credit: Youtube.com: eHow Sports

2. Moment resistance: Now you want work on your forearms but you don’t have access to barbells, elastic bands, and weighted plates to make for an easy forearm workout.  Not to worry, you know that a lot of those forearm workouts require overcoming a moment which acts as the resistance for the workout.  As long as the moment force can be increased, the forearm will be worked out harder and harder trying to overcome it.  Simply holding a chair out parallel to the floor will give you the moment loading you desire.  Because the center of gravity of the chair is closer to where the legs are, the further away you grab the chair from the center of gravity the more your moment will increase.  Here’s a video showing this type of workout:
   

   Chair. Photo Credit: infobarrel.com

3. Overload training: Overloading in solid mechanics may cause premature failure in many components due to high strain rates, rapid propagation of cracks, creation of residual stresses in the material, etc.  However, overloading your muscles is important to increasing in muscles mass because it allows for muscle tissue to tear which will then recover and grow stronger than it was before.  Jumping squats and a slew of calisthenics exercises use this idea to get high stress and strain on the muscles without the need of extremely heavy objects.  Here’s a video showing how to do jumping squats properly: 

Jumping squats. Photo Credit: popsugar.com

With these considerations, you’ll be sure to have a good quick workout.  Get ready to turn some heads today.