A we all know, pull up bar is essential piece of equipment we need for bodyweight training.
I have a simple one in my utility room. I made it few years ago. Bought a galvanized pipe and hanged it between the wall and shelf. But since I started to train more often it was clear, that this pull up bar does not meet my requirements and is uncomfortable. Especially uncomfortable is to do weighted pull ups when bar is too low, so I really need higher bar. I am 1.93m tall, so it is not possible to place pull up bar high enough indoors. As I live in own house and I have a free space in my garden, I decided to create my home gym at the backyard.
Plan and preperation works
I started with search in internet for ideas of diy bars. There is lot of interesting pictures and ideas there. People have built their equipment using various materials. For me it was clear, that I want a wooden posts as they fit best to my house appearance. One more thing was clear, that I want stainless steel bars, as they feel much better in hands compared to galvanized. It was clear that I need to build paralel bars for dips, high pull up bar for me and lower one for my daughters, as they also like to play on bars.
So here is the list of materials I bought:
- 100x150mm treated wooden beams for posts
- 38mm stainless steel pipe for bars
- 25mm stainless steel pipe for children bar
First step was planning how to place bars and posts. I placed them in such way, you can swing on pull up bar freely without risking to hit another pole. Both pull up bars on one line and parallel bars perpendiculary between them.
Next step was, preparing posts. I cut beams in length I needed. Drilled holes for pull up bars, but not for parallel bars yet. I will drill them later, when posts wil be digged into ground, to get holes in equal height on both posts. Then impregnated with atiseptical wood stain.
Cut stainless steel pipes, for pull up bars, length will be about 1.3m and polished them with sandpaper.
I didn’t wanted to mess with concrete and decided just to dig posts deep enough and pound with gravel. As posts are quite thick, I believe they will not rot for at least 7-10 years. My fence was built using same aproach, and it is in quite good condition after 7 years already. So I dig them almost a meter deep. I tried to dig minimum width holes, but it is quite hard to do that if you want to dig 1m deep. I measured depth of holes and get them in apropriate depth for every post.
Then I put posts in place, and put pull up pipes in their places. And then started to level them, trying to make them straight vertical and mange that pull up bar is straight horizontal. Then pounded gravel around the posts. It was the most difficult part of this work, to make posts straight in all planes.
Then I dig two holes for parallel bars, as other end of pipes will be in existing pull up bar posts. And now drilled holes for parallel bars in equal width and height. Leveled those last posts and pounded around them with gravel.
And that’s it. Now I have –
DIY calisthenics gym in my backyard
It took me few days to finish it, and the most difficult part was to level all poles in equal height, and make them all straight verticaly, and bars straight horizontaly. But I did it pretty well I think:
DIY wooden parallettes
One more piece of equipment I decided to make was wooden parallettes. I just like wooden things and I have created a lot of wooden things at home, such as fence, gates, doors, shed, children’s swing and house and etc. So again, for inspiration, I was looking for pictures in internet – there is plenty of different variations out there.
I took round wooden bar for handles, cut them to 500mm lenght.
Cut out four legs from 50x220mm boards. I cut out a little bit narrower sides, to make them lighter. Drilled holes for handles, and put it all together. Fixed handle with a screw on every leg. Painted with wooden stain. Here is what the result is:
To be honest, I would not bother myself doing them by myself, as you can by them quite cheap. But as I have some experience doing wooden things and wooden equipment better suits my house and backyard 😎 I decided to give it a try. And since I have all equipment now, since June, I am doing my workouts only outside.