Not technically workout equipment, but I use a 7-inch diameter sawed-off PVC pipe as a foam roller. Without the foam.

I built a set of parallettes (pdf [library.crossfit.com]).

Together with rings, two kettlebells and two medicine balls, it's a very versatile home gym for about 250 euros.

My favorite at-home exercises are:

On rings: regular & weighted pullups (with 16 or 32 kg KB attached), muscleups, dips, front/back levers, support position with rings turned outward

On parallettes: handstand pushups, tucked frogstand, low straddle holds..

Medicine balls are easy and cheap! Cut open a basketball, fill it with sand, and duct tape the crap out of it. Costs like $5, weighs about 20#. Ghetto-fit. :)

Likewise PVC paralettes are cheap and easy, and well worth it! I love mine.

For rings, I went with manufactured. More expensive but I love them.

-Tavis

In case you didn't know, Ross Enamait has a great website. He talks a lot about home made fitness equipment.

I've built myself a couple slosh tubes and love them (info on marksdailyapple and/or Youtube search).

I also acquired some old tires that I enjoy hitting with sledge hammers.

One of the first things I made was a couple of different sized sandbags. Quite simple, I used two sturdy woven jute sacks or hessian bags and filled to the required weight with beach sand. They're very useful and hard enough to handle so as to add a degree of difficulty. A big tractor tyre is good for flips. Resistance bands come in many sizes and strengths and are reasonably priced too.

I've built myself a indoor pullup bar and hung some makeshift gymnastics rings off of it. It's made of galvanized gas piping, and it's not quite sturdy enough for kips and my ceiling isn't quite high enough for muscleups, but it seems to be working for my needs.

www.marksdailyapple.com has some cool DIY equipment ideas, like slosh tubes, and I think there are instructions for a homemade medicine ball.

The one piece that I made that doesn't get nearly as much use as I wish was a gada. It's an old Indian Wrestling tool that looks like a mace. Pretty simple, take a junior sized basketball (I used a legit ball and that might be why it gets so little use. Ops....) fill it with Quikcrete and put an old wooden shovel handle into it and let it set. Boom done. You use it doing overhead rotation, google gadas or Karl Gotch, he loved that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQKsyqQPRpc

That is a link for making clubbells at home. Pretty cheap, check out Scott Sonnon for clubbell work.

You guys are going to love this

Go over to my blog to see how to make your own Paleo Style Throwing bag!!!!! Loads of fun alone or even better with a partner!!!!!!

The Famous Paleo Guy Throwing Bag!!!

Guy The Healthy Paleo Guy

My group has a tire with a good rope. Wrap that thing around your waist and pull it up and down the street. My guess is your neighbors already think you are weird, so this should be no different. Put a mat in the bottom and add weight as necessary. I fear tire pull days.

I made myself some heavy Indian clubs out of black iron pipe from Home Depot. They cost about $12-14 each, and they're super fun to swing, and a really good workout. Mine are very adjustable, as empty they weigh about 9#, and I have several different diameters of pipe that I fill the top portion with to make it weigh up to ~11.5#.

11# is pretty heavy, but I really want to get some lead shot and make 'em REALLY heavy, see if I can still swing 'em. I also made some miniature versions for my girlfriend that weigh ~2.6#! They're fun to warm up with. I also have since wrapped the handles in Gorilla tape, and a layer of sports tape over that for better grip. At some point we're gonna spray paint them fun colors.

Joe, above, posted a link to a video where I got the idea. It was really fun!

I've been thinking about trying to build something like this:

maybe out of black iron pipe? Wonder what the cost would be, or if it's even possible.

I wanted to share 2 clips of me working on a piece of homemade exercise equipment I developed.

The YouTube channel I am on is matthew3689

Thank you for your time.

matthew

There are a lot of alternatives that we can used when it comes to work out equipment. Just analyze the things and you will know that it is useful and can be used as a nice alternatives.

5 Gallon water jugs are very useful. Full, they weigh in at about 54 Lbs., and most come with handles.

When they are less than full, they provide for an unstable load, so you can fire off a lot of the stabilization muscles. Figure 8.35Lbs/Gal.

Here's how I build my gym: go look around for some rocks of various weights and shapes. Start lifting them in various ways. Get logs and stuff too.

I don't get it. Why the hell do people spend so much money on barbells, dumbbells, etc when they could just go in their backyard or some local park/trail and gather some rocks and put them somewhere?

How much does it cost to build a gym? NOTHING! All you need are rocks, logs, etc, and those are FREE! This isn't just some ghetto way of doing it either. It's BETTER. You know how machines suck in comparison to free weights because there's a lot less stabilization going on when you're doing the machine? Well, that's why rocks (uneven weight distribution and irregular shape) are EVEN BETTER!

machines < free weights < rocks/logs/etc

Of course this only applies to people who live in a rural enough area to have rocks and stuff lying around, but that should be most of you. If you live deep in a city with no parks at all, this advice is of course useless.

Where I live the gym is only $10/month

where do you live where its so expensive?