Photo: GirlWalksIntoABarbell

“Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.” – Bruce Lee

Tired of the same old workout routine? You go for a run, you go to the gym and do cardio or lift weights; rinse and repeat, day in day out. Here’s a cheap, effective workout tool you can build at home that can really give you a great workout every day. 

Water does a lot of things. It gives us good health, it cleans us, it provides us with life, it gives us power and electricity. It can also kick your butt, hardcore.

What I’m building today is called a slosh pipe. It’s a really simple concept — a slosh pipe is essentially just a long pipe filled with water at least halfway. The idea is that the water will never settle exactly in the middle of the pipe — it will always try to flow to one side or the other. This can give you a killer core workout even before you manage to get the pipe up for the workout itself!

Here’s what you need:
One 9-10ft long piece of PVC that is 3 or 4 inches in diameter.
Two end caps – here’s where you can get fancy by getting an end cap with a threaded insert so you can remove or replace the water in the pipe.
Enough water to fill the pipe at least halfway (cap one end, then fill it and cap the other end).

It will cost you about less than $20 in parts ($30 if you get fancy with it).

The pipe, when filled, does not have to weigh that much. With water, you can really customize how much weight you want — and at the very most the pipe can weigh up to 50 lbs. What gives the slosh pipe its “kick” is the water weight all moving from side to side. As you “slosh” the pipe, you are requiring your core to dynamically adapt in order to keep the weight balanced. At the same time, it will work your legs and your arms through virtue of your body’s kinetic chain, essentially giving you a whole body workout.

Once you actually get the pipe up, you can do a lot of different things. You can carry it across your chest for distance, you can walk uphill with it, you can do curls, deadlifts, and presses with it, and if you have good barbell form with squats, and other Olympic lifts, you can try doing them with the slosh pipe too. Be very careful and be sure you have good to excellent form doing these types of exercises, because improper form with the slosh pipe can potentially hurt you due to the dynamic nature of the load.

Be like water.

–Francis Garcia

Francis is a 23-year-old electrical engineer from New Jersey. He likes Reddit and running.