DIY Project #2: The Whiffle Ball Bat Project = FAIL
The Premise: Take a Whiffle Ball Bat, fill it with sand, and you've got a great new addition to your home gym, right? Wrong. Much like hoverboards and democracy in central Asia, making the idea a reality was a bit more difficult than we thought. But we're not letting it die yet.
The idea, at first blush, seemed like a good one. Find a cheap way to incorporate axe-swinging type movements into a workout routine. Why not just use, oh I don't know...maybe an axe? Well, not everyone has a pulaski, or a falling axe lying around their backyard smart guy, nor do they have a limitless supply of downed timber just lying about, begging to be chopped up for training purposes. So the idea was to create a weighted club, minus the sharp blade, and use that to swing against things. The first problem we encountered was "Ok, you have a whiffle ball bat filled with sand. What the hell are you going to hit it against?" It was a spot-on criticism, with a beautiful solution. If you completed the first DIY Home Gym project (The $9 Medicine Ball) then there you go! The two projects dovetailed perfectly together! The synergy made our hearts flutter...
The medicine ball could be placed on the ground, and you could swing the whiffle bat bat directly down against the ball, or perform 45 degree chops at it from both the right and left sides. Then, for a little practice hammering wedges into a backcut, you cut place the medicine ball at waist level, and then have it at like Paul Bunyan! Brilliant. Or so we thought.
We dashed out to Target that very night and bought a whiffle ball bat ($5 bucks) and they tossed in a free ball. Mighty generous, those folks in red. Mighty generous.
The next morning, we set out to work.
The Supplies:
- 1 Whiffle Bat Bat
- 1 thing of Liquid Glue Adhesive
- 1 plastic water bottle (to use as a scoop + funnel)
- 1 utility knife
- 1 roll of athletic tape (hockey tape)
- 1 roll of electrical tape
- 1 bottle of delicious beer
- Some sand. How much exactly? Who knows. Enough to fill a bat. Figure it out.
The process is fairly straight forward. We decided to make our insertion point at the base of the bat's handle.We just carved out a half-moon shaped flap, peeled it back and called it good. There was enough room to use the funnel, but we decided to skip it and just scoop the sand in directly.
Filling the bat with sand took less than a minute. It was at this moment that we thought, "Hmmm, maybe this thing won't be as heavy as we thought it was going to be." We thought it might weigh around 7lbs. After a few scoops, we quickly realized that was a pie-in-the-sky estimate. We pounded the bat into the ground with a ferocious intensity, but couldn't get the sand to settle at all. There just wasn't much any room.
If the bat came in at 4lbs, we'd be amazed.....
About an hour later, we went back to see how it looked it, and the seal looked fine. We pushed on it, and it looked pretty secure. So we decided to let it cure for 5 hours.
After five hours, the glue was dry and it was time to take a few swings, to see how it felt.
Initial thoughts:
1.) This bat was ridiculously light
2.) There was some serious flexing going on when it was swung. The no-man's area of the bat where it starts to taper up towards the top was not handling the added weight very well. It looked like we found the weak point. However, we were optimistic. We had two rolls of tape. We were confident that the problem would be mitigated.
Two rolls of tape later, Some more discoveries:
1.) Electrical tape doesn't do much to increase structural rigidity of a whiffle ball bat.
2.) Neither does athletic tape.
3.) Sticky athletic tape gets all over your hands.
4.) The bat + sand + 2 rolls of tape = 3.6lbs.
So weak, Soooo weak.
It was at this point, that we were forced reconsider the feasibility of the sand-filled whiffle-ball bat. However, we did find a half-way decent work-around. If you reversed the bat, and swung it while holding the fat part, the flexing in the core was seriously reduced. So much so, that we reasoned that it might still be a salvageable idea. So we're going to send this back to the Hotshot Fitness labs for more work..
So the jury is still out on this project. We still need to determine how tough the bat is, and we're hesitant to start slamming the medicine ball with it...BUT...we are going to. Because that's science, and we here at Hotshot Fitness owe that to you. In the mean time, we plan on incorporating it into some circuit training (e.g. 50 overhead swings, bringing it straight down,followed by 50 baseball swings from the right and left side. )
It's a work in progress.
What are your thoughts? Got a way to improve it? Got a better way for adding axe-swing movements into a workout? Let us know - @hotshotfitness on twitter, or by email info at hotshotfitness.com.