By now you’ve heard it’s important to stay in shape during these trying times, but I bet you haven’t taken it as far as former military police officer, Zachary Skidmore.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced his local gym to shut down, Skidmore needed a way to get some exercise. But rather than risk breaking social distancing etiquette to buy a set of exercise equipment, he decided to make his own gym on his family property in Jackson, Ohio.
Composed entirely from timber and rope, the idea of making a wooden gym crossed Skidmore’s mind when he saw a fallen tree on his family’s land. After 60 hours of hard chainsaw work over two long, isolated weeks, he managed to create what he calls his “Lumber Jacked Gym”.
So lumberjacked. While he initially wanted to make just a few dumbbells, Skidmore realized he had way more time to work on other pieces of equipment. As of now, the Lumber Jacked Gym comes with complete set of dumbbells, a cable machine, a rowing machine, a bench press (complete with spotting equipment and wooden bench), a leg press machine, and a treadmill among others.
It may not be the safest or most accurate setup in the world, what with the weights being unfastened logs, but the Lumber Jacked Gym is certainly the woodiest and allows Skidmore to get in a daily workout. Couple that with the amount of work he had to put in with making it, and you can bet his body is already feelin’ the burn.
According to an interview with Storyful, he made some of the gym equipment using premade plans but most of the work was done on the fly. “Between the engineering and planning of how to execute parts, I was going as fast as I could because I wanted to get back to my normal workout routine.”
