Mr. Penguin's Adventures: Building a Plyometric Box

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Building a Plyometric Box

The man decided a good item to have in our gym would a plyometric box to increase his vertical jump. Depending on which side is up, you have the option of three different heights to jump up on.

I agreed it was a great idea, it just took some time to plan out how to make one. After mapping out our dimensions and design, we went to Lowes to buy the lumber.

Back at home we assembled all our tools and wood to begin building.

We had Lowes cut a panel of wood into the dimensions of the sides of our box, all we needed to do was saw down some 2"x2"s for added reinforcement. We decided to do this outside so we wouldn't make a mess in the Sweat Shop.

Fearing blisters may form on my delicate flippers, I decided to allow the man to have a go at sawing.

Now, I’m not about to get a splinter in my flipper, so I decided to take over supervising, while the man did all the manual labor.

I'm a great motivator

finally done sawing

We gathered up the support posts and took them inside to begin building. Everything seemed to be going well but then we hit a snag. As we were laying out the box to assemble it, we discovered a miscalculation; 4 of our support posts were about 3 inches short. We had some left over wood, but not enough to even make 2 posts. We were pretty disappointed. It was late and seemed pointless to run back out to the the [not so close] store to get one more 2”x2”. The woman and I felt really bad because we knew how excited the man was to have this man project. And once he started, he--understandably--wanted to finish it. The man was not ready to give up, he kept trying to make it work out. But you can't make a wood post magically grow 3 inches.

Finally, the man figure out why we miscalcualated. The pieces of support wood were only 1 ½” wide, not the 2” he assumed.

It took a lot of pleading and gentle prodding, but the woman finally convinced the man to just step away from his project to regroup and replan.

The man, being tenacious, was not willing to throw in the towel just yet, so we decided to just continue on building the box, omitting the interior reinforcement posts.

After all sides were drilled and glued in place, we tested it out. It was fine, strong enough to hold the man’s weight. We both let out big sighs of relief.