We've had a successful couple of weeks with the pre-season boot camp that we started in July.  For the first session at the beginning of the camp I wanted to get some base fitness numbers to see where our athletes were starting from.  We tested them on push-ups, situps, dips, inverted row, 40 yd dash, 20 yd shuttle, and threw in the 3-cone drill for the heck of it.  Testing is an important part of performance enhancement in order to determine what type of impact that we are able to make with the athletes that we are coaching. 

Since we were out in the open field, and I wanted to get a good back and bicep test, as well as tricep, I came up with this fairly simple way of getting it done.  I say fairly simple since I do quite a bit of woodworking, but you do have to have some tools and some ability to use them.

This dip and row station that I made is really just a couple of saw horses.  You can buy the metal saw horse brackets at the hardware store, and I used pressure treated 2"x4"s for the legs.  I made the legs a bit longer than a standard sawhorse in order to get the clearance that we wanted to perform the exercises.  Since I wanted to cut grooves in the cross pieces, I used  2"x6" boards so that I still had enough wood to support the weight.  I originally bought a few pieces of sturdy plumbing pipe for the bars, but then I remembered that I had a few standard weight bars that were just laying around in the corner of my gym... they work like a champ!

We use this contraption for standard dips (chest and triceps) as well as inverted rows (back and biceps) and really found them to be useful for this type of portable station.  The athletes really liked these tests also and I'm told that they were feeling it the next day... better now than on the first day of practice, right?