Most of us have to get any training when we can, climbing being something we have precious little time for at the bets of times. When life gets in the way and you have to miss out on real rock just what can we do.
Having bought a house this year I have turned many a chore into a training regime. First off, I have to scrub virtually every inch of my new house such was the damp. So scrubbing brush in hand I worked like a demon and set micro goals. This next hour I will scrub this much, by the end of the day I will have done this much.
The same goal setting helped me through painting the inside and outside of the house. First off, remember to cut in first. It is a ball ache and no one like doing it. After that ditch the brushes and get the roller out. The reason being you can push the roller onto the wall and work those antagonist muscles. This is really important for ceilings, as a days good ceiling paint is my personal recommended favourite way to get some pre-winter training in. How else are you going to get used to holding those ices above your head!
Other handy thing when doing DIY are hammering you own fingers into walls, whilst painful at the time are helping kill off the nerve endings. Thumbs are partially prone to this form of nerve training. Thumbs are also good at been sawn off, ala Tommy Caldwell. I was using a table saw to help lay a laminate floor and every time I turned it on it felt like an E1 4c. Essentially easy but one false move and your dead! I mused not inaccurately that if I was to take a finger off with this beast, I would see the fingers and blood before I felt the pain as it went through flooring like a hot knife through butter.
Putting that laminate down is another good core workout, as you try and pull the parts together. Although be careful because I popped a intercostal muscle, which felt like a broken rib for a few weeks. My final training was deadlifting a storage heater, after failing to get it off the ground I had to dismantle it and do timed runs up and down the stairs to my car with a 5kg block pinch in each hand.
Possible the most important thing about any DIY training is the trips to B&Q or some other store and seeing the people who it seems this is there life. A non stop cycle of do one thing then move onto the next. Working their way round the house only to arrive at the beginning. Don’t become one of them, do you time at the coal face, preferably in wet weather and then enjoy the dry.
Happy DIY.