Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Keg Jeg - Leeds and Glasgow


Our recent tour brought us to Leeds in the UK to play at the Brudenell Social Club. Leeds, while not the first city we ever played in England (Liverpool has that honour. RIP Quiggins), it served as our 'home base' for years as we would frequent the UK on various tours. Our good friend Jase lived in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of Leeds in a sliver of a house in an amazing neighbourhood of terraced houses which looked straight out of any grainy ancient dismal footage of an English slum somewhere in the mid century. Charming of course. Since then, Jase has moved away, and we don't crash on floors so much anymore, but our tour had us playing right around the corner from our first real home in England at the Brudenell.

The sky was gray, the air was cold, the run up to the show was boring, and i'd just eaten a bunch of junk food and had a pint of good cask ale. Feeling guilty about being a lazy lard lad, I stepped outside for some air when I spotted piles and piles of empty kegs behind the venue. Empty kegs are not so heavy, but they have a good weight, and they are bulky to handle. They have places built into them for carrying/lifting and after picking one up, I immediately thought they would be a perfect surrogate for a kettle bell.

Borrowing from my typical kettlebell routine and parts of Charles Bronson's "Solitary Fitness" I devised a workout with the empty keg.

3 sets of 8 "Dynamic Tension" deltoid/chest/stomach exercise. Standing up straight, I held the keg length ways (horizontally) out in front of my chest. Held it there for a few seconds, and slowly lowered it down to my waist. Then back up for another hold and repeat. Did one variation of this, and that was to bring the whole keg from my waist all the way above my head.

3 sets of 8 Military Chest press. Holding the keg vertically by it's two handles, I flipped it so the bulk ofthe empty keg was above me. Standing, and starting at the chest, I pressed upward with both hands until my arms were fully extended, then back down to a "clean" position.

3 sets of 8 Squats. Horizontally again, and with the keg above my head, arms fully extended, i did some squats. Wearing jeans was a bad idea, though. Even in cold weather.

3 sets of 8 rows. Leaning over my legs, bent slightly at the knee, almost like a semi deadlift, I did some rows with both hands, and the keg horizontal.

The next night in Glasgow, there were more kegs, and a big indoor space to do the exercises in. My usual workout buddy is Ben aka Young Guv. He joined in.

We did as above with the following additions:

Tricep extensions
Farmers Walk holding two kegs
Alternating Bicep curls
and push ups balanced between two kegs

Anyways -- if you are on tour and in a band, you are probably playing at a place that serves alcohol, lots of which is draft beer. Go out back, find the empty kegs, and get busy before your set.




Ledges and Blocks in France



Spring and summer touring usually means better opportunity to improvise outdoors. Recently we played in Rouen, France. It's about one hour outside of Paris -- it felt a bit like being on the set of Alphaville: Tall modernist buildings and tower blocks mixed with only a shadow of the charm of classical looking French architecture. Stained concrete, and a working port. Rouen is on the Seine river, and the venue was inside a giant port building, beside two huge loading cranes. A short walk down the embankment and I was in an empty stretch between a warehouse and a barge, out of most peoples views and among what looked like abandoned or closed market stalls. I found a ledge and cement block and started making up a routine.


This was about knee-height on me (despite the shitty perspective), and blocks exactly like this lined the entire building. I started by doing box jumps - 3 sets of 10. I then moved on and put my hands in the middle of the block and did some awkward leaning pushups - 2 sets of 20. The raw peddles and stones in that old block were tearing my hands up a bit, so I moved over to the smoother concrete ledge to the right, and did some dips. Dips are a very easy exercise to improvise just about anywhere you can hang on to. Then, I put my feet on the block, and did some decline push ups. 1 set of 15.

To my right was this giant sandstone (?) block which was being used to hold down one of the empty market stalls. I put my feet on the block against the building, and my hands on the 160KG block, and did some more dips, this time messing around with lifting my legs and holding them out to see if that created any extra balance/resistance/whatever.

I then returned to my trusty original block, did 20 more box jumps and called it a day as a group of drunken French yahoos (probably coming to the show) got out of their Citroen parked on the embankment and started stumbling toward my once serene workout spot. Thanks Rouen, that was easy enough.