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.