Body Bar Transcript
LISA: Hey there! My name is Lisa Belcastro and I'm so excited to share with you some inexpensive ways to make sports more accessible to athletes with disabilities. For over a decade I have been working in the disability sport community as an adapted physical education teacher, volunteer, and advocate. Like many who run disability sport programs funding is often limited. Even on a shoestring budget we must find creative ways to accommodate the needs of every athlete in our program. No one deserves to be left on the sidelines and we're here to make sure that never happens.

Today, we will be building a PVC body bar and PVC hand weights. Additionally, we'll be looking at ways to adapt those pieces of equipment to assist athletes who need grip adaptations. The idea of building a PVC body bar came to me when I realized how expensive they were to purchase from a store. While the price far exceeded my budget, I still wanted to utilize body bars with my athletes. The resistance training equipment that we are going to build today is very inexpensive and most importantly it will ensure all of your athletes can participate. Over the years I've found that I really enjoy working with PVC. PVC is incredibly durable, easy to work with, and best of all it's really inexpensive. One of the benefits of building a body bar out of PVC is that it's completely customizable to your needs. To give the PVC pipe weight it must be filled with sand. You can customize the weight of the bar by adjusting the diameter and the length of the PVC pipe.

To build the body bar here are the materials that you'll need: PVC, PVC end caps, and sand. You will also need a couple of tools. A saw, permanent marker, measuring tape, PVC primer, and PVC cement. When I built my first piece of equipment I'd never even picked up a saw. You might be a master builder or maybe you've never picked up a tool in your life. Regardless of your comfort level or experience I want to assure you there's nothing to be intimidated by.

Building with PVC is as easy as one, two, three. Step one: cut the PVC into the lengths you need. Step two: connect the PVC using the proper fittings. And finally step three: cement the pieces into place.

Grab your saw and let's start by cutting our PVC into the lengths we need. Start by measuring five feet of your PVC. Mark it and with your saw cut straight down from where you made your mark.

So, for the body bar it's very easy. You're going to start off with one of your end caps. You're going to secure it to the end just like that. Flip it over. Take your second end cap and secure it on, just like that. You're done! If you're happy with how everything looks and it fits together snugly, you're ready for the next step.

Now that we're happy with how it looks, we're going to cement just one of the end caps into place. It's important that you only cement one end cap because for our next step we're going to be filling the pipe with sand. Now we're going to cement our end cap into place it gets a little bit messy so I put down a piece of cardboard. Let's get to it.

First, we need our primer. We're going to pop off this end cap. We're going to prime all the way around a piece of PVC and we're also going to prime the inside of our end cap.

Next, we're going to grab our cement and we're going to do the same exact thing. Put some cement around that PVC and also on the inside of that end cap. Join them together and hold. Give them a second to dry.

Next, we're going to add sand to our body bar. This is going to give it weight. We're going to start off by pulling off the end cap that wasn't cemented yet. Then we're gonna need a piece of paper that we're gonna roll into a cone and use as a funnel to get our sand into the body bar. Put it in just like that. We have our sand right here we're just going to slowly pour it in. We'll do that until our body bar is at the desired weight.

The last step is we're going to cement this final end cap into place.

This store-bought body bar costs 50 dollars or more to buy. This DIY body bar costs just seven dollars to make. The benefit of it is it's also adaptable to your athletes that might need help with grip. Let me show you how it works.

So, for students who might struggle with the thick diameter of the body bar, the gear ties can be used to make that diameter smaller. It's easier to hold in their hand. This body bar is also easily adaptable. You can change the length of the bar and also make it heavier by adding more sand.

I told you that was going to be easy! In just a few simple steps we've created a piece of equipment that is durable, customizable, and adaptable to your athlete's unique needs. With all the benefits this body bar brings it can be built for just seven dollars.

Be sure to tag us on social media with your builds. Links to our social media accounts are available in the description. I'd like to thank the U.S. Department of State especially the Sports Diplomacy Division and the University of Tennessee Center for Sport, Peace, and Society. 

We hope this project design serves you and your athletes well. Thanks for watching.