An Inverse Roman Chair

For personal fitness training the ultimate instrument of torture is the Roman Chair. It has an aptly earned name, as no other piece of apparatus can teach the Roman virtue of stoicism better than a Roman Chair. It is used for doing sit ups and oblique twist sit ups. It is two padded horizontal parallel bars where one is almost directly above the other by a distance of approximately 40 centimetres, with the bottom one being approximately 15 to 20 centimetres above the floor. These two bars are held together by two L shaped pieces of steel where the bottom leg of the L provides the ground stability.

The bottom bar hooks in front of your shins with your feet coming under the bar from behind. The back of your quadriceps muscles rest on the top padded bar with the top padded bar being behind ones knee on the backside of the legs. There is nowhere to rest and nowhere to cheat. It is you against the chair and she is determined to break your spirit and shatter you as a human being. Ultimately surviving the chair involves incredible core strength but even more so mental toughness because unless there is some greater force burning within and driving you, the chair will break you. If you can beat the chair she rewards you with 99th percentile and higher core body strength.

Here is a photo of a sissy version of a Roman chair. Instead of a nice comfortable L shaped pad for the backs of the thighs and calves, the manly man version has a padded off centre steel bar.

Doing any exercise inverted 180 degrees generally requires three times the strength of doing an exercise on the normal gravitational plane. Doing a tricep dip inverted 180 degrees requires three times the relative strength that doing a tricep dip right side up does.

The paddling technique I saw requires a muscle pull that is the 180 degree opposite from the muscle contraction used for my oblique twist sit up. It is time to conjure the nastiest instrument of torture. Off to the drawing board to design a 180 degree inverse Roman Chair. Dr. Jekyll is off to build a more sinister way of torturing Mr. Hyde.