Good Ol' Cinderblocks

I've gotten surprising mileage out of my pair of cinderblocks above. I picked them up at Home Depot along with some rubber padding (sold as "anti-fatigue floor mat", or something like that). Nothing high-tech, I just cut the pad to fit and wrapped lots of duct tape around it to affix it. Each is 6" high when laid flat. Uses so far:

• Depth plyometric pushups.
• Standing on one to make the Standing Jackknife on rings more challenging.
• Stacking them and then anchoring my feet in the lower holes during Russian Twists.
• Stacking them and doing step-ups onto them.
• Standing on them to use my wrist roller properly (scroll to near the bottom of the article).

The padding is a mixed bag. The downside is that it makes the blocks unstable when you stand them on the side or on end. Then again, they've saved me from at least one nasty scrape so far when I didn't quite make it back up onto the blocks during my last plyo depth pushup of the day.

Two also isn't quite tall enough for the step-ups. I'll probably buy two more and leave them unpadded. The rough surfaces should keep the blocks from sliding in relation to each other, and I could do a variety of configurations with a padded block always on top.