Hey all…so i am slowly putting together a strongman type of home gym. On saturday im gonna be getting a keg and so my question is, how do i fill it and whats a good starting weight? My thought was in the neighborhood of 200lbs or something like that
You can fill it with water and that will get it to about 130lbs. This is the method that is easiest to adjust.
You can fill with sand and that will add 30-60lbs depending on sand coarseness. You may then add a little more water for another 10 lbs (maybe you can get more, I just get sand everywhere)
Heavier than this, people often go concrete or shot or scrap metal and that can take you to 300lbs and beyond. I don’t like this as concrete is messy, you lose the swooshy feeling when it sets and there’s no removing the concrete.
Scrap metal can be hard to get and painful to fill/ remove and shot is costly.
What I like is small river pebbles, they take about 1/3 of the space of sand. I feel it’s the best balance of cost, feel, ease and noise that there is for heavier weight.
For 200lbs, I’d go the Keg (28lbs), 3 bags of playsand (130lbs) and 2 bags of river pebbles (45lbs) - top with water depending on how anal you are about getting to 200lbs)
Check YouTube for how to get the spear out/open the keg - different kegs have different techniques, so make sure you are using the right method. Use a big milk or juice container (think a gallon) with the bottom cut off as a funnel. Duct tape it to the keg, pour in sand, then pebbles then sand then pebbles then sand.
If the sand is moist this could take a while. You can use the keg spear to push the sand through the funnel to speed the process up.
A rubber end cap with hose clamp is probably the best way to reseal - too hard getting the spear back in, especially with solids in it.
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Stainless steel BB’s or ball bearings work well. Regular steel will rust and not move well after a while and the steel is much easier to be exact with the weight. It also allows more weight to fit overall, I don’t know if that’s a concern or not. It also can be removed depending on what bung the keg has. Water will make things swich around a lot more, but isn’t very heavy and will make problems later with anything beside stainless.
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Thanks very much, that was very helpful