Using Euro coins as weights (2004)

I'm using euro cents as weights in my weighted vest.

When I started doing this I didn't want to afford dedicated weights as it seemed like a waste of money, but I had many cents saved up from my childhood, which I started to use instead.

I have roughly 15kg in euro cents in my vest and I'm regularly talking walks with it.

To get one kilo you need 435 cents and it turns out that in Germany you can also "buy" coins "for free" at the "Bundesbank", that is, you can exchange actual money for weights without any fees. You give 4 euros and 35 cents and you get a kilo. Once you need the money back, you can also sell those coins back to them for free.

What's a weighted vest? Something for diving?

It's a way to increase the risk of injury to your knees and ankles and strain your back and shoulders while taking walks, and in general make walking more unpleasant.

Some people think it's an exercise 'life hack'.

Used in running to add extra resistance.

I've used them on and off in the past; useful in limited circumstances.

It's a vest that you can fill with stuff to increase the intensity of a workout.

There was a time in my life when my legs started hurting and shaking from muscle atrophy because I was programming too much and moving too little.

I was looking for a way to fix that issue and I didn't want to waste time going to a gym, so I started talking walks with a weighted vest. Walking is nice because you can think while walking and with a weighted vest you don't have to walk for hours for it to have a useful effect on your body.

The decathlon weight 500g pakets of sand)jacket is about €20. How easy is it to make your jacket 10kg? Are the coins easily removable? Do you have straps to keep the weight 'tight'?

Is it worse than carrying a backpack?

I went 0' 5' 10' 15, 20kg over 3 years after an embolism. N=1 (rather like yourself: or you spoke to/ read about people that don't quite understand 'pacing'. Do you/ them struggle with 1 bag of shopping? I make three or more light(er)trips.

Could you explain more? I do not understand how you can buy coins for free by paying coins for “weights” (what are these weights? What are they made from?). Also, what is the use for this? To check of your coins are real? Calibrate your coin scale?

It's very easy. I'm using the cheapest weighted vest that I could find and it came with blue bags that I've just filled with coins. You don't really need straps to make the weights tight because the money just kind of spreads inside of the bag and doesn't move at all once it's there.

It's on my todo list to 3d print some containers to replace the bags with actual "money rolls" so that I can remove them more easily.

You give bills and get pennies.

The coins are weights, the actual money is paper or electronic money.

The risk of injury while walking in a weighted vest is not much higher than walking normally. A very high weight of vest is probably ill advised, but walking on a very flat/regular surface for long periods is far more damaging than walking with a little extra weight. Weighted bracelets/limb weights are dangerous though, and shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing and take care not to move too quickly and put excess strain on joints.

How much weight on a weighted arm band is considered dangerous? I'm considering 500 gram bands for my arms, that's just about twice the weight of a cellular phone today.

Maybe you've already considered and decided paper wouldn't work, or maybe you want the fun of working with a 3D printer, but my initial thought:

Would it not be simple to create rolls of coins by simply wrapping a sheet of paper round a stack of them, once or twice around, a little bit of sellotape to hold the paper in place, including folding it over at both ends and taping there too? I'd imagine an A4 sheet would be more than enough for each stack of coins, cutting off what isn't needed, and since you wouldn't care about them being beautiful you wouldn't even need fresh paper and could just use paper that would otherwise go into recycling/trash (letters received, junk mail, etc.)

edit: I did a quick search which both confirmed people have made coin rolls using simple paper, and also that it's highly likely banks will offer pre-made paper holders for the various coin sizes that you can just ask for and get for free (with the bank assuming you'll be bringing them back full of coins - you could either ask for as many as you need, or just one per size and use it as a template for making more from plain paper like this guy does: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvsOkp_WPxY )

That's a very good point. I wonder about the durability of a paper based solution, but 3d printed rolls might also be suboptimal in that regard. This needs some experimentation.

If you're injuring yourself by walking around with a few extra kilos then you are so, so hilariously out of shape that any advice you can give is competely disregardable.

I'd imagine that if paper alone wasn't strong enough for long term use, using sellotape to cover the entire roll such that the whole thing has a layer of tape on top of the layer of paper would make them pretty durable and add very little time and cost to it. (But I've not done anything like this, so my guessing could be bullshit - happy experimenting!)

How do you pay 35 cent in paper is still a mystery. But OP just means you can exchange/buy coins (and use them as weights)?

I guess OP means you don't need to buy above or sell below its value when "buying" or "selling" a metric shitton of small coins (like you would for gold for instance).

15 kilograms sounds excessive though, I bet the bank clerks hate that trick ;)

You should be just as mystified about the 4€ component.

For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration. So if you did so little exercise that you get muscle atrophy, a weighted vest isn't going to do much for you.

I'd honestly just use some ziplock bags and call it a day.

> For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration

For what goal? Increasing strength? I have my doubts.

I have to ask, how do you not sound like ~6500 coins jingling together as you walk? I notice when I have like 10 coins in a backpack. Do you wrap bundles of coins in cellophane or something?

Some people have no, zero, none understanding of sensible limits. "If X is good then more X must be better" applied to one or more aspects of their life. Hence protein in their diet, vitamin supplements, weight in a vest, and of course, infamously, having a presence on social media.

I remember back when I used physical coins, banks used to wrap them in paper rolls with known quantities in them. So you could get a $10 roll of ten $1 coins or whatever.

You can also go to the beach and get unlimited amounts of weight for free too. That's what's most budget weights are made of

Anyone who has actually done both low-intensity exercise, e.g. walking, and high-intensity, e.g. heavy compound lifts, will tell you that statement needs a lot of additional caveats.

Ehh, I've been doing fitness boxing and knockout home fitness (Nintendo switch) with 1.5 kg wrist/hand weights for ages now, no issues to speak off. I think he's taking about the 2-5kg weights, these are way more dangerous then you'd expect from wearing them. (I did that for a while, after getting slightly In shape - at least until I read up on it)

Strong recommendation for Nintendo switch for baseline fitness btw, these games are great for a 1-2 day 20 minutes workout/week for unfit office workers. Way better experience then the equivalent VR games.

It depends on what you're doing, but 500g shouldn't be dangerous as long as you wear the weights tightly bound so they don't bounce or slide. What you want to watch out for are anything that overextends or puts pressure on the joints - those movements can cause damage even unweighted and having weights just makes the danger worse.

> saved up from my childhood

Isn't Euro just from 2002? That surely is not that long time ago!

I don't mean to argue that it's just gimmick and any sane person would just use sand, but to be completely fair, sand is much less dense than steel, so if the coins pack well it does make a better weight.

I do also suspect that there must be some product that must be more cost effective than coins but denser than sand, but cannot think of it right away. I mean, scrap steel is a couple of cents per kg.

It's 22 years ago, roughly

Banks usually stock pre-counted rolls of coins, and it's not much hassle to count out several of those. Though I guess 15 kg is probably going to be several dozen.

> you can also "buy" coins "for free"

Free till you count inflation and opportunity cost. (What you could gian as interest with some other investment)

But yeah, probably still cheaper than some product from a store.

It's a lot easier to contain coins vs sand, though.

I'd be worried about blisters/rashes/rubbing if the weights slide around. I use an exercise-bike like device and realised I was getting a blister on my hands from the constant motion of the grip.

Just FYI this is illegal in many areas.

Olympic weight plates for barbells. They're widely used, so competition has brought the cost down, and they're easily available in useful increments. I currently see 4x 10lbs for <$50 on Amazon. That works out to 2,53 Euro per kg. So cheaper than euro cents. They may not have the exact shape you need.

The scrap steel probably didn't cost cents per kg when it was sold for its original purpose. You are paying for a useful shape.

A professional equivalent of weighted vests are ballistic plate carriers. Real ballistic plates can be fragile and expensive, so options for exercising in (or milsim games in airsoft etc.) include expired (and failed to re-certify) real ballistic plates, made for purpose training plates... or plate shaped sandbags!

They're probably referring to some contrived fitness study on hypertrophy.

Thank you.

You’re gonna need to provide a source to that. For caloric burning? Sure, I’d agree. For cardiovascular health? Eh, the answer lies in the middle. For strength and muscle building? No, quite the opposite really. At some point the intensity of an exercise is so low it provides no meaningful muscle stimulus.

FYI going to the gym is hardly a waste of time. You feel refreshed and your body will thank you after a while.

Excuse the nerdy nitpick, I get the point but technically as far as "actual" money goes that's the coins. Electronic entries in bank ledgers are not legal tender.

One can of course go further and question if banknotes and coins should be called actually money. Today the nominal value is completely disconnected from what the metal is really worth, it's not like with gold coins back in the day. And once collective belief in the value is lost fiat money quickly becomes worthless. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are recent examples.

Have to correct your nitpick. What you're talking about is currency not money. Not being legal tender doesn't mean it's not money. The majority of money sits as electronic entries in each country's central bank. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency.asp#:~:text=Th....

> That works out to 2,53 Euro per kg. So cheaper than euro cents.

The cents are free though, cause they're legal tender — just deposit them instead of having to sell 2nd hand

What are the equivalent VR games? Just curious.

I don't play too much VR these days, but enjoyed Beat Saber for "stationary movement", Gorn for beating up stuff and the VR ports of the original Serious Sam games for "run and shoot like a maniac".

The cheapest plates can be higher variance than you might expect. I’ve seen reports of 45s that are 10% light.

Working out without the commute saves time.

True. I'm talking about private bank books, the kind of "electronic money" regular people use, which I assume is what the comment above referred to. Since only financial institutions have access to central bank accounts.

Ah that is almost certainly it, it's been so long since I've gotten a roll of quarters from a bank that I forgot that is an option. Thanks!

Sometimes sand + water is used for ballast. Depends on your use case, if your heavy thing is moving around then the sloshing won't be ideal, but if it's just sitting somewhere static then it can work.

eg; weighing down the corners of a beach tent, pegs won't grip in the sand so instead tie plastic bags onto the guy ropes and fill them with sand and water.

Your body weight varies by more than that during the course of a normal day. Carrying 1kg should not increase any sort of risk of injury unless you exceptionally weak (as in, have trouble walking at all).

For the same reason, you probably won't see much benefit from such light weight over just walking a little faster or a little further.

The problem is that when you put weight on your limbs you are creating levers and inertia which get transferred to joints in ways those joints are not good at dealing with.

How to you carry groceries (or, basically, function at all) if you can't handle a 500g weight attached to your arm?

One usually doesn't do much with their arms while carrying groceries, they just hang at the side or move the bag around when putting it down or picking it up. When performing other movements, especially when they are fast or forceful, the extra weight can add momentum that is potentially hazardous, especially if it bounces or moves around (makes it very hard to compensate for reflexively). If present during repetitive tasks, extra weight can increase the risk of repetitive stress injuries occurring.

It's illegal to fill a bucket with sand?!

You can keep both in a series of ziploc bags for convenience.

And remove it from the beach, yes.

Especially if you hit eBay or similar, you can get it for cheap

What is a waste of time is going in and out of the gym.

I avoided injury when backpacking through the Himalayas by tying helium balloons to by backpack for neutral buoyancy. Had to make slight adjustments as altitude changed, but it all worked out. I had my porter carry the helium tanks.

For me, it would be rather long trip and generally too expensive. I would had to steal it from kids playground. Which is rather low thing to do.

Sand is not an infinite resource. It's crucial for both protection (if you remove all the sand from the beach, there will be nothing to cushion the waves and currents and etc. and it will result in more erosion, which can be deadly for any constructions nearby) and construction.

As such, it's completely normal that you can't just take sand or stones from many beaches. The very famous Étretat town in France with its accompanying beach and rocks, have a very strict "don't take souvenirs from the beach because you'd be actively destroying it" policy.

The OP said their legs were shaking just standing due to lack of exercise. So, they were literally that hilariously out of shape.

Sometimes someone has paid money to place the sand at the beach because it wasn't a sand beach from the start. So no, you can't go fill your sacks with sand anywhere you like, not even in Sweden were we can pick berries in the forest for free. Stones, trees and sand is not allowed without permission.

These can be pretty physically challenging too! my issue with arcade style games for fitness is that they stop whenever you fuck up. That's not really great when your goal is to get moving for ~20 minutes or so.

The one's I've currently got installed on my quest 3 are

Supernatural Fitness (I need a VPN to play because they're geolocking it to USA). I find the way they try to "get personal" with the trainer super awkward.

FitXR (only one with decent passthrough gameplay) I dislike how most exercises are centered around "gyms", whenever you enter a session, there are others around you doing the same exercise as you and you get a scoreboard. It really doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. I also don't believe that I almost always get first or second place - I'm pretty sure this is showing you numbers to make you feel good about yourself.

XR workout It's the most "indie" of these and with the highest difficulty ceiling. It's biggest downfall is that it doesn't really give you a generated "I wanna exercise for 20 minutes" button. At least I couldn't find it.

There are also others, but I don't have them installed. I.e. Les milles etc

But as I said before: purely from a workout perspective, the Nintendo games work way better in my experience.

It's just so awkward in VR compared to Knockout Home Fitness, worse signalling what you need to do next - you're wearing a headset while getting sweaty - no center stage youre watching, instead youre just trying to guess which movement you're supposed to do while things randomly float around.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctLdgFf5GCQ

No, to walk away from the beach still holding that full bucket.

Round coins are also less coarse and rough

In the same way that consuming food and drink is? Or carrying a backpack of things you need, not just dead weight?

Maybe I misundertand - how much weight are we talking about here?

Assuming you live in a sane country. One of the few complaints I have with Dutch society being so "streamlined". Cash is seen as a nusciance here.

You would be surprised how many things its illegal to take from beaches or country (sand, corals, some shells, of course anything old enough etc)

haha yeah nah. This needs a lot more additional context and caveats.

If I'm working on increasing my deadlift's 1rm, doesn't matter if I practice deadlifting for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but never go above 10% of my current 1rm

I do not know if that is satirical, specially the last sentence?

God must have created America, humans wouldn’t have been capable of trekking with such weight.