How fit do lumberjacks get? We don’t exactly know. What we do know is, slamming an axe onto a thick tree trunk over and over will put your muscles through some serious work. That’s the idea behind the ChopFit Chopper, a fitness equipment based on the traditional wood-cutting tool.
Designed for functional training, the equipment allows you to recreate wood chopping motions in place of more conventional exercises, so you can get fit like a mountain man who spent all day chopping up firewood for stashing at your nearby lakeside cabin. To ensure you get a full-body workout, though, they recommend altering the chopping movements by incorporating squats, lunges, and other complex actions, essentially turning it into a viable full-body workout. Does it look cool? Absolutely not, as watching people pretend to chop logs in front of them while performing jumping lunges just look like some type of uncoordinated dancing. Is it effective? From what we can tell, it probably is, since you’re essentially performing compound exercises using the weighted fake axe to provide the resistance.
The ChopFit Chopper is, basically, an axe-shaped weight with a solid metal head and a reinforced plastic handle, so it’s heavy enough to provide resistance while ergonomic enough to enable to a secure grip. Because all the weight is concentrated on the head, you can alter the resistance, depending on where you grip the handle. According to the outfit, gripping it just below the head lowers the resistance to six pounds while holding it by the tip gives you 16 pounds to work with. In case you’re too much of a hulk to find a mere 16 pounds satisfying, you can put one Chopper in each hand to double the resistance.
It measures 20.25 inches long, with the head measuring 6.75 inches wide, so this is small enough to fit in most people’s backpacks (no need for an axe pouch), making it easy to bring to the park, take to the gym, or even stash in your luggage for getting your workout on the road. Despite providing up to 16 pounds of resistance, the whole thing actually weighs just four pounds, so it won’t weigh down your bag, either, when you do take it along.
The ChopFit Chopper comes with a wrist strap that you can use to keep it in your grip, similar to how people tie straps on their wrists whenever they’re doing deadlifts. From what we can tell, the straps are merely there to keep the darn thing from slipping and flying off (to avoid accidents), so you can opt not to use it if you’re working out in a relatively empty room anyway.
A downloadable app provides a visual guide to all the exercises and details a number of workouts that you can do using the equipment. You can also read a pretty comprehensive guide from the website and, from what we can tell, using it is easy enough that you can do a workout right at first use.
The ChopFit Chopper is available now, priced at $139.