PHOTO | ASHLEY MAHONEY

Filling sports drink bottles with coins and rocks converts them into homemade dumbbells.

A plastic bottle is much more during a pandemic.

One second it’s filled with a sports drink. The next it’s rinsed, dried, filled with coins and pebbles to go on a scale. Weight: 5.8 pounds. More pebbles are stuffed inside and back on the scale. Six pounds. The bottle now has a second life a homemade dumbbell.

Gyms have been closed for weeks. If your apartment complex has one, or a local park has equipment like First Ward Park or Marion Diehl Community Park, they are closed too. Maybe you are lucky enough to have a home gym or at least a few pieces of equipment. Even if you don’t, body weight exercises still get the job done.

Streaming fitness classes online and running outside are fine, but one thing was missing — weights. Targeting triceps and quadriceps came naturally with push-ups and tricep-dips, as well as lunges and squats, but how do you address your biceps when the bicep curl is basically the only option for working that muscle? Imagine using jugs of laundry detergent. It feels as funny as it sounds. To get proper form for a basic curl, let alone a hammer curl, jugs just won’t cut it.

For a month, I checked various stores for any dumbbells in stock. No such luck. One retailer said to check back in July. As a certified yoga sculpt instructor and former collegiate athlete, the issue was never how to work the muscle, but what to use during a pandemic when everyone else has already scooped up weights?

I reached out to friends in the fitness community who sent links and suggested using resistance bands. My sister-in-law suggested filling water bottles with rice. My boyfriend came up with the winning idea of coin-filled bottles.

A 16-ounce bottle filled with pennies weighed roughly 4.4 pounds. We decided on a bottle with a wider opening to fit quarters, which allows for more weight. Using two 28-ounce and 36-ounce bottles allowed us to create a set of 6-pound and 8-pound weights. They are not perfect, and goodness knows we miss the real thing, but after three weeks of bicep atrophy, anything will do at this point.

It is amazing how easy it is to take things for granted like having access to weights, and the joy that came with a basic bicep curl this morning. Stay fit, Charlotte. Stay safe. Stay home.  
Ashley Mahoney is a multimedia journalist at The Post.

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