Weight vest

[FredMnkyDad10]

At work they finally opened up the small gym back up. For the last month I been doing pretty good in my workouts. Doing two a day. 30-40 min during lunch and another 45-hour after work. Doing a mix of weights, running stairs and treadmill. Also mixing it between heavy weights, low reps one week to light weights, high reps the next.

I was thinking at home I can do some additional light workout while watching TV and stretching.

I am thInking of getting a weight vest. Either fix weight or adjustment one. Nothing crazy maybe 20-40 lbs that will add some when doing squats, pushups and jumping lunges.

Anyone have experience with weight vest. Any pros and cons you can share.

[pintbuster]

Start out with a book bag that you can cinch down the shoulder straps and tape the load tight, see how it feels with some weight in it.
The weight vests are more for running and dynamic movement stuff, or looking cool.
The tactical vests have an elastic cummerbund that keeps the plates tight, the cheapo ones just use a strap.
The strap sucks ass, you have to hook your thumbs under it when you run or the plates banging against you mess up your breathing.
Condor and Blackhawk make an adjustable molle LBE vest that you could put weight pouches on, that would help spread the load better.
Surplus LBE with adjustable sides that you can run shock cord through and sandbag the pouches is where I would start, after the book bag gives you an idea.

[Quickling]

Most fitness stores will have normal weighted vests with individual pouches (front and back) that you can add/subtract weighted sandbags to. I used one for a long time and it worked well. I did feel that the sandbags were a little too thick when doing pushups. For the vest I had, I believe each sandbag was 2lbs and there were 10 pouches on the front and 10 on the back, so you could really customize the weight you wanted.

I have/currently use non-ballistic plates in a tactical vest. This set-up is less customizable as the plates tend to be more expensive so its not like I have 4 or 5 sets laying around to gradually increase the weight. The tac-vest setup can either be more comfortable or less so, depending on the vest and the plates. A cheap vest may let the plates bounce too much, or in my case the curve of my multi-curve plates is too aggressive and causes hot spots on my sternum.

However, I do favor the tac-vest setup because I use a plate carrier for part of my job and numerous tactical athlete shooting events are incorporating plate carriers with a predefined weight minimum. So I get more mileage out of training with a weighted plate carrier.

[FredMnkyDad10]

Thanks guys for the input. I will look around for options. Yeah in the past I have had some stuff that use sand. Sooner or later they start to lose the sand. Think plates or metal bars will be better.

[coyote]

I got a CAP 20 lb weighted vest off of Amazon 2 years ago.

I throw it on in the morning when I walk my dog to get extra work from that activity. I also use it for heavy sets of pull ups.

When I'm particularly ambitious I'll wear it for 4 hours at work.

A 20 lb fixed weight vest is probably plenty for most guys. I can do 12-15 body weight chin ups per set. That falls to 4 or 5 with the extra 20 lbs.