Increase your physical fitness with a hybrid phone case + barbell. Lifting weights has never been easier!

Jun 3, 2024

exercise, incidental exercise, kettle bell, lift weights, phone barbell, phone case barbell, phone kettle bell, TV remote barbell, weights

Background:

“Incidental exercise” is a term that refers to the physical activity that a person gets during their normal daily routine. For example, a person who lives in an apartment that is three flights of stairs up from the street would get the “incidental exercise“ of climbing three flights of stairs.

Proposal:

Let’s bring incidental exercise to a common daily activity: doom-scrolling on a phone! Just combine a barbell and a cell phone holder (Figure 1), and you’ve got the perfect encouragement for casual weight lifting.

Fig. 1: A couple of possible designs for a phone + weight hybrid. Left: barbell. Right: kettle bell. One could also imagine a phone case that was just a SUPER heavy battery (like a car battery) in a regular cell phone case. This might make it difficult to put the phone into a purse or pocket, however.

Ideally, the barbell would keep the phone in the same orientation (facing the user) even when the user lifts the barbell up and down (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: By allowing the phone to freely swing from the “grippers” (red, top), the phone will remain facing the user (more or less) even when the barbell is lifted up and down.

Conclusion:

This system could work with other objects as well; for example, a “TV remote barbell” or “insulated beer can holder (A.K.A. “beer koozie™”) barbell.”

PROS: Increases overall national physical fitness. Could discourage prolonged “doom scrolling” (which has recently been implicated as a cause of poor mental health).

CONS: May result in greatly increased rates of heavy-weight-dropped-on-foot incidents, which could partially offset the increase in overall fitness from lifting weights.

Originally published 2024-06-03.