Pilates workout station/tower in your own home

I’ve been practicing Pilates for more than 10 years now, and using the props at home - such as straps, bands, tubes and long springs - has been a challenge. Where do you hook them? I tried inserting a device in the door jamb, but that put me in an awkward place, and gave me only one point of attachment. It was also difficult to adjust on the fly. Where I’ve positioned this wall unit, I have plenty of free space to move my legs, for example.

Then I saw an ‘alternative’ springboard tower on the Balanced Body website. Their $445.oo price was a bit more than I can justify right now, although it’s probably fine for a professional studio. So I built my own.

With this home-built ‘tower’ I can really use the props as they were intended to be used - for under $40 for all the materials, not including the props which I already had.

I simply purchased a 24”x48” interior grade piece of plywood at Home Depot. They have bins of pre-finished wood cut to this size. I wanted the width to be 20” to fit my space, so had the guy cut four inches off the width. I used this spare wood to mount between the wall and the face of the ‘tower’.

Next, after mounting to the wall and into studs for strength - I stained the wood and put in heavy eye bolts for attachment points.

I’m working on figuring out a foot bar to add to the bottom - for hooking your feet for crunches, and a way to easily add a version of the ‘push through’ bar found on studio versions of the ‘tower’.

But now, I can really do many of the tower and reformer spring/strap exercises - standing or laying supine - much more effectively. I can even begin to incorporate the foam roller, ball and disc for ‘unstable surface’ type exercises.

I’m sure this will be great for my skiing this year, but I can see where folks with long term physical challenges might get a great deal of benefit doing physical therapy type exercises related to their rehabilitation.

I’m sure that I’ll be ‘tricking’ this out as I use it and find more ways to enhance it’s functionality. I’ll keep you posted.

Here are some video demo’s of how ‘tower’ exercises work and you’ll be able to see a bit of what can be done with this inexpensive wall unit.

In this next video, you’ll get a good look at some great leg exercises (I may add some ‘handles’ ):

Here are some more: