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The Altus Athletic Chin Up Bar, Push Up Bar and Sit Up Bar is a quality home fitness product that offers a little bit more than other bars because it’s adjustable, so you can place it at the top or bottom of your doorway. The ability to change the position of the bar offers you many more exercises you can do in your home with the Altus Athletic Chin Up Bar.

We at Tastefully Driven have installed one ourselves and tested it out. Installation is fairly simple and it worked great for us. This chin up bar offers great exercises to do for your upper body and abdominals. We’ve come up with a list of exercises with muscles worked, instructions, and demonstration in our video.

Chin Up Bar Exercises

Overhand pull ups
Primary Muscles Worked: back and arms
Instructions: With your palms facing forward, grip the bar little more than shoulder width apart. Then pull yourself up till your chin is about above the bar. Come down slowly and repeat.

Underhand pull ups
Primary Muscles Worked: back and arms
Instructions: With your palms facing backwards towards yourself, grip the bar shoulder width apart then pull yourself up. Come down slowly and repeat.

Reverse push ups
Primary Muscles Worked: back
Instructions: Position yourself under the bar and grab hold of the bar. Extend your legs in front then pull yourself up, it should be like you are doing an upside down push up.

Push ups
Primary Muscles Worked: chest and triceps
Instructions: Position yourself over the bar and grip bar. Extend legs back so your back and legs are straight then slowly bring yourself down towards the bar with your chest almost touching the bar. After reaching the down position push yourself back up and repeat.

Dips
Primary Muscles Worked: triceps and shoulders
Instructions: Position yourself above the bar as if you were sitting on it and grip the bar with your palms facing the ground. Hold yourself up and extend your feet forward so your body makes an opened L shape. Bring yourself down by bending at your elbows till your triceps are parallel to the floor. Push yourself up so your arms are fully extended and repeat.

Sit ups
Primary Muscles Worked: abs
Instructions: Place a mat down in front of the bar if you have one. Sit down and place your feet under the bar. Use the bar to hold your feet in place and bend your knees about 90 degrees. Start with your back on the floor or mat and arms by your ears or crossed on your chest (not behind your head). Then bring your head and upper body towards your knees then lay back down slowly and repeat.

Knee Raises
Primary Muscles Worked: abs
Instructions: With an overhand grip, grab the bar and just hang off of it. Now with your legs together bring up both knees towards your chest. Bring your knees down slowly and straighten your legs and repeat.

Leg Raises
Primary Muscles Worked: abs
Instructions: With an overhand grip, grab the bar and just hang off of it. Now with your legs together and extended straight, raise your legs to create a L shape. Bring your legs down slowly and repeat.

Those are just a few of the many exercises that the Altus Athletic Chin Up Bar has to offer. Also included with this home fitness product is an exercise wall chart courtesy of Altus.

Chin Up Bar Exercise Demonstration Video

This chin up bar would be a great addition to your home gym or the start of one with all the exercises it offers. At a reasonable price, it would be hard to find many other home fitness products that the Altus Chin Up Bar has to offer. We’ve used it at Tastefully Driven and we approve of this product. More product information…

As some of you may have noticed, Tastefully Driven was loading very slow for the majority of the last week. Unfortunately a nameserver was down and the company that managed our hosting had an extremely difficult time fixing something that shouldn’t have taken long at all.

A few days ago we made the necessary decision to set up our own dedicated server, which the site is now running off of. We now have a single server for both Tastefully Driven and Detailed Image. Not only does this mean faster load times and less downtime (hopefully none), but it also gives us the control that we previously did not have. A server is a critical part of any web business, and by being in complete control we hope that speed and reliability are never a concern to any of our customers ever again.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. If you have any questions/comments/suggestions/complaints feel free to post a comment below or email me directly at adam [at] tastefullydriven [dot] com.

It’s been a little over six months since the ASUS Eee PC captured the imagination of techies all across the globe. The low price point, ultra-portability, and customizability have made it a consumer favorite since it’s arrival. With a rapidly expanding community begging for more (and competition looming) ASUS hasn’t wasted any time announcing the release of the Eee PC 900. And although the 900 model will undoubtedly be popular with consumers, it’s the Eee PC 701 that retails for $399 that I reviewed recently that is still the best ultra-portable device on the market today.

Despite the low price and portability, many Windows-savvy user like myself are wary about using Linux for the first time. I ultimately decided to take the plunge (mostly out of curiosity) but now find myself hooked on the nuances of Linux and have even installed Ubuntu on my home PC. After tweaking with my Eee for hours on end, I have finally come to a set up that enables me to do almost 100% of the work I do on my Windows dual-core laptop.

For anyone looking to get set up quick and rapidly without a bunch of headaches, here’s what I did (with the help of the very awesome EeeUser tutorials):

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode.   The Eee comes with a special “easy mode” installed.  Easy mode is great if you just want to boot up and check the web and use the software that the Eee PC comes with, but not much more.  Advanced Desktop Mode puts you in a traditional Windows-like environment with a desktop and a start menu and the ability to customize your computer a bit.
2. Change the taskbar clock format.  Unless of course you like a 24 hour clock.
3. Create more screen space in Firefox.  Since web browsing is likely one of the main things you’ll be doing on the EeePC, this is paramount.  Also make sure to get rid of the Status Bar on the bottom by unchecking view -> status bar.
   
4. Add other software repositories.   The EeePC comes with some great software - Skype, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc - but if you want to experience all of the other great Linux software out there the easiest way to do this is to add the list of four Xandros software repositories from that tutorial.  Doing so will allow you to install almost any available Linux software at the click of a button in the Synaptic Package Manager.  In particular, I wanted to install Bluefish for web development and GIMP for image editing.  Both were easy installs once I added these repositories.

Doing those four steps will take less than an hour but will dramatically increase the potential that your Eee PC has to offer (and also familiarize you a bit with Linux).  If this quick guide alone doesn’t satisfy you, the Wiki over on EeeUser has step by step instructions for almost any other task you might want to attempt.

One of the things that always drives me nuts is when people say “I’m too busy to eat heialthy”.   Eating healthy doesn’t take a lot of time, but it does require some creativity from time to time.

Consider this quick Broccoli and Chicken recipe that I made for dinner last night:  less than 2 minutes of prep time, it’s done in under 20 minutes, and there are no dishes to wash.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• A bag of Birdseye Steamfresh microwavable broccoli.
• 1 - 1.5 lb thin flattened chicken breasts
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• Reduced fat shredded cheddar cheese
• Seasonings - salt, pepper, oregeno, garlic, crushed red pepper, and anything else you like.
• Dijon mustard

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  While it’s preheating, make a tray for the chicken out of aluminum foil (two-ply to be safe).  Remove the chicken from it’s packaging and place on the foil pan. Drizzle  1 tbsp of the olive oil over the chicken and season to your liking  with as much of the seasoning as you want (only use a dash of salt though).  Once preheated, place the chicken in the oven and cook for 15 minutes.  With about 7 minutes left, microwave the broccoli per the instructions on the packaging.  After letting it cool, mix in the other tbsp of olive oil.  Once the chicken is fully cooked, cover it in dijon mustard.  Sprinkle the cheese on the broccoli for flavor.  Throw away foil and bag.  You’re done! Serves two.

There are obviously many variations to this recipe, but I prefer to not use the mustard or cheese until the very end in case I want to save some of the food for leftovers and use it in other recipes.  I’m sure it would taste a bit better if you marinated it in mustard or bbq sauce beforehand, but you lose some of the versatility of the recipe by doing so.

In less time than ordering a pizza (and with about the same amount of work) you can make a super healthy dinner for yourself.

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