Why there is
a block.

I spent my career standing post.

That is most of the job. You are somewhere you did not choose, for longer than anyone told you, and you have to be ready at the end of it. A motorcade route. A helicopter landing zone. A stretch of beach. The work is long stretches of nothing followed by the part you trained for, and there is no warning between them.

You cannot be out of shape doing that. But you also cannot take a gym with you. I trained in hotel rooms. Parking garages. The back of vehicles. Whatever floor was available, with whatever was on it. Twenty-three years of that — harbors, flight lines, foreign runways, surf. The assignment changed every week, and the one constant was that whatever I needed to train with, I was going to have to find on site.

For years the best training tool I ever found was not equipment at all — it was a cinder block on a job site. Heavy, awkward, handles in all the wrong places. You could press it, carry it, row it, step on it, throw it. It asked for nothing and it never broke.

The problem with a cinder block is obvious the first time you drop one. It shatters. It tears your hands up. It is a different weight every time you find one. And you cannot put it in a car and take it home.

So I built the one I actually wanted. Steel, so it survives a concrete floor. Handles cut into both sides, so the grip is the same every rep. The footprint of a cinder block, because that shape already works — it stacks, it sits flat, it goes under a bench. And adjustable, so the same object is a warm-up and a full-body session.

The first ones were made in my garage. They still are made here, in the United States — cut on our own table, welded by hand, painted, boxed. My family runs this. When you call, you are talking to us.

I am not going to tell you this replaces a gym if you have a gym and you love it. Go. What I will tell you is that most people do not go, and the reason is almost never willpower. It is that the equipment is somewhere else. One block removes that excuse, and it takes up the space of one block.

That is the whole idea. It is the same thing I was doing on post for years, with a better object.

Noel Abboud
Founder, EmberBox