C.J. Murphy ("Murph") and I have been friends for over a decade and change. There are a lot of blowhards in the fitness world and I will read or listen to most, but I subscribe to very few.

Murph always includes me in his training logs and tomfoolery which is a source of much of my laughter. What he did with his "Old Man Conjugate" program was show an exercise that I have done, but taken out of the program for no apparent reason.

He does what I call, "Windchime" squats. The setup is something out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab. But in a nutshell, you take a bar and start adding weight suspended below the bar via bands. This allows for those bad boys to shift and shimmy causing a wonderful "torque" in the spinal stabilizers. (I hate calling it the core, as the only core I know is spelled differently).

Once you get your feet planted, the goal is to do the set with this dangling weight shifting and swaying trying to plant you face first onto the ground, or backside stapled to the box.

How much weight did we start with? We played with that up to our working weight which was determined by "ALMOST SMASHING" you.

The actual setup was an SSB Yoke Bar (Murph uses a Hurricane bar, I think) Then I put strong bands from the pegs UP onto the bar. Then working our way up in weight to make the off-the-box a bit of a struggle but NOT impossible.

NEXT, we started adding Kettlebells with medium to mini bands. Whatever would hold the weight aloft and articulate. When the KB's got cumbersome, we dangled plates in the same manner.

Once we found a super challenging weight, we proceeded to do 5 sets of 5 reps. FUN!

Then, because I thought it would be funner, (yes, that's a real word in the book of Harry) we took the bands and the dangling weights OFF and added straight weights to do 5 sets of 10 reps at a ridiculous amount. This proved to be even MORE fun! You may ask, why??? Because after swingin' and sway'n and fighting the weight to stabilize it, the heavier straight weight seemed EASY like Sunday morning, and the PUMP was SICK!

5 sets of Leg Extensions pumping more blood into the quads than seemed necessary and a finish of GHR's, 6x10 made for a complete breakfast of iron!

Give those Murph "Windchime" squats a whirl. You won't be disappointed when you find out if your trunk stabilizers are weak or worth your weight!