If you read rec.sport.disc via Google Groups, which lacks a killfile that you’d get with a dedicated usenet reader, and wish you could see less of Toad, I wrote a little script that hides his posts. You have to use Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. If you are, click (toadless.user.js) to install my script, and it will hide Toad’s posts when you view a thread. Actually, it replaces them with an innocuous little placeholder, like so:
It works, but it’s really just proof-of-concept. A sampling of known issues:
- There’s a brief delay before the posts are hidden as I used jQuery to do the heavy lifting rather than writing the code in pure Greasemonkey JS.
- Toad’s posts still show up on the home page.
- You still see replies to his stuff (arguably a feature rather than a bug)
I’m sure there’s more, and it’s only lightly tested, but I didn’t want to spend more than a few minutes on it. If anybody wants to extend it, enhance it, redistribute it, whatever, feel free.
Also, you can pretty easily update it to hide posts from any user that you don’t want to read anymore.
Usain Bolt lays waste to another world record, this time the 150 meters. Watching the race brings back Olympic déjà vu; total destruction of the field. Here’s the Science of Sport’s take. I wonder if he can score a WR in the 400 too? He’d need to take like 2.5 seconds off his personal best, I think. Michael Johnson thinks he can do it.
P.S. Here’s the super slow-motion replay of his 100m Olympic final again. Even slowed way down his feet spend such a remarkably short amount of time on the ground, and I love watching the clock tick down as he runs past it.
Fantastic Nike commercial featuring a Kobe Bryant puppet heckling a LeBron James puppet over his three championship rings. (via kottke)
Jason Kottke has a good post up on free running, including an impressive demo reel of practitioner Levi Meeuwenberg. Getting up that wall at 1:51?! Unreal.
Inspired Bicycles just vaulted onto my top five Parkour videos list. Having “bicycles” and “Parkour” together doesn’t seem right, but there’s really no better way to explain it. I wouldn’t have imagined some of that stuff was possible. Really great. (via waxy)
The Orbitwheel skates look like a ton of fun. Kinda like a cross between a skateboard and rollerblades. Best of both worlds, almost. Your feet are independent like rollerblades, but you can just step into them without lacing or buckling, like a skateboard. And could they be more portable? Just chuck ‘em in your backpack.
Siggi’s skyr rocks. You couldn’t ask for better ingredients (PDF). It’s not at all like the oversweetened crap every big commercial manufacturer churns out. Sure, I like oversweetened crap, but this is a much better choice.
The Big Picture has shots of the Tough Guy Challenge 2009:
Billed as “the safest most dangerous taste of physical and mental endurance pain in the world”, the Tough Guy Challenge took place yesterday, February 1st, on South Perton Farm, near Wolverhampton, England. Thousands of challengers (men and women) started the endurance race, with hundreds dropping out along the way due to exhaustion or injury – broken bones, dislocations, and over 600 cases of hypothermia. Even the overall winner, James Appleton, was treated briefly for hypothermia.
Did the guy in the Borat suit finish, you think?
Art De Vany has temporarily opened access to his private blog as he migrates to a new platform. Lots of good stuff in there.
The folks over at RingTraining.com have unveiled a nice looking tool to help ease into advance ring strength moves, the Elite Strength Trainer. There’s good info there, and this was in the e-mail announcement:
I just wanted to let everyone know that the Elite Strength Trainer is now available. It’s selling at a $40 discount till January 1st. It’s a new tool that helps train for the cross, maltese and other advanced ring strength exercises. It works by adjusting the leverage placed on your arms in 10 increments. As you get stronger, you simply move up to the next level. It brings the direct, linear progressions available to weightlifters into the world of bodyweight exercise.
A few months ago, I took a prototype to the national team training center. I met with Kevin Mazeika, head coach of the US Olympic Team, and Jordan Jovtchev, 5-time Olympian, and they both offered me some feedback on the design. Within 15 minutes of setting them up in the gym, I had almost a dozen national and Olympic caliber gymnasts from the American and Japanese teams try it out. They had all used equipment in the past that worked on the same principle, but unanimously preferred the design of the Elite Strength Trainer. They liked that it had a lot of adjustment points, it was quick to adjust and easy to set up and comfortable to use. This is actually a tool that is quite important in the training of a lot of top-level gymnasts. For some of them, it is just for conditioning. But they already have short arms, so it’s almost like they’re already using it! For others, it’s the safest way to get back strength after an injury or to develop new strength skills. For the rest of us, it is a great way to safely and effectively incorporate advanced ring strength moves into our training.
Sorry not to let you know about the sale earlier (which will probably be over by the time you read this), but I didn’t get the announcement until 12/30.
Alobravo has a fun collection of videos up, The 6 Sickest Playground Workouts You Can’t Do (no arguments here). I’d seen the Bartendaz one before, but the rest where new to me. The Hannibal video is unreal. The guy does some exercises I’ve never even imagined before. (via SttB)
And here I thought the one-arm chin was a difficult skill… How about one finger? Also, Jim at Beast Skills turns in some great work on the pegboard, including a muscle-up. That guy is a machine. (both via SttB)
A buddy of mine encouraged me to hit up YouTube for some Roberto Carlos clips, and I’m glad I did. First up is the physics-defying free kick against France HQ. It must have been disbelief that kept the goalie pretty much pinned in place. That post should not have been fair game. This top 10 goals compilation is also pretty good (alas, not in high quality). I think the goal at 2:57 is actually more impressive than the free kick, and if the soccer itself isn’t proof of his athleticism, check out the air on his celebratory leap at 0:40.
Who knew you could structure an entire blog around breathing? More helpful for sports (or at least more concise) is Breathe Right and Win. Very useful for me, as I do way too much breath-holding when working out. Related, and unfortunately incurable by Googling alone, I’m also too stupid to count my reps and breathe at the same time, if the reps and the breaths aren’t synchronized one-to-one. (via jeters)
Very cool indoor caving setup, cobbled together with eye-bolts and hinges. Great pulling workout, and that knee-over-the-arm move is clever (makes it look easy, until you consider the grip strength involved). ‹via cr›
I love these little aggregator coincidences: this afternoon The Science of Sport puts up a good piece on swimming’s credibility crisis, and this evening I catch this NewScientist article on a new nanotech fabric that is unwettable (too bad the word “waterproof” is already in play). You can leave it in water for hours and it comes out bone dry.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm giving up one of my sites, and as my other sites are built on top of that site's architecture, I need to move them. I've migrated all the content to the Textpattern CMS. The biancolo.com domain is sticking around, while the leanandhungryfitness.com domain will be folded, with all that content now under biancolo.com, although as a distinct category, so if you want just the fitness stuff without the rest you can continue to do that. The new site is VERY rough around the edges (I'm running TXP with pretty much default everything, including the skin), and I expect to gradually improve it over the coming months. I wanted to get back to posting though, so didn't want to wait until it was done. Please forgive the work in progress!
The RSS feeds are already pointed over, so hopefully that transition should be seamless (although you might get the current batch of articles in your readers again).
Anyway, my personal site is still at biancolo.com and now includes all the fitness stuff, plus anything else that I find interesting. Here's the fitness-only category. Again, RSS feeds are available for both.
Thanks in advance for your patience, I'm sure I have plenty of bumps and warts to smooth out.
Coach Sommer, who you may remember from articles like Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning or Developing the Hanging Leg Lift, has a post up on a very interesting "prehab" exercise, Wall Extensions:
Wall Extensions are a relatively simple movement that can be quite effective in treating what I have occasionally referred to as "Bench Press Syndrome"; or a greatly reduced range of motion throughout the shoulder girdle due to an incorrectly designed exercise program.
Just tried these, there is only one way to describe my performance: I sucked. Which is totally unfair, since I don't bench, and work harder on pullups than pushups. Sigh, stupid computer job. Definitely something to add to my regular stretch breaks.
Also, very exciting, his long-awaited book on gymnastic strength training for the layperson, Building the Gymnastic Body is available for preorder! As you can see from the link, you can also buy it with DVDs and/or rings if you want.
I remember, quite a few years ago now, watching DoG play at Regionals. I still remember Billy Rodriguez exhorting a defender from the sidelines, "where do you want to make him go?"
As one who was (and still is, if I let my mind wander) inclined to play defense by merely chasing my guy around, this was revelatory. "Where do I want to make him go"?! What a concept!
Now, years later, Josh Mullen has put up a post laying out how that works in practical terms: Good Defense Happens BEFORE the Disc Moves. Perhaps not as pithy as "where do you want to make him go", but much more helpful.
