Via the RT forum comes an impressive resource, Performance Workouts:

Enjoy what promises to be one of the most extensive and thorough exercise databases available. These guides assure that you get the most from each and every workout. Choose from still images with detailed descriptions, or see the exercise in action with video clips available in two different formats (Windows Media Player or QuickTime).

Nice!

They banned playing Tag? They banned TAG?!!. And not just Tag:

Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Liable? I'd be tempted to sue the school for preventing my kids from running around. You want to ban something from the school? Ban soda. Ban trans fat. But running? Outrageous.

UPDATE: The LA Times is running a good opinion piece on this.

Just a couple videos for you: first up, a teammate sent me this pole vault compilation. What a great event. I love the slow motion footage of the moment when you push and arc over the bar and release the pole. Balletic. Second, via the RT forum, comes this "USOEC Intense Greco Roman Training Highlight Video". Explosive power on display.

Y'know how sometimes you go to hit the Home key and you accidentally catch the Insert key too, but you don't realize it until you've typed over something, because suddenly you are in "overstrike" mode rather than "insert" mode? I wanted to kill the Insert key, and immediately thought of my favorite utility, AutoHotKey (upon which I built that Wikipedia AutoCorrect thing). But instead of just killing the Insert key, I thought perhaps I could make it do something useful. So I took the "append" script from here and just changed it to fire whenever I hit Insert, like so:

Insert::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
clipboard = %bak%`r`n%clipboard%
return

This has two effects:

1. Hitting Insert no longer puts me in "overstrike" mode.
2. If I have text selected, it is appended to the clipboard (unlike CTRL+C, which replaces whatever is on the clipboard with your new selection).

UPDATE: I added another script, this one for CTRL-Insert. As a web programmer, I'm sometimes faced with a specific repetitive task of going through text and putting stuff around little chunks of text. In this case, I had a bunch of questions on a page that needed to be emphasized, so I needed to wrap them in STRONG tags. Each question was different, so I couldn't do a find/replace with regular expressions. What I wanted was to select the question, hit CTRL-Insert, and have it automatically put the tags around whatever I had selected. My solution is kinda convoluted, and nobody will care about it but me, but here goes anyway. First, the script:

^Insert::
bak = %clipboard%
Send, ^c
StringReplace, clipboard, bak, @@, %clipboard%
Send, ^v
clipboard = %bak%
return

Then, once you have it installed, the steps:

1. First, type out your "template". You just need to put @@ wherever you want the selected text to be inserted. For my example, the template looks like this:

   <STRONG> @@ <STRONG>

2. Next, select your template text and copy it to the clipboard.
3. You're all set. Select a question (or whatever you want between STRONG tags) and hit CTRL-Insert. Continue selecting and CTRL-Inserting as needed. So in my example, if you select "my dog has fleas" and CTRL-Insert it, it is instantly replaced with

   <STRONG> my dog has fleas <STRONG>

Your IDE might do something like this already, but I like that AHK makes this functionality available in any application. And I can bring it along on my USB key, making me more at home on foreign machines.

On Crossfit today was a link to a "Cliff Kipping" video by Jon Gilson. I liked his portable pull-up bar setup, and didn't have to look very far to discover he sells them under the name The Again Faster Bar (after his site). If you live in the Boston Metro area you can pick up the complete set, which comes with lashing straps and chains for $150, or you can have just the bar and straps delivered anywhere in the US for $60 + $15 FedEx shipping. Here's a related thread. Tempting as an option for my garage, so I don't have to move the rings around, and could just leave it slung over the rafters, but I can probably jury-rig something if portability is not a priority. Still seems like a nice piece of equipment though.

A muscle-up tutorial on YouTube. I'd like to notch that skill, but it gives me elbow pain. I expect to get it eventually, though. « via RT »

Scott over at Straight to the Bar has been posting excellent stuff. The latest thing to catch my eye was his linkage to a great kettlebell certification video. The impressive stuff starts around 2:45 and keeps getting more impressive as it goes. The heavy double-arm Turkish Get-up is quite a feat. The explosive pistols at 4:00 are ridiculous. And the kettlebell bear walk at the end looks like fun. Painful fun, but fun.

The subhead of this site used to read "'Lanky and Peckish' is probably closer to the truth." Then I had this from a teammate, which made me laugh:

My two cents, by the way, is that neither of those words is really all that good, but I respect the thesaurus work and the self-effacement behind them. The idea that *you* are "lanky," is, really, a serious insult to people like XXX and me, who are pretty much left with only "scrawny" if you have staked out that territory. Peckish implies, to me anyway, a shortness of temper and brittleness that just aren't even remotely there.

How I got the British usage of "peckish" ("slightly hungry") in my head rather than the American ("ill-tempered") is a bit of a mystery. My theory was too much Tolkien as a youth, but now I'm guessing it's too much Wallace and Gromit as an adult.

So I changed it.

I promise not to flood the weblog with these, but ultivillage recently posted another fun clip, this one featuring a huge game-winning catch by Jeff Graham to lock down the #2 NE spot to Nationals. That boy can climb the ladder.

Good clip on ultivillage.com today of an impressive play. The receiver (Fortunat Mueller) simultaneously makes the catch and gets creamed, and then recovers almost instantly to throw a deep scoring pass. Incredible field sense.

I decided to spend my way out of my post-Regionals depression, and as the stuff has arrived in the mail it has contributed to my growing excitement over my off-season training plans.

First up was a 12-foot length of 1.5" manila rope from McMaster-Carr. $22.17 including shipping. I'd link right to the page, but their site uses frames. I hate frames. Anyway, I tied it to a garage rafter with a bowline knot for rope climbs. It's not very high, but workable, especially if I do them in an L-seat position. In fact, I'll have to work on it before I can manage that distance in that position.

Next, the big ticket item: the "advanced" set of Iron Woody Fitness Bands for $118.45, including shipping. I've played with these a bit, and they're going to be great (I had no idea they'd be so thick). I can loop a band over the door attachment of my Homemade GHD, rig a board with footholds, and work the Grasso Lunge. Will also be perfect for improvising a kneeling cable crunch, and all kinds of rotational/core movements, explosive and otherwise. I can also use them in devious ways to add weird loads to pullups, pushups, and other bodyweight exercises. And free weights, for that matter.

Also, inspired by Ross Enamait's The Home Gym video, I built myself a couple doubly evil wheels:

Equipment from Home Depot (total $32.70):

• 2 3/4" x 5" black pipe nipples (handles)
• 4 lawnmower tires
• 2 1/2" x 10" carriage bolts
• 4 1/2" hex nuts (two per bolt - screw one on, then screw the other one on to lock it down)
• 8 1/2" washers (one for each side of each tire)

I've been working on the standing rollout some more after letting it slide a bit. Progress is very slow. Doing one-arm rollouts from the knees is a nice exercise too, for those of us who can't do 'em standing. The wheels are also great for pushup variations. For example, pushup with one arm while the other arm rolls out. Or up. Or, for a big challenge, down (towards your waist).

You really have to watch Colbert dismantle Congressman Lynn "Bag of Hammers" Westmoreland.