Today marks the beginning of my training for the 2006 season and beyond. For the next 10 weeks I'm going to follow the program detailed in Ross Enamait's Infinite Intensity. Today's workout? The Magic 50. Well, for me it was "The Magic 30", as I'm new to dumbbell work and I started to feel a bit of back-related nerve shooting so laid off. I'm sure my form sucks, and I overestimated how much weight I could do. Also, 30 was pretty damn tiring. I have clearly gotten soft since the season ended. Amazing how little it takes to slide.

The Infinite Intensity program promises to be fantastic though. It's a mix of workouts like The Magic 50, interval training, a variety of core workouts, dumbbell workouts, plyometric moves, etc. All speed, endurance, and strength, no bulking up. I've modified it a bit, but not much. The biggest change is that Enamait calls for a work:rest ratio of four days on, one day off, but I'm going to go 5:2 (rest on the weekends). I'm also doing some substitutions where I don't have the equipment, like twisting medicine ball throws instead of heavy bag work, for example (although as an Ultimate player I wish—perhaps counterintuitively—that I could keep the heavy bag work - all that rotational power in the hips).

I wrote up a cheatsheet for the program, and I managed to squeeze it onto one double-sided sheet. 8-point Times New Roman, 4 columns, with the minimum margins my printer can handle. This makes it sound like the program is complicated, but it's not. What it is, though, is comprehensive, loaded with variety, and yet still, amazingly, focused. The book is a keeper.

A few years ago I bought a pull-up bar from Champs for around $25. The beauty of this particular bar is that you don't need to screw it in or fasten it in any way. I dangles off the trim and gravity and leverage keep it securely in place. A buddy of mine was recently looking for something similar, but most such bars now seem to be $50 and up. Fortunately, you can build your own pull-up bar for around $30 using off-the-shelf threaded pipe (scroll down to "Doorway Chinup Bar").

This is a bit outside my area of expertise, but holy cow, look at this guy handle his bike! (WMV, 488KB)

The Crossfit WOD has a link to several Crossfitters doing a 1-minute burpee race. Very impressive scores, I thought, but the thing I found personally interesting was the form: when I descend from the leap I drop into a squat before kicking out and simultaneously descending into the pushup (like Ross, but not as quick (yet)). But these folks don't seem to squat much at all, and do a simultaneous drop-down/kickout/pushup-descent from a much higher point.

I'm not making value judgements; I just found it curious.

Carl Hiaasen on Florida's irreparable hurricane unpreparedness:

Be prepared, they're warning us. Next time, you'd better be prepared. Know how to prepare? Stock up on Prozac, that's how.

I've been into Hiaasen and his outrage at Florida corruption and overdevelopment ever since reading his novels. He is the only non-local (to me) local columnist I read.

Exercise trumps Zoloft. Less drugs, more sports. Sounds good.

Just discovered Skwigg Blog and loved two bits from her Monster Names and Medicine Balls post:

Great workout today, very ab intensive, lots of crazy core exercises and unilateral exercises. I did dumbbell bent over rows one arm at a time while balancing on a wobble board, squat/overhead presses one arm at a time, incline hammer curls with chest press one arm at a time, medicine ball oblique twists which are kind of hard to explain - your butt is the only thing touching the floor, your knees are tucked up by your chest, the medicine ball is in your hands, you touch the ball to the floor next to you and twist your knees toward the opposite side for balance, then you touch the ball to the floor on the other side and take your knees in the opposite direction, nothing but your butt and the ball touch the floor, killer oblique contractions.

Sounds like a great exercise. And this was a hoot:

I also did the lie-on-the-floor-and-get-pummeled-with-a-medicine-ball exercise. That's the one where ET repeatedly throws the 10 or 15 pound ball into my stomach HARD, occasionally slamming me in the solar plexus or ribs just to make sure I don't nod off. It's a nice reminder that strong abs aren't just for show. They also protect your guts from blunt force trauma. And, of course, I find the lie-on-the-floor-and-get-pummeled-with-a-medicine-ball exercise extremely funny. Taking the shot is all about breathing and timing and muscle contraction. There's just something irresistibly hilarious in knowing that if you relax and laugh, your spleen will fly out your nose.

Kinda like when my almost-four-year-old daughter takes a running knees-first leap onto my stomach, but without the element of surprise. Thankfully, she's a bit small for her age.

Skwigg also has good stuff in What I Eat (mmm, Peanut Butter Banana Sundae...) and Workouts (I do pretty extensive core work, but I bet "Six Pack Attack" would destroy me). And probably elsewhere too; I've only been exploring for a few minutes.

Must everything be so complicated? Even milk? I don't really care so much for myself; at 35 my lifetime diet has probably so loaded with plastics, teflon, hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides that I'm doomed. Or maybe I'm waterproof, bulletproof, disease-proof, and feared by mosquitoes everywhere (or at least boll weevils). Regardless, I try to protect my daughters from that stuff, as I have a crackpot theory that girls are hitting puberty earlier because of all the hormones in the food.

So I was going to write this thing on balance training, but then I watched this video of these guys playing on a slackline and it made me feel inadequate. I gotta get a slackline kit for me and the girls; it looks like a blast.

Anyway, on to what I was originally going to write... I had a very good Ultimate season this year, and one of the things I noticed was that I converted many more "accidental plays" than in recent years. For example, after bobbling the disc I'd make the catch anyway. Or someone would throw me an unexpected pass (or in an unexpected manner) and I'd have to catch it reflexively. Stuff like that. There are lots of things I improved this year that could contribute to making more of those plays: increased focus, better fitness, etc. But, for no empirical reason whatsoever, I like to attribute it to balance training. My warm-up for my daily stretching routine included about five minutes of balance work. Each day I'd mess around with some combination of the following:

• Balance on one foot...
  • ...while slowly moving your head from side-to-side.
  • ...while slowly moving your head in random circles.
  • ...shake your head vigorously, and then recover your balance.
  • ...with your eyes closed.
  • ...standing on your toes rather than flat-footed
  • ...standing on a 2x4.
• Walk a 2x4...
  • ...frontwards and backwards.
  • ...turning 180 degrees each time you get to the end.
  • ...and crouch to pick up implements stacked at the end, bring them back to the other end, and crouch to replace them.
  • ...with various combinations of eyes closed and head movements.
• Stand on a biofoam roller for time (a pool noodle is a much cheaper option, but it crushes, breaks, and generally doesn't behave in a very log-like manner - it's still harder to walk than a 2x4 though).

You get the idea. I have no idea how much this helped my game, but as you're doing these exercises you can feel all these little proprioceptive firings that you just don't work otherwise. I believe it made a difference, which is enough for me (heck, maybe it was the believing itself that made the difference).

There are all kinds of workplace recommendations for five-minute breaks every hour or so. Might as well use that time for something fun, and imagine the looks you'll get when you drag a 2x4 to the office.

If I could find five other like-minded lunatics and an 8-foot-high net I'd give Hooverball a try:

The sport originated in 1928, when shortly after his election Hoover took a goodwill trip to South America. While aboard the battleship Utah on his return, he watched a game of "bull-in-the-ring," a medicine ball game that was popular on naval ships. A soft nine-pound medicine ball was thrown from one to another of the players standing in a circle as the "bull" in the center tried to intercept it. During the trip, the president-elect played and enjoyed the game, which was the inspiration for Hoover-ball.

There's a national championships and everything. And I thought I played an obscure sport...

A teammate of mine recently had knee surgery, and was given a DonJoy Iceman to aid his recovery. He loaned it to me for my sprained ankle, and it's great! Just fill it with ice water, wrap the pad around the body part you want to chill, and relax. You can just leave the thing on for hours (although you can set the dial cold enough to be dangerous at such durations, I think). The unit appears to cost around $200 new, but happily seems to be well-represented on eBay. With some luck you could score one in the $50-70 range. This is very expensive when compared to the normal cost ($0) of icing an injury, but would definitely be worth it for major rehab projects, trainers, or teams. And my ankle is very, very happy to have a loaner unit.

You gotta love a post on Intelligent Design that begins with the stage direction "scientist pulls out baseball bat" and whose discussion ends when the blog owner invokes Godwin's law.