I was reading this old Straight to the Bar post on Bruce Lee's back injury, and followed one of the links to this terrific piece on the legendary Lee physique (all functional, not for show). Lots of great anecdotes. Definitely worth a read, fan or not.

But back to the back injury... To me, it's very scary to consider that one small misstep with the weights can screw you up forever. And if it can happen to someone as superbly conditioned and focused as Lee, it can happen to anyone. It certainly gives me pause in my self-taught (albeit with good books), uncoached approach. Not that I'm going to stop, mind you. :-)

Ross Enamait's latest article and video, Budget Training, is up. Every time I turn around that guy gets stronger. The weights I use for strength, he uses for conditioning. How depressing. And inspiring.

Cat vs. Octopus, let the games begin!

Got a new jump rope this week. I've tried a variety of jump ropes (leather, beaded, and "speed", but this new one is easily my favorite. It's a Cable Freestyle Rope from buyjumpropes.net. The handles are long, lightweight plastic (with foam sleeves, not pictured on the site) and the rope is basically a flexible coated wire. It's the fastest rope I've tried (although not the fastest they sell) and the long handles are nice for crossovers. Since it's been cold I've only used it wearing like exercise pants, which is good because I bet it hurts like hell when you whip yourself with it. Adjustment is very easy, just a little two-part sleeve inside each handle that you slide apart to adjust. Adjusted out to the max. they are just long enough for my 6'4" self.

The other new piece of equipment I got this week was a used tire, kinda on the largish side (maybe off an SUV?), picked up for free at a local garage (they generally have to pay to dispose of them, so I imagine any garage would be happy to be rid of them). What's it for? Why, beating the tar out of it with a sledgehammer, of course!

So, in honor of my new finds (and workout time being pretty tight lately), today's workout:

• Tabata jump rope, immediately followed by...
• Tabata sledghammer, immediately followed by...
• 50 double-unders on the rope.

Ross Enamait recently ran an article on sledgehammer training, which includes a video demo of sledgehammer Tabatas. From there, he also links to his own article specifically on Tabatas.

Anyway, since I mostly feel the jump rope in my shoulders and the sledgehammer in my forearms, it's amazing I can type this at all.

To satisfy my sweet tooth, I've come to increasingly rely on Splenda (sucralose) sweetener. Usually just a packet in my oatmeal in the morning, or a packet in some plain yogurt. Not a big deal, but as sucralose is increasingly finding its way into a variety of products, I wondered as to its safety. After googling "splenda", you don't have to scroll down very far to get to pages from one of its more vociferous critics, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Not really sure how to take his stuff though, given how many hits a search for "mercola" and "quack" returns. So you've got Mercola on one side and Michael Fumento on the other side. Who to believe? Ultimately I found The Truth About Sucralose by Cy Willson at T-Nation to be the most persuasive. The best course of action is certainly to avoid all sugar and artificial sweeteners, but I'm not ready to pull my sweet tooth just yet. So for me, Splenda it is. For now.

Now that my new pullup bar gives me plenty of room to hang and swing, I've been able to work on my kipping pullups (Crossfit has all the best resources on what these are and how to do them: this thread is essential reading (or the first page, at the very least), and here's a movie teaching them). What a great exercise!

The debate over which is "better", kipping or strict, is extensive. I'm sure I have nothing new to contribute to that discussion. I like them both, but personally find kipping pullups to be more fun, and somehow more satisfying. And it's not because I can do more of them, because I can't! As I'm just starting with them, they have exposed a set of weak links I wasn't aware I possessed. When I bottom out on a kipping pullup, the speed of the descent and the swinging motion requires more power and flexibility in my shoulders than during a strict pullup, and at the same time that force really taxes my grip and forearm strength.

Anyway, they feel great, give 'em a try. I'm sure I'll keep mixing up pullup varieties in my training, but kipping pullups have definitely joined my list of staple exercises.

P.S. Having learned and only done these on a swinging pullup bar, I wonder how they'll feel if I get to try them on a fixed bar?

Design blogs have the best gift guides:

• Core77's 77 Design Gifts Under $77
• Inhabitat's Cheap Gifts Under $30
• Josh Spear's "holiday"-tagged posts

• Physical Strategies links up a bunch of Jumpstretch Band Training PDFs. You have to do a bit of work to separate the wheat from the chaff, but I took away several new ideas. Use Firefox and DownThemAll! to grab them all at once.
• Physical Strategies again, making an interesting case for eating buffalo instead of beef.
• dirttime.org posts an excellent interview with Jim "Beast Skills" Bathurst.

From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.

Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.

If you are the sort of person that uses keyboard shortcut, you probably know that F3 is commonly used as the shortcut for "Find Next". And if you know that, you probably use that command a lot. And you probably still hit F3 in Microsoft Word expecting it to work, only to be disappointed. Despite making that mistake thousands of times.

Or maybe it's just me.

Anyway, here's a quick AutoHotkey script for making F3 work the way you'd expect in Word (it remaps F3 to MS's shortcut for Find Next, SHIFT+F4):

#IfWinActive ahk_class OpusApp ; only in Word
F3::+F4
#IfWinActive ; reset

I could have just remapped the keys in Word itself, but this way I can carry this behavior with me via the AHK scripts I keep on my USB key (and I keep my scripts in sync from my desktop machine to my USB key with Unison, which rocks).

T-Nation is running a good article titled 50 Tips for Serious Athletes. The last tip suggests, "for team training, play games with your athletes." Included in the list is "speedball", which I'd never heard of. Sounds like fun though.

I can't remember how, but I stumbled across a reprint of a Stuart McGill (the back fitness and rehab guy, coincidentally recently mentioned by De Vany) article dealing with Low Back Exercise and "Superstiffness". It reminded me that I really want to get his Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance book. Looks like it's in it's third edition now. Maybe Santa will bring it to me.

Crossfit linked up Vurtego pogo sticks this evening, and as I remembered thinking the Flybar looked cool a few months ago that sent me off on a bit of Googling. Flybar wins the video competition with this backflip series, but at least according to one site the Vurtego holds the height record. There are even pogo stick exercise classes built around these things!