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.
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.
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.
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):
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).
Crossfit announced they'll be releasing "hundreds of pages of previously published subscription articles to the CrossFit site over the next few months in order to expand the amount of content available free of charge." Awesome! They've already released 13 articles via the Crossfit Journal weblog. A great resource just got better; a big tip o' the hat to the Crossfit gang.
Ross Enamait just posted a good article and video on sledgehammer training. I'd do that in my garage this winter, but it would just be a matter of time before I knocked the garage door opener off the ceiling.
If you are considering creatine supplementation, I'm thinking these three articles, taken together, cover just about everything you need to know to make an informed decision:
I adopted the low-dose approach described in the second article and ran with it for around a month:
However, bear in mind that the water-retention-related gain in weight is primarily a function of the high creatine-loading doses (20 to 30 grams per day) used both in many research studies and by many athletes. In a very recent study, a lower loading dose (6g of creatine per day) produced only a one-pound gain in weight ('Why Your Creatine Consumption Is Costing You Too Much,' Running Research News, vol. 14(7), pp. 1-4, 1998).
And in fact researchers are finding that lower loading doses can be as effective as the big, 20-gram per day intakes at building up muscle creatine-phosphate concentrations, provided that the lower doses are taken over a little bit more time. Basically, the new research is revealing that six one-half gram doses of creatine per day (for a total of three grams daily) over the course of about 30 days will build muscle-creatine concentrations to a level comparable to that achieved with the whopping 20-gram ingestions. Very importantly, these three-gram per day intakes appear to be associated with very little water retention and weight gain.
Thus, it appears that creatine monohydrate can be a performance-boosting (and legal) supplement for endurance runners. The best way to take it is to simply sprinkle about a half-gram of the stuff on some food (and then of course eat the creatine and comestible) six times per day. Little creatine will be lost in the urine and faeces, creating a very economical intake pattern, little weight will be gained, and the resulting heightened intramuscular creatine-phosphate concentration should have a direct, positive impact on the quality of your high-intensity training sessions. Since intensity is the most potent producer of running fitness, your creatine-boosted sessions should eventually lead to some very nice PBs.
As advertised, no weight gain, which was nice. Everything else about that approach is so gradual it's impossible to say how much benefit I reaped, if any. Could I train harder? Maybe. Some of the burpee challenges seemed a bit easier on some days, but such things are highly variable under any circumstances. I'll probably run a couple more 2-month long cycles (using the same dosage strategy) over the coming year and see how it feels. I doubt I'd take it long-term, as I'd hate to run the risk of hampering my body's ability to produce creatine naturally, as suggested in the "long term risks" article.