I wouldn't want anybody here to actually think I'm good at the stuff I write about. So, details on my embarrassing workout of the day, 100 burpees, as fast as possible. While burpees figure prominently in my routines, I've never actually tried this before.

My time? 15:58.

Shhh... Hear that? If you listen real close you can hear hear folks clicking the "unsubscribe" button in their newsreader of choice.

15:58!? Fer cryin' out loud. That's barely over six per minute! Anyway, enough lamentation. Here's how it broke down for me. I figured I'd tackle it in 10 as-fast-as-I-can blocks of 10, with the minimum rest between blocks. My first block of 10, which is when I should be able to record my best time, took 40 seconds. That is not very good. I'm not sure why I'm so slow at burpees, but I keep working at it. Anyway, if I did them straight through at that pace I'd be looking at around 7 minutes. Of course, fatigue sets in, so subsequent sets take longer, and rest between sets takes longer, and before I knew it I'd nickle-and-dimed my time to death.

My pipe dream was 10:00. At 13:00 and two sets to go I was gunning for 15:00. Pretty much killed me to get under the 16:00 wire.

Consider this a public service. On many a gung-ho site (you know who you are :-) you are encouraged to post times, and one notices a preponderance of superhuman times. One might develop an inferiority complex ("everybody can do these workouts better!"). My theory is that folks with non-superhuman scores are less inclined to post, skewing the sample. That, my friends, is where I come in.

P.S. Score above recorded with a bad shoulder and pulled abdominal muscle.

P.P.S. Immaterial. Even healthy I doubt I would have cracked 15:00.

P.P.P.S. Yet.

A late morning diversion for you: a variety of impressive Capoeira moves. Proof that you can never tell what a guy can do just by looking at him.

I've been a bit at sea since finishing the 10-week sample program in Infinite Intensity. I figured I'd revise it slightly and go through it again, but haven't gotten around to the revisions yet, so have been picking and choosing workouts while I waffle. Last week I found myself on a GPP/core day, but without enough time to do both. I didn't want to pick one over the other, so this is what I came up with:

• Body Rows x 30 seconds
• Mountain Climbers x 30 seconds
• Weighted Russian Twists x 30 seconds
• Rest x 30 seconds
• Repeat 10 times

Set things up so you can move between exercises without rest. I felt this one in a bunch of different places for a few days: hips, upper back, lower ribs, obliques (really noticed it sitting up sideways to get out of bed the next morning). Some notes:

• The closer you are to the floor on the body rows, the more challenging they are, but they still aren't nearly as hard as pull-ups. Still, they are a good movement and work the muscles a bit differently. And if you're babying a shoulder that doesn't like going overhead at the moment, they are a nice substitution. If you prefer pull-ups but can't do 10 good circuits of them you can do negatives after you run out of gas (jump to the bar and lower yourself) or static holds (perhaps jump to the uppermost position, hold, lower halfway, hold, lower and hang, keeping shoulders activated).
• To do mountain climbers, assume a push-up position. Sprint in place, pistoning your knees to your chest as fast as you can while keeping good form. The less your butt bobs up and down, the better. The closer your knees get to your chest, the better. The faster, the better. If you haven't done these before, you will find them surprisingly tiring.
• To do weighted Russian twists lie on the floor with your knees bent like you're about to do sit-ups. Holding a medicine ball with both hands, bench press it to the fully extended position and hold it there. Now do a partial sit-up and hold. From this position, keeping the medicine ball extended, twist back and forth, first bringing the medicine ball towards the floor on one side, then the other, maintaining tension throughout your core. You can do this without the ball to make it easier (just clasp you hands). You can do it on an incline bench to make it harder.

Scott Sonnen's floating lever progression is great, with videos of some exercises I'd love to start incorporating, the elbow-lever push-ups, if nothing else. Looks like great core work.

Often the catch-all "men's magazines" fitness stuff is hit or miss, but I took away a couple useful things from the Seven Numbers piece from Men's Health.

Apparently 24 is the magic number when it comes to L&HF-favorite almonds. The notion of pinning it to a specific number is silly, but if you're like me and you tend to overeat at dinner the concept of "front loading" with something densely nutritious seems reasonable.

Also, as a big fan of preventative icing, this caught my eye:

10 Minutes: Spend this amount of time icing after a run to save your knees from osteoarthritis. Weight-bearing exercises, such as running or playing rugby, draw blood and a lubricant called synovial fluid to your joints. And that's good ­ while you're exercising. But if extra synovial fluid and blood stick around for too long, the cartilage can crack and osteoarthritis will eventually develop. That's why post-exercise icing is so critical: "The ice makes the extra fluid run away from your joints, and then your lymphatic system filters it out," says physiotherapist Kevin Olds.

« via HealthHacks »

George Cooke has a good post up on "Intensity", in which he analyzes the Phil Jackson quote, "intensity is full alertness and a commitment to execution and fundamentals". Like George my definition was of the less constructive "go harder, be more aggressive" variety. All these years of "we need to be more intense" instead of "we need to focus." Alas.

I just came across this polished-looking piece on Tabata Intervals titled Guerilla Cardio (PDF). The focus is on fat-burning, but also includes references to many of the training benefits of Tabatas. On the fat-burning front, there's this note:

To prevent overtraining, try to incorporate the program on your weight training "off days." For instance, I train with weights on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and perform my Guerrilla Cardio sessions on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, before I eat anything. (Studies show cardiovascular exercise performed first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach, burns up to three times more fat than the same amount of exercise performed later in the afternoon!)

Scientists are divided on this idea. Tom Venuto covers it well. Personally, the idea of tackling something as punishing as Tabata sprints upon waking, on an empty stomach, is unappealing, to say the least.

Speaking of sprints, they are the Tabata exercise of choice as outlined by Guerilla Cardio:

Now, while Guerrilla Cardio can be applied to all sorts of activities—the stationary bike, stairstepper, etc.—I would highly recommend you stick to sprinting for a couple of reasons . . .

First, all else being equal, sprinting elicits a significantly higher peak oxygen consumption (VO2 peak) than do other modes of cardiovascular exercise, according to researchers from the University of Missouri, Columbia, who recently compared treadmill sprinting to high-intensity exercise on a stationary skier, shuffle skier, stairstepper, stationary bike and rower. This is important because this new research shows the closer you come to your VO2 peak while exercising, the more fat you'll burn once that exercise session is over.

Second, sprinting is tough. In fact, it's so tough, many people actually fear doing it, which is exactly why I recommend it. (Remember, if you move away from what you fear, you get weaker. But, when you move toward what you fear, you get stronger!)

Leaving the focus on fat loss aside, and having applied quite a few different exercises to the Tabata protocol, there's no question in my mind that sprinting is the toughest, lung-wise, and by a wide margin, in many cases.

(Burpees are the closest contender, and while I personally feel like they take the title for whole-body muscle fatigue, lactic burn from head-to-toe, etc., I don't think they hit the lungs quite as hard as sprints. But that may be because my burpee technique limits my repetition ceiling, whereas sprints don't have a comparable personal limitation.)

HealthHacks on the recent "discrediting" of the Glycemic Index. That's the post I would have written. The distinction between the Glycemic Index and the Glycemic Load in particular. Nice. I'm not a GI zealot, but I do keep in in the back of my mind when I'm picking what to eat.

My favorite Olympic story so far. I love how the guy really doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.

I was interested to read this bit from Skwigg on NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis). It's basically the calories you burn from fidgeting. Squirrelly people burn more than we relaxed folks.

This got me thinking about a crackpot idea I've been mulling over: the concept of micro-workouts. I recently read that you don't have to get your exercise all in one big chunk, you can break it up over the course of the day. So six 10-minute sessions is as good as an hour straight (I'm not advocating long cardio work, but some folks dig it). What I wonder is, how small can the workouts get and still be effective? If I take a two-minute break every fifteen minutes during the workday and crank out a semi-quick 500m on the rower (I work at home), is that as good as rowing for an hour (32 2-minute sessions)?

I doubt it does anything for my strength, or even much for my conditioning, but what about my metabolism? Tying this back to the NEAT ideas, I imagine that kind of work would count as some serious fidgeting. Just some half-baked thoughts late on Monday evening...

A few of the sites I frequent seem to be down on stability ball training and other forms of unstable surface training. Mostly it's shrugged off as "not functional" or "you get all the balance training you need just living." Personally, I find it useful, but I'm not a slave to it (or any other training modality). With that in mind, I was interested to read Art De Vany's take on Paul Chek ("simply put, he is among the best"), and in particular, this bit:

The idea is to work out on an unsteady surface to train your balance. But, the more important point (which I think you may find only Chek among trainers points out clearly) is to trigger unsteady states wherein the dorsal horn must quickly activate a response. The dorsal horn is down near the end of the spine and it is responsible for the extremely quick corrections that do not have time to go up the spinal cord to the brain and back down in time to make the correction. This tends to over ride learned, disfunctional neural patterns that come from protecting the lower spine from past injuries or poor patterns.

I know pretty much jack about Chek, and had never heard of the dorsal horn before (even now it sounds vaguely like the "five dollar shelf stretcher" the grocery store manager from my youth used to send new stockboys to the storeroom to find when they couldn't find room on the shelves on freight day) but having suffered back injuries in the past, I know it can happen in an instant on one off step, far quicker than your brain could ever brace for intentionally, so the notion of training the right corrective reflexes rings true to me.

43 Folders (a popular personal productivity site) has an open question up, asking readers what their favorite fitness sites are. Out of curiosity (and since some nice reader gave L&HF a mention) I culled through the responses. In addition to a couple nods to favorites Crossfit and Ross Enamait, there were these:

• The Shovelglove guy is quite funny, and really makes some good sense, once you get past the fundamental wackiness of the concept of using a sledge indoors. I'm more a "go outside and beat the hell out of a tire with it" kind of guy, but is that any less wacky, really? He also has a "No S Diet" plan, one of the few diets that doesn't automatically set my Klaxon sounding.
• Stumptious Women's Weight Training and associated blog has some good stuff, and plenty applicable to both sides of the gender tracks.
• Three more blogs I've subscribed to: SideDish, Starling Fitness, and HealthHacks. We'll see how much of interest they bring to my aggregator (there's enough there currently to get me to subscribe, so that's good).