Three very good reads:
Just a quick post, but don't let the brevity fool you, this is a good one... Mark Sisson links up a study that suggests it's the workouts that result in lactate production that stimulate a human growth hormone response (cool study, bummer for the folks with McArdle's disease). Art De Vany follows up with more (upon reading you'll probably want to Google his site for "hierarchical sets").
UltiVillage recently posted a trailer for the 2007 Emerald City Classic. It features tons of great clips, and it really wants to be available in a higher resolution, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.
Speaking of UltiVillage, I don't know what they pay for bandwidth now, but it occurs to me that at least for the Clip of the Day and trailers they could get a SmugMug account and store hi-res video clips there (check the quality of that demo video, would only cost them $60/year to host 2.5 minute clips, $150/year to host 5 minute clips). I've also wondered about them moving to some kind of pay-per-view model for UltiTV. I assume the UltiTV clips are the same low resolution, but a pay-per-view model would allow users to choose to only watch the clips they want to see, and to pay more to watch them in higher resolution. Bandwidth costs would be a concern, obviously, along with managing the payments, but Amazon has some tantalizing web services available that are really perfect for this kind of application. I'm pretty far afield from a fitness post now, so you can stop reading if you want, but here are the services that UltiVillage could use:
First, for storing the videos online there's Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers (write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited).
The thing that really makes this shine is the pricing, which is practically tailor-made for pay-per-view:
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TBRequests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
- No charge for delete requests
So lets say UltiVillage wanted to store a full DVD's worth of video online (a bit less than 5GB for a single-sided, single-layer disc, but we'll round up to 5GB for these back-of-the-envelope calculations). Nice, high-res stuff. It would cost $0.50 to copy the data into S3, and $0.75/month to store it. It would cost $0.90 for a user to download it (assuming they watched the whole thing, at high resolution). So suppose it's up for a year, 100 people watch it, and you charge $2.00 per view. UltiVillage costs are a one-time upload of $0.50, $9.00 to host it for a year, and $90 for it to be downloaded 100 times, for a total of $99.50. They collect $200 for a profit of $100.50. Of course, the numbers would change if they offered several resoutions to choose from; users could choose to pay more/less depending on what resolution they wanted to download.
Now, I'm not a businessman, and I have no idea if $2 would be a good price point for them. There's salaries, cameras, film, and all the other costs that come with running the business. I have no idea how many customers they have, whether those customers would prefer a pay-per-view model, and how much people would pay. Finally, I have no idea how this might affect their DVD sales. But speaking for myself, I'm not an UltiTV subscriber currently because I don't like the low-res QuickTime files, and I'm only interested in a few of the videos they offer. But I'd definitely do pay-per-view for higher resolution versions. How much would I pay? Not sure. I'd probably put $20 into an account and then pick and choose a few high-res games to watch, hopefully at somewhere between $2 and $5 a pop. Totally off the cuff, but that's the ballpark.
The other piece of this would be managing the pay-per-view accounts/payments. For that there's Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS). It's in limited beta now, but it looks promising (and you could always see about getting in on the beta). Pricing (which obviously affects the estimates above):
For Transactions >= $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
2.9% + $0.30 for credit card
For Transactions < $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
5.0% + $0.05 for credit cardFor Amazon Payments balance transfers < $0.05:
20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025
It could be done! The question of whether it should be done is one for the bean counters. I'd sure like it, though.
(Oh, it would be nice, while we're at it, if the UltiVillage site had some social networking components built in. Perhaps allow paying customers to rate the videos so others know how to best spend their pay-per-view money, maybe a forum so videos can be discussed, allow users to upload commentary tracks that synchronize with the video, etc. I mean, as long as I'm musing about somebody else's business model...)
(The piracy issue is a whole 'nother can of worms. I don't know how much sharing/stealing of UltiTV videos happens now: one guy on the team gets an account, downloads the videos, passes them around. I'm sure it happens. Heck, DVDs can be ripped and the high-res files shared, for that matter. Not sure how high-res pay-per-view changes this behavior, or again, how that would affect DVD sales. If it makes it worse, hopefully it is offset by new customers like me, who don't subscribe to UltiTV because of the low-res, and don't buy the DVDs because I only want to watch them once, not over and over.)
I've been meaning to write a review Ross Enamait's Full Throttle Conditioning DVD and manual for quite awhile. I really liked it, and I'm long overdue in writing it up. This time though, laziness has it's rewards, as Scott Helsley went ahead and wrote the review I would have written. I could try and rehash those sentiments in my own words, but why?
I also liked this note from one of the comments:
I also agree with you on Full Throttle Conditioning. It's a great product, and at $25 for both a DVD and a manual, a steal. I will say that it would probably be best to have either Infinite Intensity or Never Gymless (or both) along with FTC to get a fuller scope of what can be done. Hell, you can get all 3 for $85, which feels like grand larceny considering the amount of info Ross provides.
I think this is a good point. If you don't have any of Ross's products, getting either Infinite Intensity (dumbbell oriented) or Never Gymless (bodyweight oriented) plus Full Throttle Conditioning would make for a very nice package.
Another Furman link: I really like the looks of this pull-up variation. Definitely going to have to give that a try.
Just two quick links:
Ross Enamait just posted an article and video, "The Homemade Wheel." Definitely an inexpensive piece of equipment worth making, as it's good for a variety of truly killer exercises. And as always, Ross's video is very impressive. Check it out.
If you have access to a rower, here's a workout I run through when I'm strapped for time. With 30 seconds rest between each interval, row:
100m
200m
300m
400m
500m
400m
300m
200m
100m
Last time I set an average 500m pace of 1:43. I think I can do better, but that was a pretty good workout.
It's a bonus if you can set up this workout on a C2 rower, as you can program the distances and the rest intervals into the monitor, and it forces you to be honest on the rest time. Once the rest is over, the clock starts ticking on your interval time, and any time spent dead in the "water" REALLY hurts your average.
Ross Enamait just posted a Nike commercial that vaulted into my top five. Don't ask me what the other four are, because then I'd have to start YouTubing them and my workday would be shot.
This T-Nation article, The Third-World Squat, is the second time I've seen this particular stretch touted. First time was at the end of Mark Sisson's beach sprints video (more sensitively referred to as the Indigenous People Stretch). The Crossfit boards also picked up on these articles. Anyway, it's definitely one of the perfect stretches. Hits a lot of different muscle groups, proficiency will help with form/flexibility issues you might run into squatting or deadlifting, and you don't need a lot of room. I like to get out of my office chair every once in awhile, squat for a bit, then hit the camel pose (watch your back on this one, esp. doing it cold). To me this combination seems like the quickest and most efficient way to stretch out a lot of the stuff that shortens up when you spend too much time sitting.
Oh, one tip I don't think anybody has mentioned regarding the squat: if you can't get low while keeping your heels down you can roll up a towel and put it under your heels. That'll make it easier to get lower. After a few days, as you get comfortable, unroll the towel a bit. Repeat until you don't need the towel any more.
Sorry, been sitting on some of these links for a while...
I developed tendinitis in mid-2004 after doing a lot of bicycling over a period of two weeks. The inflammation went away after some time, but I continued to have pain that lasted for several years. After trying everything from accupuncture, physical therapy, massage, chiropractors, pain drugs, lidoderm patches, ointments, etc... the only thing that significantly reduced my pain was "eccentric exercises." I learned about such exercises through reading medical journal articles. However, I had to develop a protocol that worked for me through trial-and-error.Ties in perfectly with what I know about fixing achilles tendonitis.