Came across this video by IronMaven, showing in incredible detail the motions of some Olympic lifting. The video includes some great editing with “ghosting” of successful lifting attempts and failures. Definitely worth a watch. Great work.
Bob Hoffman established the York Barbell company in 1932. With the weight lifting equipment and publications produced by his company, Hoffman had a profound influence on the fitness industry.
Although many of Hoffman’s publications have been out of print for some time, his books can be found on the site, “Eugen Sandow & The Golden Age of Iron Men” – a website primarily devoted to reproducing out of print collections of bodybuilding and weight lifting books circa “the strong man era”.
Although these books tend to be fiarly old, much of the material hasn’t changed much. In fact, books like the “York Handbalancing Course” are still very informative.
See the Hoffman archive, here.
Low-carb dieting is nothing new. In fact, what some may consider to be a “fad diet” goes back nearly 150 years!!
William Banting, a teacher who had problems fighting obesity is one of the first recorded testaments to a low carb diet. After numerous failed attempts to lose his stubborn fat, Banting took the suggestion from a doctor to try a certain diet. This certain diet, although not referred to as such, is for the most part a low-carb diet.
According to Banting himself, the new diet didn’t only solve his weight issue, it also cured him of some of his ailments. In his astonishment at what a change in diet could do for him, Banting felt it his duty to spread the word of the low-carb lifestyle.
In 1863, at his own cost, Banting printed and distributed a pamphlet called, “Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public”. In this open letter, he describes his diet failures and how this miracle low-carb method worked so well for him and others whom he passed the idea on to.
As far as I can tell, given that the book was published well before 1900, it is in the public domain. I’ve transcribed it from a pdf version of the original that I found and have made it available for your own perusal below. The writing is a bit on the “old style” side, but I found it to be quite interesting and definitely recommend it to you, should you be interested at all in diet. It’s astonishing how little things have changed.
(Keep in mind that the word, “Corpulence”, is a middle English word for obesity)
I managed to find a few minutes today to update the WOD Timer and add some presets. Now included are presets for some Crossfit WODs like Tabata, Tabata Something Else and Fight Gone Bad. Makes setting up the intervals a little easier.
Also made a dedicated page for the WOD Timer. Check out the new version here.
Tonight I did a quick workout consisting of 5 rounds of 10 hang clean lunge combos, 10 handstand push-ups and a muscle-up into 5 ring dips. I didn’t go all out on intensity and instead took it a little easier than usual. However, I thought that the hang clean to lunge combination was a great full body exercise. It really gets the quads and hamstrings. Tonight I went with only a 75lb bar, but it could easily be scaled up (or down) as necessary.
Check it out here:
Lunge tip: kiss the ground with the knee; keep weight nicely distributed over both front and back feet; initiate the push back up with the front heel.
My last PR for the good ol’ 30 Muscle-ups for time was 10 minutes. Maybe just a hair longer actually, but still not half bad. Now, there’s more strategy in the 30 muscle ups for time WOD than most others. It turns out that trying to bust out 30 as fast as possible leads to failure much earlier than if you pace yourself.
To get to the 10 minute mark, I had to hit 1 muscleup every 20 seconds, which I more or less did.
Tonight I thought I’d try and break that PR. My goal was to get 1 muscle-up every 15 seconds. By doing so, I’d get down to 7 and a half minutes total – something to truely be proud about, I know…
So did I do it?? Nope… Video evidence of my failure at around the 20 mark to follow…
Sofia Boutella – I can’t get enough of this girl’s moves. Sure, dancing can be learned, but there’s no doubt that Sofia has some seriously raw talent.
Sofia Boutella, half Armenian, half French, a life long dancer, landed a huge break in 2006, when she was picked up by choreographer, Jamie King, to represent femininity and Hip Hop for some Nike spots. I’m not usually one for commercials, but Nike has put together some pretty nice arrangements in the past and the Sofia Boutella spots follow suite.
While dance generally categorizes under art, dance also epitomizes true athleticism. Strength, coordination, flexibility, endurance – all key to the movements that can sometimes literally take our breath away.
Sofia Boutella – “can you honestly tell me, I’m not an athlete?”
The pic above can be grabbed from here.
Tonight I did a workout consisting of 5 rounds of 10 burpee-pullups and 5 135lb push jerks. Now, keep in mind that I’ve done workouts consisting of 150 pullups before. I’ve also done workouts consisting of 150 burpees before. But let me tell you that 10 burpee-pullups and I was surprisingly a little winded.
Burpee-pullups are what they sound like – a burpee, followed by a pullup.
If you’re not sure what a burpee is, here’s a good video, courtesy of crossfit: http://tr.im/dmlt.
So i searched online to find some more people doing burpee-pullups and came across this video. 100 burpee-pullups for time. Holy shit.
Good god… I have some work to do.
Via Twitter: On March 22, 1992 (his 19th Birthday), Valery completed 130 Jerks as part of his record-breaking performance of 318 reps.
I spent a bit more time on WOD Timer and fixed some issues.
Added features include:
Finally, I’ve also built an AIR version of WOD Timer. This version can be installed locally on you computer. Follow the instructions below.
To install locally, you will need to first install the Adobe AIR runtime. You can download and install the runtime from the Adobe Air download page:
As always, leave feedback in the comments section!
Interval training is huge. It’s a fantastic way to increase the efficiency of a workout and develop increased cardiorespiratory ability and work on metabolic conditioning.
Unfortunately, intervals can be somewhat difficult to time. This is especially the case when you don’t have someone dedicated to be the official “time keeper” for a workout.
In programs such as Crossfit, for example, a workout like the infamous “Fight Gone Bad” requires numerous rounds of numerous sets of intervals. Using a wrist watch or normal digital timer is not necessarily an effective way to time the workout, even when someone is the designated timer.
I figured that having some sort of automated timer would be super nice to have. So I decided to experiment a bit and came up with the WOD Timer.
This is my first Adobe Flex app, so despite the seeming simplicity of the concept, creating this thing admittedly took a while. At the moment it’s in “beta”, but the feature list includes:
I’m looking at future enhancements to include things like,
Some feedback on what you would think would be good features for a WOD timer would be appreciated. Let me know in the comments!
I have to say I’m super skeptical of this. In September 2008, there was an apparent shortage of bananas across Japan due to Japanese opera singer, Kumiko Mori, announcing on national television that she lost 15 lbs in 6 weeks by dieting as follows:
- Eat 1 or more raw bananas for breakfast, with room temperature water
- Eat whatever you want for lunch and dinner
- Dinner must be eaten by 8pm
- No dessert
- Eat until satisfied, not stuffed
- Drink only water
- An afternoon snack is fine by 3pm – chocolate or cookies is allowed (although donuts are frowned upon)
- Exercise is optional
Huh… You don’t say. Maybe the Japanese have super high metabolisms, but this is an absolutely terrible diet.
First the obvious – glad to see that donuts are frowned upon, but chocolate and cookies are not really ok mid-afternoon snacks. Then the whole banana concept. Bananas are nutritious – there’s no doubt of that as they’re loaded with vitamins and minerals. However, with an average banana containing over 27g of total carbohydrates, over 14g of sugar, and barely a notice of protein or fat, a bunch of bananas in the morning are hardly a good day starter for a weight loss diet.
The high sugar and low protein contents of the banana throw hormones around a bit, causing an insulin spike, potentially lending a hand to weight gain, rather than loss. The chocolate and donuts in the afternoon certainly don’t help and between those and the bananas, the whole diet would seem to keep insulin levels high throughout the day.
This is, of course, my opinion. I have never tried the morning banana diet and don’t intend to. However, I can’t imagine it being an effective way to lose weight.
Judge for yourself – visit the morningbanana.com to find out more.
Super good interview on NPR with Mark Rippetoe, talking about losing some weight and tackling the New Years resolution of getting fit. Rippetoe is the author of “Starting Strength”, a phenomenon of a book in the weight lifting world, garnering praise world wide for it’s complete examination of the best way to exercise. A great quote from the interview:
“Learn how to squat. It works more muscles than any other exercise, it’s harder, it’s a longer range of motion, and it will make more difference in your appearance over a shorter period of time than any single thing you can do. You have to learn how to squat correctly. Correctly is below parallel.”
Listen to the whole thing on over at NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/wwrd/2009/01/what_would_rob_do_to_lose_10_p.html
Or just listen to it here:
