The folks over at RingTraining.com have unveiled a nice looking tool to help ease into advance ring strength moves, the Elite Strength Trainer. There’s good info there, and this was in the e-mail announcement:
I just wanted to let everyone know that the Elite Strength Trainer is now available. It’s selling at a $40 discount till January 1st. It’s a new tool that helps train for the cross, maltese and other advanced ring strength exercises. It works by adjusting the leverage placed on your arms in 10 increments. As you get stronger, you simply move up to the next level. It brings the direct, linear progressions available to weightlifters into the world of bodyweight exercise.
A few months ago, I took a prototype to the national team training center. I met with Kevin Mazeika, head coach of the US Olympic Team, and Jordan Jovtchev, 5-time Olympian, and they both offered me some feedback on the design. Within 15 minutes of setting them up in the gym, I had almost a dozen national and Olympic caliber gymnasts from the American and Japanese teams try it out. They had all used equipment in the past that worked on the same principle, but unanimously preferred the design of the Elite Strength Trainer. They liked that it had a lot of adjustment points, it was quick to adjust and easy to set up and comfortable to use. This is actually a tool that is quite important in the training of a lot of top-level gymnasts. For some of them, it is just for conditioning. But they already have short arms, so it’s almost like they’re already using it! For others, it’s the safest way to get back strength after an injury or to develop new strength skills. For the rest of us, it is a great way to safely and effectively incorporate advanced ring strength moves into our training.
Sorry not to let you know about the sale earlier (which will probably be over by the time you read this), but I didn’t get the announcement until 12/30.
Alobravo has a fun collection of videos up, The 6 Sickest Playground Workouts You Can’t Do (no arguments here). I’d seen the Bartendaz one before, but the rest where new to me. The Hannibal video is unreal. The guy does some exercises I’ve never even imagined before. (via SttB)
And here I thought the one-arm chin was a difficult skill… How about one finger? Also, Jim at Beast Skills turns in some great work on the pegboard, including a muscle-up. That guy is a machine. (both via SttB)
A buddy of mine encouraged me to hit up YouTube for some Roberto Carlos clips, and I’m glad I did. First up is the physics-defying free kick against France HQ. It must have been disbelief that kept the goalie pretty much pinned in place. That post should not have been fair game. This top 10 goals compilation is also pretty good (alas, not in high quality). I think the goal at 2:57 is actually more impressive than the free kick, and if the soccer itself isn’t proof of his athleticism, check out the air on his celebratory leap at 0:40.
Who knew you could structure an entire blog around breathing? More helpful for sports (or at least more concise) is Breathe Right and Win. Very useful for me, as I do way too much breath-holding when working out. Related, and unfortunately incurable by Googling alone, I’m also too stupid to count my reps and breathe at the same time, if the reps and the breaths aren’t synchronized one-to-one. (via jeters)
Very cool indoor caving setup, cobbled together with eye-bolts and hinges. Great pulling workout, and that knee-over-the-arm move is clever (makes it look easy, until you consider the grip strength involved). ‹via cr›
I love these little aggregator coincidences: this afternoon The Science of Sport puts up a good piece on swimming’s credibility crisis, and this evening I catch this NewScientist article on a new nanotech fabric that is unwettable (too bad the word “waterproof” is already in play). You can leave it in water for hours and it comes out bone dry.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm giving up one of my sites, and as my other sites are built on top of that site's architecture, I need to move them. I've migrated all the content to the Textpattern CMS. The biancolo.com domain is sticking around, while the leanandhungryfitness.com domain will be folded, with all that content now under biancolo.com, although as a distinct category, so if you want just the fitness stuff without the rest you can continue to do that. The new site is VERY rough around the edges (I'm running TXP with pretty much default everything, including the skin), and I expect to gradually improve it over the coming months. I wanted to get back to posting though, so didn't want to wait until it was done. Please forgive the work in progress!
The RSS feeds are already pointed over, so hopefully that transition should be seamless (although you might get the current batch of articles in your readers again).
Anyway, my personal site is still at biancolo.com and now includes all the fitness stuff, plus anything else that I find interesting. Here's the fitness-only category. Again, RSS feeds are available for both.
Thanks in advance for your patience, I'm sure I have plenty of bumps and warts to smooth out.
Coach Sommer, who you may remember from articles like Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning or Developing the Hanging Leg Lift, has a post up on a very interesting “prehab” exercise, Wall Extensions:
Wall Extensions are a relatively simple movement that can be quite effective in treating what I have occasionally referred to as “Bench Press Syndrome”; or a greatly reduced range of motion throughout the shoulder girdle due to an incorrectly designed exercise program.
Just tried these, there is only one way to describe my performance: I sucked. Which is totally unfair, since I don’t bench, and work harder on pullups than pushups. Sigh, stupid computer job. Definitely something to add to my regular stretch breaks.
Also, very exciting, his long-awaited book on gymnastic strength training for the layperson, Building the Gymnastic Body is available for preorder! As you can see from the link, you can also buy it with DVDs and/or rings if you want.
I remember, quite a few years ago now, watching DoG play at Regionals. I still remember Billy Rodriguez exhorting a defender from the sidelines, “where do you want to make him go?”
As one who was (and still is, if I let my mind wander) inclined to play defense by merely chasing my guy around, this was revelatory. “Where do I want to make him go“?! What a concept!
Now, years later, Josh Mullen has put up a post laying out how that works in practical terms: Good Defense Happens BEFORE the Disc Moves. Perhaps not as pithy as “where do you want to make him go”, but much more helpful.
Sorry about the dearth of posts, I’m in a bit of a transition period…
First, a link: Mackey has a great post on squatting up. Go. Read. Watch THE CLIP.
Second, to the Nationals-bound Ultimate players out there, good luck in Sarasota! Wish I could be there, but now I get to join in the trick-or-treat fun. As my daughter told me going into Regionals, “it’s a win-win!” And right she was.
Finally, do me a favor? Drop me a line if you find this site useful. You can post here or e-mail me. I’m handing over my oldest, dearest site to a fellow ready to give it a long overdue update, and this site piggybacks on it’s framework, so will have to change one way or another. Anyway, I’ve always been curious about who my readers actually are, so if you’re willing (no pressure, of course), just a quick ping: your sport, your team (if applicable), and what you’ve picked up from here. Thanks!
Nice little piece in The NY Times on the importance of relaxation to performance. They site the Michael Phelps example, of course, but I’d point to the Usain Bolt/Asafa Powell example as the more glaring one. As Anthony Lane put it in his opening paragraph to his excellent piece on the Olympics:
The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track, and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to do—the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small boy in need of a pee. Bolt’s nerves were less twitchy than that. Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive for rum and Coke.
Lane’s first article is even better. Read ‘em both (although it’s a bit after-the-fact now).
Outrageous. Maybe the trans fat companies will be next.
Crossfit has launched the latest version of their journal: CrossFit Journal 3.0. For me, the most compelling piece of this offering is that a $25 subscription gets you full access to all their back issues (which were formerly $5 each to buy). Definitely going to look into that after the season.
Everything Jim at Beast Skills posts warrants a link, and his one arm push-up tutorial is no exception. Great stuff, as always.
- A little pick-me-up to watch before your next workout: Nike Courage. I can’t link to the high-quality version directly, so don’t forget to click the “watch in high quality” link by the lower-right corner of the video.
- Interesting summary of the health benefits of eating coconut. Caught my eye because it was only a couple days ago I saw this post lauding coconut water as “nature’s perfect sports drink”.
Thanks to reader llimllib for pointing out the Women’s 100m Final. Like the men’s race, totally worth watching for Shelly-Ann Fraser’s dominant performance, but even better is the joy she expresses in her post-race celebration and interview. Makes me happy just watching her.
- First, I have to express my awe at the 100 meter dash. If you didn’t see it live, you must watch Usain Bolt’s world record run. Sweet Mother of God. His semifinal heat looked like that too; so relaxed, coasting to victory. Imagine how much he would have beaten the record by if he hadn’t started celebrating 15 meters (!) out. Also, definitely watch the super-slow-mo version. I love watching the timer count off the tenths in the background as he runs by, celebrating. Related, here’s Tyson Gay’s hamstring injury footage. It’s like a NASCAR crash. I knew those guys generated tremendous power, but I didn’t truly appreciate how much until watching it go very wrong. Looks nothing like one of my hamstring pulls. You’ll be prompted to install Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin to watch these. It’s basically Microsoft Flash (like we needed another rich media format).
- Admit it, Phelps has you thinking about getting into the pool. Tim Ferriss has a good post up on the Total Immersion program: How I Learned to Swim Effortlessly in 10 Days and You Can Too. My big obstacle is the inability to keep the water from going up my nose.
- Discover magazine: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sports Technology.
- Science stuff. Modern Forager on what happens when you fast: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
- More science stuff. Lyle McDonald on leptin: Part 1 and Part 2. Much more complicated than some of the recent popular press stories imply.
NSCA reports on an interesting study suggesting you can greatly reduce ankle sprain risk with stability pad training (PDF), especially if you’re in the high risk groups (overweight, and/or previous sprains).
