June 2007
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The integrity and health of your soft tissue is vital not only to continued progress, but also to maximizing your longevity as an athlete, whether competitive or recreational. If you are plagued by aches, pains or limited range of movement, you may have significant scar tissue or adhesions that may improve with various modalities and interventions. One of the very best modalities is Active Release Technique.
Pictured is Dr. John Fragoso.
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Arguments from Eric Cressey and Mike Boyle on why yoga and pilates don't deserve significant time commitments by athletes.
Eric Cressey
Mike Boyle
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Lifting straps are cheap and handy (no pun intended). Styles range from threaded, like the IronMind straps on the left side of the photo, to simple sewn loops of nylon webbing or leather, to tied loops of nylon webbing. The decision among the styles is entirely personal preference. In general it's wise to limit their use to only when necessary to avoid leaving behind your grip strength—examples might be 3 position snatches, heavy pulls or deadlifts.
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Having trouble racking your cleans and getting the load off your hands and wrists? Try muscle cleans to focus on elbow movement around the bar and increase its speed and accuracy.
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Ross Enamait has loads of info on budget equipment and training on his site, RossTraining.com.
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FindTape.com is the place to go for quality athletic tape.
Non-Elastic Tape
Flexible Tape
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Turning off any blue-light-producing gadgetry such as TVs and computers and lighting candles prior to bedtime may help you sleep. The red, orange and yellow light spectrum helps initiate the sleep-inducing hormonal response. Try not to fall asleep with the candles still lit and burn your house down.
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Relax! The Relaxation Response is a simple, quick, and not-too-new-agey way to relax a bit.
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Dr. Michael Eades does a great job of explaining ketosis on his blog. Read the full post here.
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Ky: Official Mike's Gym guard dog.
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Got yourself knocked up? Farmer's walking is an excellent exercise to keep during the late stages of pregnancy when nearly everything else has been dropped. It allows a full body loading without any jarring movements and even a nice metabolic challenge if performed uphill.
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The weight room and the new patch at UC Riverside, home of head strength & conditioning coach Josh Everett.
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There are a number of ways of wrapping your wrists for striking. Ringside has a great tutorial on one way here. Their Mexican-style wraps are the way to go.
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D-Balls are tough no- and little-bounce medicine balls good for slamming, throwing and otherwise abusing. As tough as they are, if the balls will be slammed extraordinarily frequently, slam them on rubber flooring or wood platforms instead of cement.
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Congratulations to Michael "Rutman" Rutherford of Bootcamp Fitness KC on the bootcamp group's 6th anniversary.
The Fitness Conduit
Bootcamp Fitness KC
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Leo San Juan, Catalyst Athletics:
Watch Video - Final Round
3 rounds of:
60 m driveway sprint
20 push press 40kg
20 pull-up
20 floor wiper 40 kg
Time: 17:09
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Consider wearing tall socks when performing the Olympic lifts or deadlifts. Chances are the bar will come in contact with the shins at some point, and in the battle between knurling and skin, skin will invariably surrender. Of course, knurling can sometimes overcome even the sock front line.
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This is not a hamstring stretch! While this position may generate some tension on the hamstrings, it should be obvious that the spine is doing the majority of the work. The pelvis has barely rotated anteriorly, forcing the lumbar spine to flex excessively.
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Functional strength is critical as we age. I recently watched a woman spend over an hour walking leisurely on a treadmill in a physical therapy office and then struggle to reach down and lift her purse from the floor. What activity do you expect to be more beneficial for her: more walking, or learning to deadlift even small weights?
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The newly updated Performance Menu media center.
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Soy appears not to be the remarkable health food it's been billed as by the industry. Quite the contrary, in fact: according to more and more research, soy consumption may contribute or cause a litany of health problems such as Malnutrition, Digestive distress, Thyroid dysfunction, Cognitive decline, Reproductive disorders, Infertility, Birth defects, Immune system breakdown, Heart disease and cancer. Read all about it in The Whole Soy Story.
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Check out Dr. Stephen Seiler’s Time Course of Training Adaptations. Don’t let the endurance slant scare you! The adaptations can describe most any training in many ways. Strength training causes initial biochemical and cellular changes (1st wave) but one must achieve remarkable efficiency to reach the top tier of strength athletics (3rd wave).
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What are the respective requirements of hip and ankle flexibility for full-depth squatting? Read about it on the CrossFit forum.
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Is it really healthy to try to eat like a cave man? Won’t you be deficient in many nutrients if you do not make grains and legumes the basis of your diet? Take a look at Professor Loren Cordain’s work that proposes a Paleolithic diet composed of modern foods.
As a fun experiment, use some nutritional software and start deleting veggies, fruit and lean meats and start adding bread, rice pasta and beans. Look at what happens to the nutritional quality of your diet with the addition of these foods.
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The barbell Turkish Get-up is a great way to increase the overhead stabilization challenge of the exercise.
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Emu: The other Red Meat.
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Artie Dreschler wrote a phenomenal book called The Weightlifting Encyclopedia. This ponderous tome covers everything from technique development to program design and various forms of periodization. The appendix covering anatomy and physiology is worth the price of the book. Even you powerlifters have much to gain from this work.
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What constitutes a full-depth squat? For some applications, simply breaking parallel with the thighs is sufficient, but this would be called appropriate depth, not full depth. Full depth means literally what the term implies: as deep as is physically possible to squat. Ultimately squat depth is determined by 1) the length of the femurs relative to the tib/fib, i.e. how far the hip joints can reach down from the knee; 2) the thickness of the upper and lower legs, i.e. how much meat is in the way of closing the inside angle of the knee to 0 degrees; and 3) balance in this smallest knee angle.
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Despite the embarrassing name and the fact that the promotional photos appear to have been taken between 1978 and 1982, a Theracane is a handy gadget for the lone owner of trigger points in otherwise unreachable locations.
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Issue 29 is now available. The June issue includes The Clean Pt 2, Body Flow for the Ground Game, Bodyweight Skill Integration, Hamstring Warm-up, Get Zerched, and Cooking With Scotty.
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