Rubber Match

Here's an example of a really simple but effective conditioning workout that can be done with just a beat-up old tractor tire.  These aren't hard to find.  I picked mine up for $50 on Kijiji.  If you have farms anywhere in your vicinity, I bet they have old tires that they'd be willing to part with quite cheaply.  Mine weighs about 350 pounds.  My sledgehammer weighs 12 pounds but you can experiment with different sizes.  Again...very cheap...maybe $10-15 the hardware store, and of course will actually work as a legit sledgehammer too if you need it for such.  This stuff will last forever.  I've used this tire a lot and it still has that new tire smell (well not really, but it looks pretty good still)


"Tire 300" workout:

10 rounds for time of:

10 x tire flips (bend down and "sumo" deadlift/clean the tire to chest level and then push it over on itself)
10 x sledgehammer smashes (pretty self explanatory...just hammer that big rubbery bitch!)
10 x box (tire) jumps (i.e. jump with two feet onto the rim of the tire and then off again)


Therefore, each round is 30 reps in total.  10 rounds of 30 reps is therefore a total of 300 repetitions.  Complete one round nonstop and then take as little rest as possible before moving onto the second round, etc.  I find the flips the hardest, so I start each round with them.  The order of the box jumps and smashes could of course be reversed.

It's a quick but challenging full-body workout.  And it's a damn lot of fun.  There's no science behind the 300 rep total.  It's kind of a rip-off of the GymJones benchmark workout for the film 300, and also mimics the kind of rep ranges you'd see in a CrossFit Fight Gone Bad-style WOD.  Something that most relatively fit people are going to be able to do in under 30 minutes, and that you can gauge improvement by shaving time of your last attempt of the same workout.

One tip: do the flips on a soft surface like grass (or shallow snow in the winter).  It helps in allowing you to get your fingers underneath to clean the tire from ground to chest level.  Concrete\asphalt makes it more difficult to get the initial grip...though not impossible.

Happy flipping!

Blast from the Past

I just stumbled across a poem that I wrote a long time ago....almost exactly 10 years to the day  (February 2004).  In the absence of making any kind of New Year's resolutions I thought that maybe I reflect on this and see if I'm being consistent with the kind of life I envisioned a decade ago, when I was a scraggly haired hippie, living on a farm and studying Latin poetry in graduate school.  A lot has changed obviously, but I think I still identify with the core values that I wrote about back then.  You have to get past the bad poetry, but I think i was kind of writing a manifesto of sorts on the idea of simplicity and authenticity.  As Kierkegaard wrote, "Whoever you are, eternity asks you just one thing: whether you have lived authentically or not."  The title refers to an ancient Greek political/philosophical concept roughly translated as 'self-rule', or what might be extrapolated to self-reliance or self-sufficiency (I was reading a lot of RW Emerson at the time). Some of this stuff is still what I'm trying to convey with this blog.  I.e. the real good shit in life (be that in the realm of fitness or more broadly) doesn't have to cost anything.  It isn't complicated or hard to grasp.  It's right in front of you at all times, if you care to see it.  I look at this poem now and I see a lot that still resonates with me today.  When I wrote this, those 'straw-haired children' were just a glimmer in my mind's eye, still many years off.  But nowadays, with them 5 and 3-years-old and growing so fast (although only one has blonde hair), I still can't think of a happier way to spend a day than sitting beside them, putting worms on hooks and tossing lines into the water.

Autarcheia

Split wood, blow life into woolen hands,

frosty beard.

Stalk deer in the crackling dawn

of November.

Study overnight cottontail triad prints in the soft powder,

piecing together the scene.

Drink Lapsang Souchong on a stump in the vernal woods.

Wade swift trout streams with your straw-haired children.

Gather cattail pollen by bicycle, shaking seedheads into Tupperware,

Bake golden bread.

Sprout mung beans and lentils in glass jars on the windowsill.

Build a stanchion from scrap wood,

To milk your goats.

Pick beets and kohlrabi,

Steam and eat with butter.

Gather acorns from the white oak, boil out the tannins

Several times.

Learn to carve wood like your grandfather.

Build wind turbines like your great-uncle did

In dust bowl Saskatchewan nineteen thirties,

Outta the rear axle of an old Ford van.

Learn the plants,

Gather mallows as Hesiod did, and lamb’s quarters,

Mint for headaches, wild ginger for the stomach,

Plantain and spotted touch-me-not for stings.

Clip fiery blossoms of staghorn sumac,

For sun tea, sweetened with honey from your hives.

Plant a Linden tree for the bees,

Learn the craft from Aristaeus,

Smoke from burnt sumac calms them.

Waft sunset clove cigarettes,

Reclining on porch steps.

Learn the language of birds,

Coverse with crickets in the dewy crepuscule.

Re-use everything.

Catch rainwater in beautiful glass vessels.

Save seeds.

Scribble poems on rafters,

Read Milton by firelight,

Watching wax drip from the candelabra.

Shudder beneath Orion

And the inky black of January skies

To glimpse chimney smoke and the brilliance

Of undulating snowbanks refracting the moonlight.

Make noontime love in the summer grass

Backs of your knees sweating.

Take long hesperial walks along dusty roads,

Holding your wife’s slender hand.

Feed your chickens

Grains and crushed eggshells, like your grandmother said to.

Cut lilac sprigs for the kitchen table

Stain your teeth violet

With wild grape wine

And howl at the coyotes.

Value simplicity.

- DB (2004)

Errr'day

This is gonna be a short post.  I just wanted to mention something that probably seems almost intuitive in most every field of human endeavour but perhaps get brushed aside as relates to exercise and fitness.  That is, if you want to get good at something, do that something every day.  Every. Single. Day.    

 

Like I said, this seems almost too simple and obvious.  If a person wants to get good at playing a musical instrument, they practice it every single day.  If you want to be a great painter, you’d better be painting some shit every day.  Wanna be in the NBA?  You’d better be working on your jump shot daily.  Oh and by the way, you still won’t be in the NBA, you pygmy, but at least you’ll have a good jumper. 

 

As an example, when I was in high school, I played guitar for at least an hour or two each and every day.  It wasn’t out of some grand desire to be a great guitarist.  I just really liked it, so I got in the habit of doing it regularly.  If I walked by the guitar, I would inevitably pick it up and play for a bit.  And I got quite good (not amazing, but pretty decent) in a relatively short amount of time.  These days, I might pick up my guitar once or twice a week.  And you know what…I’m no better than I was back in high school. 

 

Again, this all seems quite obvious.  But translated into the arena of fitness, the waters get all muddied.  People (myself included) get so focused on training splits, periodization schemes, fear of ‘overtraining’, etc. that it’s very easy to forget this most basic fact.  If you want to get excellent at something…do a lot of that thing.  So much of the dialogue around training and muscle-building talks about the ideal ratio of rest days to work days, the number of times you should train a body part or full body per week…push/pull, training/not-training through soreness, blah, blah, blah

 

And a lot of this makes sense.  In no way am I advocating that a person can be in the gym squatting 1RMs each and every single day…there’s a logical limit to this.  But one thing’s for sure, if you want to improve your squat, you damn well be doing a lot of squatting - as much as your body’s recovery abilities will allow. 

 

The best example I’ll use is with chin-ups.  For years I was stuck in the 12-18 sort of range for max number of strict chin-ups (no kipping).  On a good day, I could get into the upper teens but was never able to push past that.  I did all sorts of things…adding weights, longer rests, etc….but nothing gave me any indication that I was likely to push much past that threshold.  During this whole time, however, I was operating under that pervasive bodybuilding dogma that you don’t want to train body parts too often.  I.e., I would at most train pulling exercises like chin-ups maybe twice per week, sometimes only once, thinking that anything more would lead to overtraining. 

 

However, for the past month or so, I’ve been making sure to do chin-ups every single day.  Not a lot of them.  Just one set to (or almost to) failure.  Every. Single. Day.  I set a reminder in my Outlook calendar.  It prompts me to get up from my desk and go find a bar or overhang nearby (stairwells often work well) and crank out a set.  And you know what….it works.  Today I hammered out 26 straight.  Not an amazing number, but at 240lbs bodyweight it’s not bad either.  I’ve got 30 in my sights now. 

 

This extra chin-up regimen has no effect on other aspects of my training.  I still do all of my other usual stuff and longer workouts on a more infrequent basis.  I even do weighted chins once a week or so as part of an upper body push/pull workout, as well as ring muscle-ups once or twice a week.  The extra ‘daily’ chins take all of 2-3 minutes – hardly an inconvenience to my day – yet they’ve made all the difference.  The volume is so low that they don’t cause any kind of issues with DOMS or ‘overtraining’.  The only noticeable side effect is being able to do more chin-ups. 

 

The same thing applies to push-ups.  A while back, I got into a rhythm of finishing every day with a set of push-ups to failure, just before bed.  That led to pretty steadily increasing push-up numbers, getting up to the mid seventies.  And again it took hardly any time and the volume was so low as not to affect other aspects of training.  I’m currently experimenting with sprints.  I’ve traditionally done a ‘long-ish’ sprint workout once every week or so.  The past week, I’ve been doing a quick series of between 5 and 10 roughly 100-yard repeats on my lunch break.  Again, this is not very scientific (I use a parking garage and don’t formally measure the course) and takes virtually no time (maybe 5 minutes, including rest breaks between).  It’s too early to tell if it’s made me faster, and difficult to gauge progress without someone there timing me, but I’m hoping to be able to feel the improvements to my quickness. 

 

So there you have it.  I feel as if I’m the purveyor of perfectly obvious advice.  Nothing groundbreaking here.  If you wanna get good at something, do it every day.  Now if I can only translate my own advice into my writing, these blog posts are gonna get a whole lot more frequent…and potentially a little bit better too. 

Not What the Tree Was Designed For

My office recently moved locations. Part of adjusting to this has meant that, over the first few week, I’ve been trying out new methods of bike commuting, exploring the running routes and walking paths around the new building and looking for ways that I can incorporate exercise into my workday.  One of the first things I was looking for was a good location to put up gymnastics rings.  I’ve written previously about what a quick, cheap and effective tool these things are for lunch hour workouts.  I was fortunate enough that my former office had a park right across the street, home to both a swing set and several trees with branches that were the right height and roughly horizontal. My new building has no such convenient swing set but, after a little bit of looking around, I was finally able to locate a suitable tree that was large and sturdy enough and had an accessible branch around which it’d be possible to loop my rings.

One day the other week, I decided to bring the rings and give it a try.  Everything went fine – I put the rings up, headphones on, hammered out an initial set of muscle-ups and then took a break before the next set.  While I was waiting, a guy walking down a nearby (maybe 15-20 yards) staircase was trying to catch my eye so I took off the headphones.  Turned out he wanted to know where I got the rings and we got into a brief conversation about using them and different exercises they could be used for, etc.  All in all, nice guy, good chat – he left and I turned back around with the intent of doing my second set when all of a sudden I see a security guard walking toward be on the sidewalk below (the tree was on a little hill, maybe 20 yards from a sidewalk and parking lot).

“Excuse me sir but do you have authorization to use that tree?”  The question was so ridiculous that it took me a bit off guard.  I work in a massive government department so I’m used to absurd bureaucracy, but I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.  Was it the tree, whose authorization I required?  The Prime Minister? The Queen perhaps, as our formal head of state?  I responded, perhaps a bit dickishly, that no, I hadn’t submitted a formal briefing note asking for authorization to use a tree branch at lunchtime to exercise.  He didn’t get the joke and proceeded to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to use the tree in “that way” (sounds perverse, I know).  I tried to show him my security pass in an attempt to assure him that I did indeed work in the building and wasn’t just someone off the street.  It didn’t help however and we ended up getting into a lengthy argument on the subject.  I probably said a few things that I shouldn’t have, although I did manage to refrain from saying what was really on my mind (namely that, if he’d give exercise a try sometime, perhaps he wouldn’t be so morbidly obese).  Unfortunately, after arguing for a few minutes it became clear that, even if there weren’t going to be any great repercussions (I had suggested he call the police), I realized that he wasn’t going to leave and my workout was basically shot.  The chance of finishing my remaining sets with any sort of intensity with this guy just standing there staring at me was about as likely as (quoting Bill Maher) trying to maintain an erection while the cat walks across the keyboard.

So I took down the rings, packed up my bag and told the guy that I wanted to talk to his boss and see something in writing (some sort of policy) that prohibited the use of tree branches for exercise.  As I was packing up, one nearby onlooker, out for a smoke break on a balcony above, gave me a sympathetic nod and shouted how ridiculous it was and how he hoped I’d be victorious in my appeal.  It made me feel a bit better.  At least not everyone’s a tool.  We went to the security office, where I spoke to someone else who wasn’t able to give me any better information, other than a definitive “well, you just can’t do that”.  Ultimately I managed to get them to call someone from the building property management office.  Not to name names, but the complex in which I work may or may not be managed by a certain Montreal-based company with alleged ties to a North African dictatorial regime.  Perhaps that predisposed the conversation which followed...

It took another 10 minutes of waiting before two people came down to see me.  By this point, I had already more than exhausted my lunch break, but I figured that I may as well keep going out of principle (even though I had decided that, in the future, I’d just walk a few minutes down the road to the parkland along the riverbank and find a tree there).  The building property manager that I spoke to was a mindless automaton.  He parroted his response to me without any regard for the specific situation or any willingness to think outside the box.  There were concerns that I could damage the tree (ridiculous, as the tree was thick and probably 75 feet tall – it didn’t even register my presence!).  Apparently there were liability concerns.  I could hurt myself.  I tried to argue that I could just as easily hurt myself walking down a stairwell or slipping on a wet floor in the foyer.  On the rings I was perhaps a mere foot or two off the ground (soft, spongy woodchips even!).  Surely as a worker here, I was covered by standard workplace insurance?  What about the fitness club in the building?  Why were people allowed to exercise in there and not on a tree?  His response was comical.  “The machines in there are designed for that purpose – the tree was not designed for that.”

WTF!!!!  For what exactly was the tree ‘designed’?  Was this actually an invitation for a religio-philosophical discussion on the teleology of a tree?!  Did he really want to discuss the theological underpinnings of man’s dominion over nature?  Perhaps the evolution of our species as largely frugivore primates with opposable thumbs, ideally suited to tree-climbing?  Perhaps even the crazy hypothesis that trees evolved scalable branching structures to encourage species such as ours to seek shelter and sustenance, thus providing a vector for the transmission of their seeds (via fruit and nuts) to other locations.  This all would have been interesting fodder for conversation, had I been speaking to a reasonable and flexibly-minded human being.  But of course I was not. Trees were apparently not ‘designed’ for exercise – not like the plethora of ill-conceived, bulky and useless machines that populate the building’s (fee for service, of course) fitness centre.   Employees are not prohibited from, and are actually encouraged to subject themselves to Smith machines, leg presses, stability balls and countless other damaging and ineffective exercise paraphernalia in that context….but god forbid a tree!  I’m guessing all that fitness centre members need is a signed waiver saying that they’re medically ‘fit’ to attempt physical exercise.  No one is showing them how to exercise properly.  They’re turned loose on a gym full of questionable equipment and assumed to be safe.  The chances of someone doing short or long term damage to themselves there is exponentially greater than the chances of me hurting myself on a tree.  I even suggested to the property manager that I could sign a waiver, absolving them of any responsibility should I hurt myself.  It of course fell upon deaf ears.  

Having wasted enough time, I concluded the conversation by simply asking where the property line officially ends, ensuring that next time I find a tree just beyond it.  Of course, if I’m feeling in the mood for a little civil disobedience, maybe I’ll try another tree on the premises and see how long it takes ‘the man’ to get me again.  Or maybe just a set of push-ups in my cubicle, or the sidewalk out front....yeah that’d be safer...oh, except that’s obviously not what the ground was designed for.....

Pacing - Hiking with kids

Having the day off work, I took both of my kids hiking last Monday.  My daughter has been obsessed with waterfalls lately, so we drove about 40 minutes out of the city to the Eardley escarpment of Gatineau Park, to do one of my favourite local hikes at Luskville Falls.  I love the scenery out there – for some reason it always reminds me of the mountains in South Korea and brings back a lot of good memories of hiking around the forests there.  

The last time I had done the trail was in the Fall and I had been able to get away and do it alone, without the kids.  I had taken them before, but they had been young enough to ride in those backpack kid-carrier devices.  This was the first time that I figured they were both mobile enough to hike on their own.  There are some pretty steep sections and I had pretty low expectations about how far we would get.

Was I ever pleasantly surprised!  We managed to hike probably 2-3 kilometres up and back, with much of that steep enough that the kids had to scamper over rocks on all fours.  I don’t think I heard a complaint the entire time.  We usually go for hikes on trails that are much flatter and easier for little feet to navigate, but still I’m usually well prepared for a chorus of “My legs are tired”, etc.  It didn’t happen this time.  I don’t know exactly what it was but they really rose to the challenge.  No complaints at all.  My only guess is that beforehand I had talked it up to them as a bit of a challenge and that it was okay if we didn’t get very far because it was a pretty steep climb – I think that element of a challenge really made them want to do it even more.  Goal-setting starts by age 3 apparently!

Of course, we kept a pretty slow pace, but it turned out to be a nice change.  Like I said, the last time I did the trail I had done so alone and I recall it was in the Fall and I had stopped in just before dusk on a road trip up to the Ottawa Valley.  I had set a pretty quick pace that time because I had wanted to get up and back before the mountain got really dark and I’d end up tripping and falling on the way down.  While that was great too, this time the slow pace set by the kids really forced me to relax and appreciate the beautiful day, the scenery, the smells and the small details.

Once the first acorn was found, the hike turned into a roving quest to find others.  We’d take 10 steps, scamper over a few rocks and then find another.  Each one had to be carefully examined for quality and either kept or discarded.  Despite my reassurances that only white oak acorns were usually palatable enough to eat, after boiling away the bitter tannins, we collected pocketfuls of the things, with my assurances that we’d try boiling these ones when we got home…just to see.

We took frequent breaks.  In addition to giving little legs a chance to rest, these opened my eyes to a few things I might have otherwise missed.  As the kids sipped their water bottles on one rocky outcropping, I caught the scent of sweetfern and noticed some clumps growing nearby.  I picked a bit, mentioning to my daughter that it made good tea.  To which she responded, “Is there anything on this mountain that we can just eat without cooking it first?”  I told her, a bit optimistically, that we might find some berries, but I’m not sure she was convinced.

Lo and behold, another 10-15 minutes up the trail, there was a little narrow, overgrown side-trail that led down to the stream atop the waterfall.  In August, it wasn’t much more than a trickle but the kids wanted to go see it.  Initially I said no, as I was a little worried about them making it down the steep footing, but I reconsidered and, holding my youngest really closely, we made our way slowly down to the water.  There was a little pool of water where they could take off their shoes and cool their feet.  We saw a little frog perched on the moss and watched him for a while.  And then, as they were splashing around a bit, I spotted a few small blueberry bushes along the water’s edge.  There were only about 10 small berries on the bushes but it was enough to mean I hadn’t been a liar earlier on.  I divided them (equally of course or it would have been tragic!) between both kids.  I thought to myself that, had I pushed on as I initially wanted to (and most certainly would have if I had been solo), I would never have gone down this little trail and would have never found the blueberries.  It was the slow, meandering pace, set by my kids that had led us to them.

We went a little bit further and then I made an executive decision to start heading back.  Again, it was me, thinking about the steep descent, that spurred this, not any complaints from the kids. They wanted to keep going.  We had a few minor slips on the way down, but overall they were very sturdy and cautious and we got back down with minimal scrapes and injury.  I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day if I tried.  And a big part of that was because I had to slow down and adapt to a child’s pace.  There’s a broader lesson in there somewhere…assuming I can remember to apply it.