The Garage Gym Online

This is another round up of some of the great news and comment that has dropped into my Google Reader inbox recently.  Now that I’ve set up my Google Reader to pick up a couple of hundred different RSS feeds on a regular basis and group them into different categories, I don’t know where I’d be without it.  And the internet never fails to surprise and amaze me with its wonderful diversity…

• An interview with Doug Hepburn from 1954 probably gets my vote as my favorite article from the last week or so.  Doug comes out with some classic lines, including claiming a 22 inch arm “on anybody’s tape” and “three reps in the various exercises are all you need for size and strength”.  And in a moment of unguarded hero-worship, the interviewer describes Doug as being “a man who does actually have to turn sideways to fit through a door.”  Something to aspire to.
• Thinking about some cardio to keep the blubber off this winter?  This article about using a turbo trainer for cardio during winter is full of quite helpful tips.  I have used a turbo trainer to turn my road bike into an exercise bike for sprints from time to time.  These days I tend to just suck it up and go outside, though.  I tend to spend enough time in my garage as it is…
• Eggs are getting harder to peel.  I have noticed this since we started buying our eggs (about 7 dozen per week!) from the local farm shop to save pennies.  This article explains why.
• Only a week after my first hymn of praise to Google Reader, Robert Scoble (a.k.a Scobleizer) wrote a post explaining why he doesn’t use Google Reader anymore.  He says it’s mainly because of its slow speed and poor functionality.  There have been various responses, some agreeing, some disagreeing and some apoplectic.  I think his main issue is that he wasn’t using Google Reader for what it is designed for.  It is designed to stop you having to go to each and every website you like and read their daily articles.  It achieves this.  It isn’t really set up to share stuff with millions of people and it isn’t really for scanning headlines.
• I have always thought that endurance athletes had something slightly wrong upstairs and now that they are removing their toenails in order to avoid injury during long races, I feel slightly vindicated…
• Josh Hanagarne of World’s Strongest Librarian and I talked recently about being afraid of your workouts.  In this post, he talks a bit more about it. 
• This is a great example of where I want to be in 70 years time.  It might be swimming, it might be weightlifting, it might even be shot or discus.  But it won’t be sitting in front of the TV drowning in my own drool while wondering what it might have been like to be a contender.
• Mark’s Daily Apple groups together some of the modern fitness tests for entering various law enforcement and peace-keeping bodies.  This is probably the most depressing reading I did all week. 
• Nate Green goes over the reasons why garage gyms are so much better.
• This is a reproduction of the original report in the September 1973 issue of IronMan, about the Colorado experiment by Arthur Jones.  Save a copy while it’s there and next time somebody wants to talk about it, you’ve got it.  If you don’t know what it is, read it.
• This cartoon is funny and anything involving Star Wars always gets a vote in my book.
• Sometimes, the sheer talent of some people just takes my breath away.  It might be people like Doug Hepburn above, who achieved amazing lifts, or it might be this artist, who is currently drawing the Manhattan skyline from memory.
• I liked this paean to waiting.  Waiting for the early-adopter tax to be paid by the unwary masses and then moving in to purchase the same products for half the price is something we have been doing without thinking about it for a while now.
• I think everybody and their dog have now shared this video of a Hemingway lookalike blasting an anvil up in the air.  But it is exactly the sort of barefaced insanity that really makes me smile.  I wish that there were more people like this in my life.

Well that’s it for this week!  I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!

For a list of my key articles by category, please check out this index.

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