Don’t miss these great links!

I’m away on holiday this week, but please enjoy this set of links that I saved up while I was still in the country…

• Theory to Practice has a long and contemplative post about the conjugate method that is worth navigating if you have the time.  I also think that Louie Simmons is probably one of the most significant voices to have come out of the strength and conditioning industry in the last 25 years but I don’t think there will be many people lining up to disagree with that.
• Mike Reinhold has a post about what core stability training is really about. 
• The Science of Sport gets World-Cup-itis with an article about the implications of fatigue in football.  If you’re looking to assuage a guilty pleasure about the beautiful game but learn something at the same time, this could be the place for you… 
• I enjoyed reading this little series of posts (one, two and three) from Hollywood Kettlebells about an experience with Gym Jones, the training camp instigated by Mark Twight and famous for the transformations of the actors playing the Spartans in the film 300.
• I read with interest this post on IronManMagazine about bulking and its implications for fat gain.  I managed to put on a fair bit of fat the last time I took a concerted effort to get bigger and I’m keen not to repeat the same mistake again.
• Dan John has been working with an intern and it seems that said intern has learned an enormous amount from the great man.  I was going to quote some of it here but there was too much that was quotable.  You’ll just have to go and check it out yourself…
• Extreme Human Performance has done a round-table including Geoff Neupert (Olympic lifter), Mike Robertson (ex-Powerlifter and corrective exercise guru), Brett Jones (Kettlebell dude) and Frankie Faires (the-guy-behind-the-biofeedback-thing).  Definitely worth a read.  I completely agree with them that strength improvements and strict form are the key to the training aspect of weight gain, with the other half of the equation being eating until you feel ill…
• Mark Young asks “you feed your kids what?”  Just in case you didn’t get the message, he draws a picture, well, a flowchart actually, showing how normal people grow up to be fat people.  Then, just in case you really didn’t get the message, he digs out some photos of what reconstituted chicken looks like (hint: it’s not nice).  And then he really rubs it in by telling you what bits of the chickens they use (do chickens really have lips?).
• If you’re bored, this is a fun little sequence of Pacman versus Mario.
• If you’re bored but have a high threshold for the sort of thing that interests you, check out this interesting post about hindsight bias.  Essentially, we all make our memories up to suit ourselves and convince ourselves we’ve (largely) done the right thing…   
• Weightlifting Epiphanies has a trip report and an interview with Donny Shankle which is well worth checking out if Olympic lifting interests you…
• Nerd Fitness is going full-time as a commercial enterprise so if you’re bored enough to have read this far down the list, why don’t you pop over there and give him some support.  Don’t forget to say hi to him from me…
• A video has been released on YouTube featuring a new Disturbed track: Another Way to Die:

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