For the last few weeks, I’ve had so many great links saved up in my Google Reader that they’ve spilled over into this week’s post. It might no longer be timely, but none-the-less, there is some great stuff in here.
- Keats Snideman takes Bret Contreras through the functional movement screen (correction: a series of table assessments) and records the results on Bret’s blog.
- Brad Pilon goes through the list of things that make you fat. Ultimately, it’s just easier to eat less. I couldn’t agree more.
- How do people achieve success? I have met a number of entrepreneurs over the years. It’s a function of my day job. I can honestly say that this post gets closer to describing the magic formula than anything I’ve read before. To summarise it (in case you are too lazy to read it!) “in many instances, the likelihood of an individual succeeding (no matter what the goal) will be dependant on how uncomfortable that person is prepared to get and for how long.” How uncomfortable are you prepared to be?
- Ayn Rand is an interesting character and has written some startling fiction over the years. Modern Paleo is clearly as fascinated as I am because they’ve reproduced his 1964 Playboy interview here.
- Ron Harris has written about the experience he had using higher rep training for three week deload periods between longer periods of heavy lifting. The bottom line: he found his joints and tendons appreciated it and he didn’t lose any muscle mass or size.
- Jerry Brainium looks at the importance of chewing your food properly and its impact on your health. He does a summary of several studies that show the benefits in taking some time over a meal rather than bolting it down.
- And speaking about food, Paul has shown us what the real food pyramid should look like. Hint: grains aren’t at the bottom of the pyramid…
- And here is an overhead press double-bill: there has been some discussion on a forum about an article Doug Brignole wrote called The Case Against Overhead Presses. Doug responds to the criticism here. Both articles are well-thought out and I enjoyed reading them. Trouble is, I want to get better at overhead pressing and I haven’t figured out a way to do that without overhead pressing!
- And Eric Cressey weighs in on swimming for pitchers. I was delighted to see that I agreed with Eric 100% about the problems and challenges swimmers face in keeping sound shoulder health. Basically, it seems that swimmers and pitchers often have many of the same shoudler dysfunctions and getting swimmers to pitch or pitchers to swim is a recipe for disaster. Next time someone asks me to throw them something, I guess I’ll just have to say no…
- Mike Robertston explains why distance running isn’t so good for you. He reviews some studies and concludes that: anywhere from 45-65% of runners will be injured in a given year, running mileage seems to be heavily associated with injury, previous injury is a great predictor of future injury, and new runners seem to be at increased risk when compared to older runners (not necessarily in regards to chronological age, but “running” age).
- I haven’t really done a proper Star Wars link recently, apart from the YouTube video that I linked to last week. But here is an amusing set of cereal boxes, featuring Star Wars characters from various films.
- I came across the band Hellyeah for the first time recently. I think I am going to have to get some for the gym. This is what they sound like:
Hellyeah, hellyeah I like it!!
T’is good.
It’s on my list of things to buy… right after a load of new kettlebells…
Your running link is interesting. I have always founding middle distance running (which I consider 3-10miles) “easy”. What I mean by easy is that I very quickly get into it, very quickly loose weight, suffer little hip and knee pain and have been injuried only on a few occasions across the years, typically during a return to running after a lay off (for whatever reason). That said, I thrive on a complex carb diet!
Indeed. Sometimes I think weights-orientated trainers are just getting their own back for all the running they were made to do at school
More seriously, I don’t think your experience marks you as an outlier necessarily, though, as far as MR’s conclusions are concerned. Reading the article, I interpreted that if you (a) built up to running your current distances over a steady period of time and (b) have naturally good running mechanics then that would put you in the “least likely to be injured” category.
Hey Chris! That wasn’t the FMS we filmed; it was a series of table assessments. The FMS is different.
Thanks, Bret. Guess I need to read about the FMS a bit more!
I’ve corrected the reference now.