I found an interesting article about Long Beach.  This weekend they are unveiling the first protected bike lanes west of New York City. For cycling enthusiasts, downtown Long Beach offers bike rentals conveniently located on the First Street Transit Mall, within easy walking distance of the gymnastics venue.  There are also dedicated bike paths along the shoreline and the nearby Los Angeles River.

In the two weeks leading up to JO Nationals, I’ll be tweeting some videos taken at the recent Region 1 Championships.  Be sure to follow on Twitter.

Blythe Lawrence was all over Japan’s Kohei Uchimura’s 94.90 at the Japanese Championships.  Good..night..nurse.  Here’s his line score… 15.85, 15.60, 15.20, 16.60, 15.75 & 15.90.  He easily has the world’s best AA score of the quadrennium.  With the exception of rings, those are all Olympic podiumesque numbers.  We wish this young man good health between now and next July.  The Olympics wouldn’t be the same without him.  Sadly, his teammate Koji Uematsu (world team member) tore his ACL just before the Japanese Championships.  His recovery timeline should put him in decent shape for 2012.  In the meantime, I have a feeling we’ll be in for quite another show at this year’s Worlds.

Cal Gymnastics Forever sent out another update, after their meeting with the incoming Chancellor John Wilton.  It sounds encouraging, and it was mentioned that philanthropist Doug Goldman pledged $160K (spread over 8 years), contingent upon four other donors making a similar pledge.  I have a strong feeling that the Cal men will receive at least a one-year reinstatement, which would bode well for a long-term deal.  Cal’s recruiting efforts have already been screwed for next season, but at least they have plenty of fuel in the tank to be highly competitive, if not title contenders.

In a new segment, which I hope you’ll like, is our new offering of providing links to the past week’s interesting articles on fitness and nutrition.  The first link (Is Sugar Toxic?) is a must read.  Disclaimer:  I do not have a professional nutritional/fitness background, but I do have a well-informed bias on the chosen subject matter.

Health Links of the Week:

Is Sugar Toxic?

What’s the Single Best Exercise?

Low Carb Diet May Reverse Kidney Failure in People with Diabetes

Weight Loss:  The Futility of the Exercise

Interesting charts showing avg. daily per capita calories available from U.S. food supply over the past 40 years.  It can be surmised from this chart that the additional fat availability consists mainly of unhealthy vegetable oils.

Quaker Oats for Breakfast, Diabetes for Lunch?

HDL and Immunity

How to raise HDL

Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (Silent Epidemic of Nutritional Imbalance)

What are “Normal” Triglycerides?

Happy Easter and Chag Sameach!

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Wolf’s solid background in biochemistry lends serious credibility to his convincing argument.  He nicely explains how the body processes and digests protein, carbohydrates and fats in layman’s terms, sprinkled with dabs of “geekspeak” and good humor.  While the paleo community is not necessarily harmonious in all aspects of the diet/lifestyle (though they usually do not sweat the little differences), they are generally in agreement on the big thing.  The big thing is avoiding grains (especially wheat) and gluten.  One of the little differences is the consumption of potatoes and dairy products.  Wolf hedges on eggs somewhat, but qualifies his stance with his recommendation that those with an autoimmune condition should not eat them.  Otherwise, he says to go for it, and recommends omega-3-enriched eggs.  Purists would recommend the pastured variety, cooked in virgin coconut oil or pastured butter, of course.

Healthy fats:

• Virgin coconut oil
• Palm oil
• Butter
• Ghee (clarified butter)
• Tallow
• Lard
• Olive oil (in moderation/better not to cook with it)

Fats to avoid (partial list):

• Corn oil
• Canola oil
• Sunflower oil
• Safflower oil
• Peanut oil
• Cottonseed oil
• Soybean oil
• Wheat germ oil
• Margarine
• All hydrogenated oil

Many health-conscious people are familiar with the paleo diet, but stubbornly stick to their choice of opting for allegedly healthy carbs like whole wheat bread and whole wheat pasta.  A lot of these people have already done away with processed foods, controlled their sugar, increased their intake of N-3 oils, reduced their intake of N-6 oils and have started buying grassfed beef and free range chicken.  But as they do more research, more and more people are deciding to try the paleo diet.  The diet is so simple; yet removing grains, the ubiquitous substance filling every corner of the modern diet, is radical indeed.

One thing is certain, the paleo diet can be tailored to those involved in high-level athletic pursuits like gymnastics.  The amount of carbohydrates can be adjusted upwards, but only if they are sourced via fruits and vegetables.  The non-athletes striving for weight loss would need to be more vigilant in limiting their carbs, especially fruits.

<Click here to see a list of encouraged foods and those to avoid>

Wolf provides easy-to-follow dietary guidelines, meal plans and a list of the necessary bloodwork protocols to dictate to your doctor.  The additional items he adds to the normally prescribed lipid panel tests are necessary to chart your progress.  Cholesterol testing is important, but a standard test is incomplete without knowing whether or not your LDL contains large particles or small dense particles (large fluffy particles are good!).  Tests for glycated hemoglobin and C-reactive protein are the other critical add-ons for your bloodwork.  The former measures how much sugar sticks to your red blood cells, and can tell you much about your nutrition and lifestyle.  The latter is a significant marker for systemic inflammation.

He also goes into great detail about how stress and the lack of sleep (increase in cortisol) interfere with good health.  Wolf’s status as a renowned strength and conditioning coach in Northern California lends much credence to his lengthy chapter on ancestral fitness.  The overarching philosophy of the paleo diet and lifestyle emphasizes our early ancestors’ active and vigorous lifestyle as hunter-gatherers.  He wraps things up nicely with a chapter on supplements where he carefully explains why he recommends only a handful:  Vitamin D3, fish oil, magnesium, iodine, digestive aids, and probiotics.  After all, we should be able to obtain plenty of vital nutrients from food alone, but Wolf deftly explains why we may need a little help to varying degrees depending on the individual.

Much alternative medicine/nutrition gets pejorative treatment by those who continue to latch on to traditional evidence-based practice.  A paleo diet falls into a category on which even the other alternative diet “experts” cast aspersions.  And our government, the majority of the healthcare profession, and the pharmaceutical industry all stubbornly continue to prescribe a low fat/high-carb diet, when this prescription is contributing to, and is arguably directly responsible for, the expanding obesity epidemic.  The number of people who suffer from inflammatory and autoimmune diseases is staggering, and continues to grow exponentially.  Too many people are growing old well before their time.  Wolf makes a passionately credible argument for a paleo solution to all of this.  As he says, “Paleo works, but only if you do it. Most folks tackle this as a ‘diet’ initially, but it morphs into a viable, long term lifestyle.”

Nutrition journalists have yet to correctly describe Paleo.  They always miscontrue and mangle the nuances.  Paleo is not strictly a low-carb regimen for weight loss, though it can be.  Dairy, white rice and potatoes are OK if your body can handle it.  Paleo is not a cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all diet.  Quite simply, it can be described as just eating real food.  More descriptively, Paleo is the essence of avoiding the neolithic agents of disease–1) grains (wheat/gluten) 2) excess/added sugar (fructose) 3) bad industrial seed oils (canola, corn, sunflower, etc.).  By definition, Paleo is NOT a low-carb diet, but it can be.

Personally, we at StickItMedia began the paleo diet about two months before reading Wolf’s book, and we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to avoid breads, cookies, pasta, pizza, and even rice once you start.  Believe it or not, the cravings for these foods come from eating them.  Just remember that if you try the paleo diet, when you end up with the inevitably great results, don’t be surprised if your doctor ends up saying, “It must be something else!”

Here are links to some great paleo blogs:

Robb Wolf’s blog

Heart Scan Blog – published by Dr. William Davis, a renowned cardiologist and author of Track Your Plaque, which shows how to use the new heart scans to detect, track and control coronary plaque.

Free the Animal – published by Richard Nikoley, who dishes out a prolific amount of insightful, biting commentary.  Richard is famous for showing off his great food porn.

Whole Health Source – published by Stephan Guyenet, who studies and conveys time-tested strategies for achieving and maintaining health and well-being.  Stephan professionally studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation.

Mark’s Daily Apple – published by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint, a book that “pokes holes in flawed conventional wisdom about diet and exercise.

The Paleo Diet – a blog based on the lifework of Dr. Loren Cordain, acknowledged as a leading expert on the diet of our paleolithic ancestors.

Dr. Michael Eades’ blog explores he and his wife’s research of refining the science of weight loss.  Author of such best-selling books as Protein Power.

The Daily Lipid is the blog of Chris Masterjohn that explores uncovering the truth about cholesterol.

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In a recent interview posted by Gymnast.com , Olympic silver and bronze medalist Jonathan Horton was asked how much time he spends in the weight room. He replied, “I have never lifted a weight in my life.” Instead, he does things like sets of 50 handstand push-ups until his arms are so tired he can’t even move them. In the same interview, he recalled the time back in high school when he challenged three guys on the football team to an iron cross competition. Horton bet each player $20 they couldn’t hold the iron cross for one second. Only one could even pull himself up high enough to try the iron cross. When he tried to drop into the cross position, he dropped to the ground. Horton can hold an iron cross for 28 seconds.

The beauty of bodyweight exercises is that they can be done anywhere such as at home, at the office or on the road in a hotel room. Most can be done without any expense, while others can be done with minimal expense. The end result is that with a dedicated regimen, one can achieve remarkable fitness and well being. Flexibility and functional strength will increase dramatically. Functional strength is what is necessary to do everyday tasks such as lifting, carrying and pushing. Contrasting bodyweight exercises with weightlifting, the latter does not necessarily improve functional strength, certainly does not improve flexibility, and taxing one muscle or group repeatedly and not in concert with the body’s full, natural movement is often harmful over time to the joints.

A rather simple workout, such as the one made famous by Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning , is the so-called “Royal Court.” This workout consists of Hindu Squats, Hindu Pushups and a nose-to-the-mat back bridge. This workout alone, if done at least 3-4 days/week, can do wonders for the body. The squats work the largest muscles in the body (the legs), along with strengthening the lower back and abdominals. The deep breathing required for this exercise will greatly expand lung capacity and will make the chest more prominent. Hindu Pushups are a great upper body exercise that also stretches out the entire back and tones the abs. Like the squats, to achieve the maximum benefits of performing Hindu Pushups, deep breathing is required. Finally, the back bridge will work out practically every muscle in the body, with emphases on the neck, back, legs and abs. It takes a while to perfect the back bridge, because to do it right, you need to hold the nose-to-the-mat position for at least three minutes.

Of course, you can also add many other bodyweight exercises to your regimen, just to keep the routine from going stale. Throw in some handstands, handstand pushups or pull-ups and you will see some amazing improvements in upper body strength over time. We are highlighting the Royal Court, just to point out how such a relatively simple workout alone can greatly enhance one’s fitness. The key is to do it religiously, combined with a healthy diet.

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Related articles:

Bodyweight Exercise is Key to Functional Strength

Check Out This Great Bodyweight Exercise Resource

Recommended sites:

Lost Art of Hand Balancing

Bodyweight Basics

Did you catch the Men’s Gymnastics Rings final the other night? For anyone who has never mounted a pair of rings its hard to comprehend the difficulty of even basic moves.

But when you have, no matter your skill level or lack there of, you’ll have a greater understanding of what these Olympic athletes are going through.

It’s not just one move they do, but to string several highly difficult strength moves together flawlessly for close to a minute straight. Whew! Gets me tired just thinking about it.

But this Olympics saw something new. (Not 100% sure on this but I believe it was a first for the Olympics.)

That is the Victorian. Also known as an Inverted Maltese Cross.

Once thought to be an impossible move. Essentially it’s lying back so that you’re horizontal to the floor. You hold the rings near your waist with the arms not contacting the body. Kind of like a front lever except that your arms are to your sides instead of out front.

I have to give it to the French here. Their Danny Rodrigues performed the Victorian not once but twice in his routine. It wasn’t perfect but pretty close. Click here to watch Danny’s rings routine at the 2008 Doha World Cup.

My guess is that in 12 to 20 years it will become a common move in the Men’s Rings event at the Olympics.

Danny didn’t score too high overall but it was fun to watch. I’m glad he went for it.

We also had Jordan Jovtchev up once again most likely for his final Olympics. Unfortunately a couple mistakes put him out of the run for any medals.

That’s how it goes in the Olympics. To win you have to be close to flawless.

To get to that level takes years of practice. Hours and hours in the gym training for a few minutes in the spotlight. You probably don’t have aspirations of Olympic Gold but what’s important is to train to get better.

Fortunately for you, you can still have Jordan teach you how to build up the strength and skill in the Ring Strength DVD.

http://www.lostartofhandbalancing.com/ringdvd.html

Mastering the Victorian isn’t important. Improving from where you are is. Learning from the best is a big step in the right direction.

If you want crazy bodyweight strength than you should be on the rings. If you don’t have a pair you can get them at

http://www.lostartofhandbalancing.com/rings.html

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"The World’s Toughest Sport"

by Michael S. Yessis

reprinted from Men’s Fitness , March 1996, page 105

[3(f+s) + 2b] (v+c+i) * ÷ 3p = TOTAL SCORE

Deciding which sport is the world’s toughest is difficult. It requires knowledge and research. Time and patience. Science and the kind of math skills rarely seen outside a ninth-grade algebra class. Well, we have all of that, and we did our homework. We logged hours playing in the field. We interviewed elite athletes from former Soviet-bloc nations. We spent countless hours watching ESPN2. Eventually, we developed an exclusive formula – the formula – to determine the planet’s toughest sport.

Now, on to the chalkboard. First, we ranked 40 sports in seven categories on a scale of one to 10 (10 is the highest possible score, with the "contact" category ranked from one to five). The categories are:

1. FITNESS (f). – The level of physical fitness you must have to participate.
2. SKILLS (s). – The complexity of the athletic skills necessary to compete.
3. BRAINS (b). – The mental toughness and intelligence needed, as well as the complexity of the sport.
4. PAIN (p). – Injury rate, plus or minus the potential for death.
5. CONTACT (c). – The chances of getting smacked by other participants (takes into account padding worn, too).
6. VENUE (v). – Where you play it. Climbing up a sheer rock face is tougher than playing table tennis in a rec room.
7. INTANGIBLES (i). – The little things. For instance, bull riders have no idea what the bull’s temperament is that day. Or, the measure of how scared your significant other gets when you say you’re going to play a particular sport.

Finally, we plugged the numbers into our special formula (see above), which gives each category its own level of importance. From there, we dusted off our slide rule. In a matter of hours, the results were in. Here they are:

1. GYMNASTICS (567.6 OUT OF 1,095.4)

Why? Male gymnasts may wear tights, but they score perfect 10′s for fitness and athletic skills, and near-perfect marks for injury potential, mental toughness and difficult conditions. Let’s see you spin in circles on the high bar, release, do a few flips and grab the bar again. Extra toughness points were awarded for the guy who survived a full-speed, chest-first plunge into the horse and for the Japanese Olympic medalist who dismounted from the rings with a broken leg.

2. IRONMAN TRIATHLON (566.6)

Why? You have to swim 2.4 miles in rough ocean water, pedal 112 miles on your bike and then run a marathon. Any doubters?

3. ROCK CLIMBING (558.8)

Why? You need a high level of fitness and mental toughness – the sport is sometimes referred to as physical chess. And you need all this while you’re a few hundred feet in the air, clinging to a rock that can be smooth as silk, or as crumbling as a saltine cracker.

4. ICE HOCKEY (524.9)

Why? A good player has speed, finesse, power, fitness, stamina, quickness and guile. And he’s got to display them all while 230-pound defensemen try to crush him into the boards. Probably the sport most likely to knock your teeth out.

5. BULL RIDING (523.4)

Why? Scores high on injury rate and chance of death, as well as brutal and unpredictable conditions. Mentally, you’ve got to be all there for eight seconds. The brains score drops, though, because you’ve got to be a bit wacky to actually try riding an angry bull.

6. BOXING (503)
The early favorite loses points in the brains and skills categories.

See boxing.

8. DECATHLON (475.4)

They don’t call decathlon champions the world’s greatest athletes for nothing.

9. WATER POLO (474)

It’s like playing basketball while treading water.

10. FOOTBALL (465.7)

Another early favorite loses points because skills at many positions are finite and specialized. Many positions also score low in the brains category.

THE REST OF THE PACK:

BASKETBALL 462.0

MOUNTAIN BIKING 449.9

SURFING 420.9

WRESTLING 405.4

SOCCER 398.0

MARATHON 374.1

LACROSSE 371.6

ROAD BIKING 327.4

TENNIS 302.5

BEACH VOLLEYBALL 297.1

ROLLER HOCKEY 273.4

BOBSLED/LUGE 261.9

SNOWBOARDING 253.8

GOLF 227.3

SKIING 220.7

VOLLEYBALL 199.7

SWIMMING 188.2

WHITE-WATER RAFTING 187.8

BASEBALL 174.7

SNOWSHOEING 159.7

SEA KAYAKING 129.7

CRICKET 123.9

TOUCH FOOTBALL 120.8

FENCING 108.4

AEROBICS 97.6

SOFTBALL 93.0

RACQUETBALL 91.8

CROQUET 67.2

TABLE TENNIS 55.5

BOWLING 55.2

Michael S. Yessis, associate editor of Men’s Fitness, got a C+ in his ninth-grade algebra class.

Bodyweight Exercises

Non-athletes are now rediscovering the secrets of bodyweight exercise.  First of all, it’s fast.  You can get into good shape in only minutes a day; a full hour five days a week can catapult former weightlifting gymrats into the best shape of their lives, and leave them with some actual time in the day left in which to enjoy that shape.  Next, since the workouts use so many muscles together in the way muscles were meant to be used, there are far less injuries.  The human body is miraculous, but it wasn’t meant to bench press or squat press hundreds of pounds repeatedly.  Finally, of course, it’s nearly free.  It removes the need to pay monthly fees in order to drive to a gym and huddle around sweat-soaked machines.  All you need is a mat and some gravity.

If you lift weights, you might think bodyweight workouts are pretty easy.  You would be wrong.  While you can get some serious progress accomplished within in as short a time as ten minutes a day, you will still find yourself sweating like a cold beer in the summer sun.  It’s a workout.  Weight training builds muscle, but it does not transfer that puffed up fiber into the ability to perform athletic motion.  And it kills the joints.  

In some ways, a preschooler has more functional strength than an adult male.  Try this:  find a preschooler and have a race with him, using the bear crawl (you’re on all fours, but no knees on the floor).  See what I mean?  Little kids use more of their muscles in tandem with each other than most adults do.

There are some great websites that will inspire you to try some of the best bodyweight exercises tonight.  While they may have products or books to sell, there is enough free information on the website, and more  when you subscribe, that it’s worth clicking these links and reading.  Then you can google, youtube, and surf your way around the web to see what others are doing.  (Remember that lots of people still don’t know the secret of bodyweight exercises and will still pay top dollar to buy all your now-unused weight equipment!)

Bodyweight Basics

Combat Conditioning

For those who are already fit through bodyweight exercise, it’s time to take it up one more notch.

Lost Art of Handbalancing

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