Suspended Pike Press

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/024-swiss-ball-pike-press/1575611245/?icid=VIDURVHTS01

The swiss ball pike press shown here is a very difficult move. It demands a ton of core strength, as well as upper body strength, and ultimately helps one train for the unassisted pike press hand stand pushup. It can be made even harder by incorporating a pump in and out of the press in between each push rep.

I have begun to incorporate a similar move into my workout using the suspension trainer. Similar to this move but with the shoulder/chest press in between pumps of the pike move. It is a killer on your abs and your chest.

Salmon with Peach Jalapeno Salsa

Tonight for dinner I made a delightful little low-fat, high protein, high carb meal: Salmon with Peach Jalapeno Salsa and a side of rice pilaf and pan steam fried squash. The best thing is that the whole meal took under 30 minutes to prepare and cook.

Preheat your oven to about 350 degrees Farenheit.
First, start with an Uncle Ben's 10 minute rice pilaf. Easy enough.
Then start chopping the squash. When you have enough chopped, chuck it into a small frying pan that has about 1.5-2 Tablespoons of olive oil in it. Make sure the pan is pretty hot when the veggies hot. Cover and let cook for about 15 minutes. The cover will help the veggies to get steamed. Stir or toss occasionally.
Rub the salmon fillets (skin on) with a touch of olive oil and sprinkle with a dash of salt, a good turn of black pepper, and a little garlic salt. Place the fillets in a hot frying pan, skin down, for about 4-6 minutes. You will start to see the pan side of the salmon start to turn cooked color. Now place the whole pan, uncovered, into the hot over for between 10-15 minutes.

While everything is cooking, toss a few slices of jalapeno (more if you like it hot!), a chopped peach (or two, depending on how sweet you like things), a tablespoon (or so) of honey into the magic bullet. Blend until a smooth chunky consistency. Spoon over hot salmon and serve extra in a bowl alongside the main dish in case people want to put on extra salsa.

Easy, low-fat, high protein, high omegas, etc dinner in 30 minutes or less!

friday by the pool

ah it is sunny & I am drinking beers by the pool...good life!
couldn't do this in Liverpool, but I dont want to rub it in... LOL

Front Lever Progression 2

So yesterday I tried a front lever on a lat pull down bar placed conveniently across the pull-up station at my gym.  I paste below a vid I took today - I am so tired from doing these two days in a row. I also must mention that if you thought normal work out routines, exercises, or the other shit I do captured attention and strange looks, well they pale in comparison to the looks you get when trying a front level in the gym. Especially if you are as bad at it as I am.  

What you should see here is me moving my rope out of the way, followed by some concentrated hanging with intense breathing to get ready for the move. Then I do two back to back. The first one is held for about 2 seconds. You will see that I got too much swing in the second rep and lose my handle and control resulting in me dropping the move.  Again bad vid quality, but gets across what I am trying. It is absolutely killer on your rear deltoids!

Suspended Dips & L-seat combo Progression

I finally got a new phone and was able to vid myself doing a few moves today. I must apologize for the quality of the movies. My wife was not around to take them, so I had to prop my phone up against the cable cross-over machine, which resulted in the camera being faced toward the lights. This is undesirable, but should give a flavor for what I am doing with my suspension training rope. Here I show a combination of suspended rope dips followed by suspended rope L-seat. I must admit the L-seat look terrible and I can attribute that to my triceps being blasted after the dips (i.e. I am weak!) It is a pretty horrible combination; quite hard in deed.  Things to note here: 1) the shaking of my arms. That comes with rope territory in the early days. 2) the ugliness of the L-seat. I tend to concentrate more on holding myself up here (notice me nearly falling to the ground at the end of the vid) as opposed to concentrating on good form. When I practice the solo suspended L-seat it looks prettier because I concentrate on form - legs together tight, pointing toes, etc, all of which actually helps me to hold the move. 3) my suspension rope is hung from the center of a cable cross-over machine using a pruisik knot. Then I wrap the extra rope around the various pull/chin-up bars to adjust the height for dips. Here the ropes are at about the height of my hands while standing so I need to bend my legs while dipping. That's ok though, same effect. 

You thought the floor L-seat was hard?

The floor L-seat is a hard move that many people struggle with. 

When I started this whole new training regime, I struggled with it. Thank goodness for some great yoga instruction because I think it helped the move come a little easier to me. At any rate, I can now hold a fairly nice floor L-seat (10 seconds or so) with movement to angled planche, crane, etc and back. It's by no means, I reiterate NO MEANS, perfect, but I am there and have started training my hip flexor strength for floor V-seat and eventually Manna. 

Now with my suspension trainer I am trying to execute the elevated/rope/ring L-seat (rope in my case, because I have not purchased rings). 

So what I do is suspend my rope handles at about a dipping height (so I don't fall to far ;-). I grab the ropes and hang for about 2-5 seconds, with my feet off the ground and directly below my abdomen, making sure that I am breathing the whole time and fairly stable. Then I raise my legs out into the L-seat. I should clarify: I try to raise my legs out to the L-seat position. Actually, I did get it the other day for about 2 seconds (again at the end of my workout so I was really tired). As with other posts about suspension training the ropes add a totally new dimension to the workout and move. So now, rather than simply (I say "simply" HA!), elevate yourself off the floor or onto a set of hand rods or dumbbells - all of which are pretty much stationery, you are forced to stabilize other muscle groups. Your arms are no longer anchored to the floor (or bar) in one plane of movement. They want to move in every direction/plane necessary to bring your body back to the floor; that's pretty much how gravity works! ;-)  So one's task is to, in addition to hold a nice looking, toe pointing L-seat, stabilize your arms, keep from twisting around like a fish dangling from a hook out of water, and continue to hold the move and breathe. Not so easy. Another challenge for me. Eventually I hope to take this in the same direction as my floor. That is, elevated L-seat to elevated planche and back. I will also try moving through the front lever to L-seat, or some sequence like that.  I will probably be 90 years old before I could make any moves like those.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuGb0-Z7VVA

Front Lever Progression

Off and on for the last few weeks I have been incorporating a sort of front lever into my pull/chin-up routine. I would on the last few reps, or the first few, lower or raise myself in as close a front lever as I could get into.

Today, I concentrated on the move as a solo move, without the combo pull/chin-up. I was able to perform 3 sets of 2-5 seconds front lever holds! I am so PSYCHED! It was hard as hell, but damn it felt good to see some progress!

Again pics and / or vids to come, once my phone is fixed...

Suspending my way to the Iron Cross...?

OK, about a month or two ago, I read an article about olympic training. The journalist actually suggested some exercises to get "olympic fit". Well many of these I was already doing, including the pull-up to dip progression. Today, however, I upped the ante. I combined pull-ups with suspended rope dips. If you have never done rope / ring dips before you would be surprised just how hard it is. The rope dips (using the suspension trainer, which now gains a fair amount of staring, points, even giggles from the other gym users, but not my trainer - he loves the idea) not only demand that you push yourself up and down, but they also force you to stabilize your arms and core. So, for example, letting your body down is pretty easy and steady, but then at the bottom you have to push yourself up. If you do this at the end of an already intense workout, your arms should be pretty tired. If you are like me, then your arms will try to go backward, forward, sideways, outward, and in all combinations of those directions while you push your self to the up position of the dip. Hard! I can push out about 6-12 after a set of 6-12 pull/chin-ups. I follow that with a set of 12-25 prisoner or sumo squats. It's actually quite nice, because I hang the suspension trainer over the gym's pull-up station and then I don't have to do a lot of running around to different parts of the gym. 

At the end of today's workout (probably a mistake) I thought I would take a stab at the beginnings of the cross. So I hung for about 3 seconds, then slowly started to let my arms move outward in a controlled strong fashion. I got about 45 degrees and held it for about 6-8 seconds. Not nearly a cross, but the feeling was so intense that I feared hurting myself if I went further. Rome wasn't built in a day! At any rate, I am getting there and thrilled.

Pics/vids to come - my phone is busted - the battery wont hold a charge for longer than a few hours so they are going to replace it, but I don't have the new one yet. I will ask Aussy to vid me while doing the rope dips. 

Strong Handshake

Ever shake someone's hand (especially a male's) and feel it was a little wimpy. If you are like me then you immediately think twice about the person. Why do they have such a light touched handshake? Are they afraid of getting in there and giving it a good squeeze? You might make up mental excuses (especially if you respect that individual). For example, you might assume they have broken their hand and hence, cannot squeeze that hard. You might fear they have OCD and they are worried about the amount of germ transfer in a good shake. Well, chances are you'd be wrong. The handshake, and grip strength in particular, is an evolutionary fitness cue to other important characteristics associated with being male. Hand grip strength is associated with circulating testosterone levels and how chicks rate you on physical attractiveness. It's also been associated with the number of sexual partners you have had (that is stronger grip, for tail!)

What's the link? Well, turns out that evolution is crafty. Evolution favors traits that help individuals reproduce and then in some cases provides the opposite sex with a bunch of cues to detect differences among individuals: say he looks more masculine he probably is stronger. And that is absolutely correct, most of the time (statistics!) So what can you do about it? Well your genetics is your genetics and that being said, sorry if you got a bum wrap! You could feign your grip strength by purposefully delivering stronger, hand crunching hand shakes. This would be the equivalent of, say, breast implants on females, but a lot less painful. That is unless your shakee has a grip to crush all grips and brakes your hand (and it would probably still be less painful).

So train up your grip best you can.

Training on the road

So if you are like me, then you like to travel. As noted in my Mountain View Moves post, I like to get to the great outdoors. However, when traveling training, in the proper sense can be troublesome: from finding a gym that will allow one-three day access for an affordable price to feeling like you actually got a decent workout. Because, also if you are like me, going 3 days with out going to the gym is really not an option (injured back or not). So here's my solution and it partially bears on another post of mine dealing with moral support - that is, have a partner who appreciates wanting to workout and plan trips accordingly. This weekend, Aussy and I took a long weekend to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. We have discovered/developed several ways to get excellent workouts while at this little weekend retreat. One way is to run up the .5 mile 50 degree incline hill to the cottage. This comes at the end of a 3-4 mile hilly run and it is a quad killer, to say the least!  Another way, go hiking. The Appalachian Trail is very hilly, and very rough terrain. It demands not only decent cardiovascular fitness (the altitude does not help as I was huffing and puffing the whole time), but it also demands a sense of core strength and stability. When stepping up a few feet onto a slippery rock or log you need to balance yourself to lift up - it's where all those 1-legged exercises really came in handy. Then there is my trusty traveling suspension trainer, which attaches nicely to any of the trees littering the yard, allowing me to get a full back, chest and shoulder workout. 

This strategy may not work if not in the woods, but at a city retreat. For example, we got hitched in Vegas - not much in the downtown vegas area for hiking (there are about 30 minutes drive outside of vegas in the Spring Mountains), but we did run the Vegas trip and went in and out of about a dozen hotels. We were not the only ones doing this. It was awesome. So where there's a will there's a way. Get out and get fit!