Fitness, Health, Diet, Crossfit, Weightlifting, Musings and fun. Please comment on what you read.
This looks awesome, coming out in 2010 in Disney 3D, although having the bikes able to turn smooth corners, shambles! 
BUT, is this better, or utterly awful (2nd act is the best, watch that one if nothing else)?
The Yorkshire Masters weightlifting competition is just over 2 weeks away now, and my attempt to make the 77kg category is going well. Below is my fitday weight goal graph, which I’ve been updating every day, except for the week I was on holiday. Amazingly I was quite good and ended the week weighing exactly the same as I started!
You can see that weekends are still a trial for me and I invariably gain a couple of pounds each weekend, only to lose it again the following few days. I have basically 2 weeks to lose the last 2 pounds, which should be no problem based on the last 4 weeks performance. All hail the zone diet. 
Training is coming along nicely too. I made a 75kg Snatch today, the first time since the 2009 BWLA Championships in March this year, that I’ve even attempted more than 70kg. I had 3 goes at 77.5kg too, which would have (just) been a personal best. It was close, but I didn’t quite get it. It felt really achievable though, so maybe at the comp, if the lifts go well.
Anyway, here’s that graph, click it for a bigger version:
Edit: Pesky F1 have been pulling YouTube videos off the footage as fast as they were put up. I’ve replaced the two that no longer work with one with static pictures instead:
I’ve just been watching a re-run of the Forumla 1 qualifying in Hungary for today’s Hungarian Grand Prix, in which Ferrari’s Felipe Massa crashed out in the second qualifying session. It seems he was struck in the head by a suspension spring from a Braun car and is in intensive car in hospital.
Get well soon Massa.
EDIT: QuickTime Embed Plugin disabled, due to pre-downloading the content which caused the site to slow down too much.
Here are some awesome videos of the Crossfit Games 2009 that went on last week. A finer collection of athletes I’m sure you will not find. It should also answer once and for all, the issue of whether Crossfit’s programming of heavy weights, makes women big muscle bound freaks? I think you’ll agree, the lady’s competing here are all nicely proportioned. And remember, they have all come through regional qualifiers to get here, so they are all very accomplished Crossfitters.
(I’m using a new plug-in that embeds QuickTime .Mov files… I think I need a wider blog theme! It’s also a pain, as it expects you to know the resolution of the video before hand, which doesn’t appear to be information that’s readily available, so the player size and video size don’t quite match, that’s my fault.)
http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/CrossFitGames09_Highlights.mov
Here’s another one:
http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/2009CrossFitGames_Individualday2Sweet16.mov
For my personal training, this week has been a mixed bag. I worked up to three Snatches at 70kg on Tuesday at Aspire Fitness, which was exactly what I planned to do. But then Clean & Jerks on Wednesday all went Pete Tongue, and I failed at 95kg three times!
I forget why I’m reading this book now (someone must have recommended it to me) but the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet has an interesting twist on the usual “low carb is best” mantra of alternative diets. It boils down to this:
1) Eat 2 very low carb “Complementary meals” per day. E.g. 3-4oz of protein + 2 cups of salad or low carb density veg.
2) Every day eat a “reward meal” which can consist of anything you want, without limit. Obviously it’s best if it’s a balanced meal, but if you want frois gras on crackers, a 1lb steak with roast potatoes, and 1/2 a chocolate gateaux, all washed down with a bottle of wine, you can.
3) The gotcha is that the reward meal has to be started and finished within 60 minutes (including any booze). They believe that this avoids a “second wave” of insulin that’s normally released 75-90 minutes into a meal.
4) Also there’s absolutely no snacking and no carbs throughout the rest of the day, not even half a sugar in your coffee. Everything gets saved for your reward meal. After all, you can have anything you want, it’s always less than 24 hours away.
I might give this a go for a month and see if it works. I can imagine that after 2 weeks of having a reward meal of a whole chocolate gateaux, smothered in a litre of ice cream, the novelty might wear off and you start eating more sensibly.
If you’re around my age, you’ll have grown up when Bonnie Tyler’,s A Total Eclipse of the Heart was a smash hit. I can certainly still sing along to it like a good’un. I nearly wet myself when I saw this spoof video, very funny:
This is a video of a training session at Crossfit Manchester. I posted my training Snatches last week, so this is the Clean and Jerk vid. This time I’ve included one’s that didn’t go quite according to plan! I was trying to get 5 lifts at 95% of my personal best, so at 95kg (209 lbs), for reference I weigh 80ish kg, but am trying to lose weight to get into the 77kg body weight category.
It turned out that 5 x 95% lifts was beyond me. In the end I got 3 (only 2 of which are shown, I forgot to tape the first one) but I was still well knackered by the end! You can see that my main issue is still consistency. When it goes right, it’s nice and stable, it just doesn’t go right often enough.
There are a million videos of cats on catnip on YouTube, but this snippet from a documentary is superbly put together and shows a mass cat stoning:
I may have mentioned, I’ve entered the Yorkshire Masters as a guest lifter in August. This is my first potential qualifying competition of the year as I have to re-qualify for the BWLA British Masters again for next year. As before, in the 85kg weight category for Men aged 35-39, I have to lift a qualifying total of 175kg (best Snatch + best Clean & Jerk). E.g. 75kg Snatch + 100kg C&J.
The competition is now 5 weeks away and I’m starting my build-up. As I have a month, I’m trying each week to increment the weights I lift by 2.5kg and get 5 good lifts at that weight, before moving up. So yesterday I was at Crossfit Manchester (the Mon-Wed 8pm Olympic weightlifting class) and working on Snatches at 67.5kg (you may recall my PB is 77kg, which I got at the 2009 BLWA British Masters). My weakness is still the variability of my technique, I just need to bang out the reps and work on the fine adjustments.
Of course I have my new Flip Video UltraHD with gorilla tripod to play with, so I took along and filmed a couple of snatches. What do you think?
Now the other thing is, I’m trying to lose weight to get to the next weight category down, which is the 77kg category (169lbs or 12 stone 1). The reason is that the qualifying lift weight at 77kg is only 165kg, not 175kg which will make qualification easier. Also, there’s an outside chance, that I could qualify for the European Masters, as the qualifying lift for that at 77kg is 182, which is only 5kg more than my current personal best.
When I started 2 weeks ago, I was 182lbs (13 stone exactly or 83kg), so I had a fair amount to lose. Here’s how I’ve done and where I’m going (from Fitday), you can see I’m down nearly half way so another half a stone in 5 weeks should be doable, especially with the Zone diet to keep me going.
Looking for a Crossfit friendly gym can be a frustrating task. When I started working in Newport it was obviously one of my first jobs. Clearly it would be great to find a Crossfit friendly gym on my doorstep, but that was too much to hope for. I also didn’t expect to find somewhere in Newport so expanded my search to Cardiff from the off. Moving to a new a town I did what everyone does now when looking for local information: I searched in Google and spent several days phoning and visiting gyms.
It’s probably worth listing here what makes a gym suitable for doing Crossfit, at least in my mind anyway, in rough order of my importance (obviously more of each is better):
1) An Olympic weight lifting bar. Eleiko would be best.
2) A modest selection of bumper plates for said bar. By bumper plates, I mean rubber weight plates that don’t break the floor or themselves when dropped from over head.
3) A suitable floor to drop the bumper plates on, with enough surrounding space for safety. Basically, can I do clean and jerks, snatches, thrusters, push presses, shoulder presses etc?
4) A squat rack for back squats and front squats.
5) Somewhere to do deadlifts.
6) A rower, Concept 2 is preferred.
7) Somewhere to run, outside would be best, but treadmills are likely to be the norm obviously.
A pull up bar, stable enough and with enough room for kipping.
9) A selection of rubber dumbbells.
10) Boxes to jump on.
11) Medicine balls to throw at walls.
12) Walls to throw medicine balls at! Though I do hate wall balls.
13) None bouncing balls for ball slams.
14) A set of gym rings… yeah fat chance of that.
Armed with my mental list, these are the list of gyms I found:
xxx
It’s worth mentioning the runner up first, which was Train Station 2 in Cardiff. TS2 has a lot of room and uniquely a 90m running circuit round the outside. It’s also allegedly the home of Crossfit Wales, which is a slightly ambitious title, especially as when I went to see the place, they weren’t doing any Crossfit classes. That’s actually changed now, and I know there is a Crossfit class being run on a Saturday morning, by a certified Crossfit instructor called Dav. I’ve got his number if anyone’s interested.
However I decided against Train Station 2 primarily because of the oly bar and plates. Whilst possibly adequate, there wasn’t a proper lifting platform and I was concerned about dumping the bar. Having seen many places by now, I was thinking I’d been spoilt by Crossfit Manchester’s dedicated lifting platforms.
That was when I found what is undoubtedly the best gym in Cardiff to do Crossfit. I’ve mentioned it before, it’s Aspire Fitness on Sanatorium road. I should put the record straight right now: when I mentioned them before I called them a “Globo Gym”. Now when I said that, I meant that they appeared (at least to my inexperienced eye) like most other “normal” gyms out there, and not like a sparse Crossfit gym. I didn’t mean to allude to them being part of a large chain, they are not and the benefit from the very friendly small business atmosphere they have. What really sold me on Aspire however, was the brand new Eleiko oly bar they had, and the very nice lifting platform in the corner.
At the time I looked, they had some dodgy Apollo bumpers that were falling apart (Apollo bumpers do appear to be rubbish):
xxx – apollo-bumper-plates-broken-1-thumb.jpg
But they assured me that they would maintain a decent set, and true to their word, they now have a full set of good quality York bumpers: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25kg:
xxx aspire-fitness-york-bumpers.jpg
Off my shopping list of requirements, Aspire Fitness cater for very nearly everything else as well as the Olympic bar and bumper plates. They have 4 power cages (I think they’re called) for doing squats in, plus a free standing squat rack. They have plenty of weight and space for dead lifts; 2 Concept II rowing machines; I think 8 treadmills; a selection of variable sized boxes to jump on; room for floor work like press-ups (push ups for the Americans), skipping etc.
Each power rack also doubles as a pull up station, by hanging on the horizontal bars at the top. They are even cunningly designed for just such a use. The designers were so nice, they thought they’d be really helpful: the knurled the bar! I strongly suspect that most people, like me, have never tried kipping pull ups on a knurled bar… take my advice… don’t! It will rip your hand to shreds. Fortunately the second bar at the top, whilst painted with a rough finish, is not knurled and is useable.
So pretty much the only thing Aspire don’t have, is a set of gym rings, and a selection of medicine balls. They also suffer the ailment that most normal gyms suffer, it’s called mirror-itis. There are far too many mirrors for my liking, but to be fair, they are by no means everywhere. However there is really only 1 place to do wall balls, and even then I need to move the bin, fire extinguisher, and ensure no one is using the power rack next to it. There’s no ball slam facilities either. Oh yes, they also have an assortment of mysterious devices, contraptions and machines which I stay well clear of, but not too many:
xxx aspire-fitness.jpg
The point here is that nothing but a dedicated Crossfit gym is going to be 100% perfect for Crossfit, and even then, not always. Aspire is not perfect, but I’d put them 90% there, and that last 10% can usually be subbed. E.g. sub wall balls for empty bar thrusters.
So if you’re looking to do Crossfit in Cardiff, or even Newport which isn’t that far away, Aspire Fitness is where I’d recommend you go. They are reasonably priced too, but you should measure these things on value, not just price. If you are going to go, say hi if you see me, I’m most often there on a Tuesday and Wednesday around 5-6pm. Or let Pete (one of the owners) know you found them through this blog. Oh and one more thing, if you do see me, don’t hog my oly bar!
UPDATE: I’m sure this has nothing to do with this post of course, but as of last week Aspire have added a set of Olympic gymnastic rings too. They are very nicely suspended from the double height ceiling so there is masses of room available to mess about with. Lovely. Now, if I can just crack those muscle ups!