Skipping Rope

In my ongoing effort to stay young in body and in heart, I’ve decided to start jumping rope. Today, my new new toy arrive from Amazon (I love having stuff delivered!): a York Leather Skip Rope. I just had my first skip out on the patio (I love having a patio!) and I’m [...]

Boot Camp for Beginners

This is a guest post from my friend, Xandros. Xandros has been attending a fitness “boot camp” in recent weeks and I asked him to write a little something about his experience. I’m so grateful that he did! Boot camps were a bit of a mystery to me, but now I’m curious to check [...]

Life Logging: Attempting the Impossible

Today I learned that sometimes it’s good to attempt the impossible.
Today I embarked on my latest workout inspired by the Monkey Bar Gym. I’m using their 60 day challenge workouts as a template, which are updated every day and is designed for “people who prefer to workout without the use of weights [...]

The Five-Minute Prison Workout

 
More proof that you don’t need a gym membership to stay fit.
The Five-Minute Prison Workout (via Jim)

Core Workout for Functional Fitness

“Core strength” refers to your ab and back muscles and their ability to support your spine and keep your body stable and balanced. These muscles receive a lot of buzz, and rightfully so – they are vital for functional fitness. But guess what – you don’t need pilates classes or a gym membership to [...]

The Incline

An quick read at the NYT discusses the US Olympic training programme’s use of hill training on “the Incline”.
“It’s not running,” the Greco-Roman wrestling gold medalist Rulon Gardner said. “It’s not walking. It’s surviving.”
This sounds like it is just going to make you hard.
“No matter how many times you do it, the ending never changes,” [...]

Exercising with a Medicine Ball

Recently, we’ve been thinking lots about functional fitness and getting hard without the gym. Although we like to avoid equipment as much as possible, a medicine ball could be a useful addition to our “home gym” (which is thus far small enough to stash under the bed, bicycles aside).
Medicine balls are those big heavy black [...]

Outdoor Magazine exercise programme

I just stumbled across a really great series from Outdoor mag. circa 2002.
The series is called The Shape of Your Life and it presents what looks like a really sensible and long term fitness programme.
Over the months you work from building endurance to strength and on to flexibility before moving on to speed and power [...]

The humble push-up

One of the fitness trends I’m following is the movement towards minimalist training using functional training techniques. That’s training movements and not muscles.
Here’s the NYT on why the push-up, a classic functional exercise, is so important.

“It takes strength to do them, and it takes endurance to do a lot of them,” said Jack LaLanne, 93, [...]

Functional training

Over the past few months I’ve come across a couple of articles about functional training. Gym Jones used it to train the cartoon-like warriors in 300 and then I caught an article in Outdoors about the Monkey Bar Gymnasium, a non-traditional gym with no machines or mirrors.
What is functional training?
From Wikipedia:
Functional training involves mainly weight [...]