Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

It’s a great clip, but a terrible advert:

EDIT: This post has been discussed on Mark Rippetoe’s Strength Mill here and the Functionally Fitness forum here.

In preparation for this weekend’s Yorkshire North East Open Olympic Weightlifting competition I mentioned the other week, I had a personal training session with Mark Beck my Crossfit coach on Sunday. The main aims were:

• Practice and time the warm up lifts, so that I know when to start warming up.
• Work up to my Personal Best lifts.

This is the video highlights of the session, not every lift is shown, mostly due to forgetting to start the camera! (Let me know what you think of the caption format I’ve used, I’m not convinced myself.)

There are 2 things to balance during the warm-up lifts, first is timing. If you warm up too soon, you are then left waiting for your opening lift and can come off the boil as it were. Of course if you leave it too late to start, you may not be ready to lift your opening weight. It took me about 20 minutes to get to my PB weight of 70kg on the Snatch, though there was some faffing about in that time with the camera.

The second point to consider is how many warm up lifts you do. You need to do enough to be “warmed up” of course, but not so many that you are tired before you even start your first competition lift. How much is enough is it seems, mostly down to personal preference. In addition, there is the question of whether you warm up with your opening lift weight or not?

After much discussion with Mark, I’ve decided not to. Partly that’s because I intend on opening with my personal best snatch of 70kg. That is probably not normally recommended, however I’ve been focusing hard on my technique and on making a 70kg Snatch a routine lift. As you saw I dropped the first one so I’m not quite there, but I do get it 75% of the time at the moment. Then anything after that is all PB territory. With a lift every 2 minutes or so, I plan my 15 – 20 minute Snatch warm up to be:

• Bergner style warm up with bar – 5 minutes
• 3 x 50kg (all as singles)
• 2 x 60kg
• 2 x 65kg

Obviously warming up for the clean and jerk is more about getting used to the weight and the movements rather than actually warming up your body, so there’s no bar work at the start. Again, I intend on opening with my PB weight of 90kg but will not lift that in the warm up (Clean only PB is 100kg). Here the danger of over fatigue is highest, especially as I will have just done 3 max weight Snatches. So I plan my 15 minute C&J warmup to be:

• 3 x 50kg (all as singles)
• 2 x 70kg
• 1 x 80kg
• 1 x 85kg

As the Yorkshire Open Masters is an official BWLA competition, there’s an outside chance that this competition will see me qualify for the British Masters Championships in March 2009. I need a total weight (from my 2 best lifts) of 175kg. As you can see, adding my current PB’s of 70 and 90 together only sees me at 160, so I need to find another 15kg combined. Here’s the plan, assuming I get all 6 lifts:

• Snatch 1 – 70kg
• Snatch 2 – 74kg
• Snatch 3 – 77kg
• Clean & Jerk 1 – 90kg
• Clean & Jerk 2 – 94kg
• Clean & Jerk 3 – 98kg

77 + 98 would give me the 175 total I need to qualify, however increasing my PB’s by 10% each would be a good day indeed!

This first one is a 300 foot dam spillway drop in a kayak, it looks like awesome fun!

And just to prove there’s always someone willing to be more extreme, here’s another one… without a kayak! (Warning, bad language)

More complete foolishness, topless this time!

I’m not really into big into petitions and such, but I did actually feel moved to sign the Gurkha Justice one at www.gurkhajustice.org.uk

I have always had the greatest respect for the Gurkhas, perhaps because it’s pretty much one of the only stories I was told by a grandparent about the war, involved serving with them. And whenever I have seen them in this country, they always command an air of respectability and pride in their uniform, something our own squaddies rarely do.

So it just doesn’t feel right to me that having spent years serving in our armed forces, some of the Gurkhas are denied the right to live here. The irony is, in my mind, they have more of a right than most of the scroungers that populate our country anyway. Anyway enough of my pontificating, checkout the website and if you feel the same, you have till Wed 9pm to add your name, before the petition gets handed in on Thursday.

Oops I missed the Friday Fun post on Friday. I’ve been rather busy this last week as I was in discussions with a couple of new clients. I’m also working on a Search Engine Optimisation DVD course and a similar Pay Per Click advertising DVD course. And I’m training hard for my first BWLA official Olympic Weightlifting competition in 2 weeks: the Yorkshire Open Masters. Dropping a 70kg bar on my neck at the weekend was definitely NOT part of the plan!

Anyway, all that pales into insignificance when compared to the news that literally in the last hour, a new trailer for the new Star Trek Movie has been launched. Though it starts with a car and bike chase, which is odd for a sci-fi movie I have to admit, it does look awesome, and Syler (of Hero’s fame) is interestingly cast as a young Spock! Either way, I’m well looking forward to going to see it.

I keep seeing people say that the Zone Diet is high in fat, so I thought I’d really look into whether this is true or not. Here are my findings. Firstly, what is the recommended fat content for men and women, do you know?

I went to the Institute of Grocery Distribution (ICD) an oddly named body if you ask me but they seem to be the people who publish this kind of information. Having said that, they don’t appear to list the fat information we want freely on their website, the main GDA page here shows no actual values. You can read a short paper about the background to the Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition website, which does give the fat GDA amounts.  Here’s the table you may be familiar with from food labels:

So for a fella we’re looking at 95g of fat per day and 70g for a woman.  Now we need to look at what the Zone Diet specifies.  First things first, the Zone Diet can be a bit confusing when it comes to fat blocks.  I will one day write a detailed article on why it’s so confusing, but let’s just take a simple approach and say that you need 3g of total fat per block on the Zone Diet eating plan.

For a man, let’s say on 14 blocks per day, that’s 14 x 3 = 42g of fat.  For a woman, on say 11 blocks per day, that’s 11 x 3 = 33g of total fat.  Let’s see how that compares:

So there you have it, the Zone diet recommends about half the fat than that recommended by the Guideline Daily Amounts that are promoted by the government and appear all over our food labels.  The only time this wouldn’t be the case is if you’re eating more than 15 blocks as a man, or more than 12 as a woman.  This could be true if you were doing a lot of exercise for example.  Either way, that looks like a low fat diet to me!

Now that Halloween is over for another year, I thought it would good to have a round up of some of the better novelty Halloween pumpkins that appeared on the net:

Puking pumpkin

Pumpkin faces

Pumpkin Cyclops

And last, but not least, my favourite pumpkin picture:

Chav Pumkins

I was ecstatic last Wednesday at getting a 100kg Clean. It’s a land mark point and as Giles Greenwood said: “You never forget get your first 100!” Ok, I didn’t get the jerk, but I was just concentrating on the cleans. And I dropped it a couple of times first, but I got it.

I’m particularly pleased for 3 reasons:

• It’s a major milestone in my weightlifting career.
• It’s my first proper PB for 2008 since my elbow injury.
• Suddenly qualifying for the British Masters Weightlifting Championship in February seems possible.

Today I was back at Bethnal Green and I resolved to work on my Snatch technique. No complicated routine, no rush, I just had a simple plan: do a pair of Snatches every 5 mins. Starting at 50kg I wouldn’t move up in weight until I’d done 2 pairs with good form. So how did it go?

50kg was good. 55kg was ok. 60kg was not going well! At 60kg every lift was different, power snatches were popping up by accident as often as not, and I was dropping every third lift. Things were not looking good! Then the break through, in the form of 45 minutes of 1 on 1 from World Masters Champion lifter Patrick Atteridge:

Pat Atteridge and me at Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club

The night was quiet towards the end and I was very lucky to get Pat’s undivided attention, there were several bits of advice that Pat gave me. First, and contrary to what I had been doing, was to relax my arms. I had been tensing everything that I could before the snatch, but Pat explained that you should only tense the muscles that are needed, and everything else should be relaxed. If you’re too tense, you can’t move fast and the snatch is all about speed. Doing this did seem to make a small improvement.

Second was to keep looking up (at about a 30 degree angle) fix a spot on the wall and stare at it. This keeps the chest up and helps prevents shoulders drooping at the catch. At first this decimated my snatch and I dropped 3 in a row, but after 20 minutes I was getting it and was doing better.

The third tip was a total focus on speed, realised by concentrating on catching the snatch in the lowest possible squat. Pat said: “Catching 3 inches lower will add 10kg to your max snatch.” It took me half a dozen goes to really get a deep landing and I was getting under it, but kept dropping the bar forward.

Finally Pat told me to really punch my arms and shoulders up and back at the bottom of catch.  That was the key ingredient.  It took a few goes to get everything coordinated, and I dropped at this point to singles, but 15 minutes later I was nailing a fast and deep landing. The snatch has never felt so easy!

The 60’s were shooting up, so I jumped to 65, which is an equal PB lift, and I got it comfortably first time. With only 10 minute left till the gym shut I quickly moved to a PB attempt at 67.5 Something went wrong in my head and the first attempt went no where. However the 2nd went up nicely and I nailed the landing. A new 67.5kg PB, woot! I had a couple of goes at 70 in the dying minutes but couldn’t quite get under it properly and lost my balance. Another 10 minutes and I reckon I’d have got that too. Well, that’s something to aim for next time.

Now if I can just get my jerk up to 95kg tomorrow, I’ll be well pleased…

Just some very funny pictures today. I think the last one is deserving of a caption competition…

Tee hee, that’s a classic.