Good Morning

When on vacation, I'm all about sitting around the pool, reading a good book and watching the kids splash around. These days, our travels usually involve minimal sightseeing and maximal R&R. Still, too much lazing around gets me antsy; being inactive for more than a couple of days is torture.

Thankfully, this morning was a particularly active one. On the agenda? CrossFit, outrigger canoe paddling, and snorkeling -- all before lunchtime.

Using a bit of reverse psychology ("Fine by me if you want to sleep in and miss CrossFit"), I managed to get M out of bed and down to Lahaina CrossFit for the 7 a.m. class.

Our workout consisted of three separate components:

1. Interval Sprints

Class started with some self-directed stretching, and then some group warm-up exercises. Once the blood was pumping, Anthony instructed us to perform 10 interval sprints. We ran like our hair was on fire for about 100 meters, and then jogged back -- 10 times. By the time I was done with my third sprint, I was dog-tired. My shirt was already soaked from the humidity and my own perspiration -- and the sun wasn't even bearing down on us yet.

There's something to be said about working out in the chilly pre-dawn darkness, y'all.

2. Twelve Rounds of Cindy (5 Pull-Ups, 10 Push-Ups, 15 Squats)

You know I'm head over heels about Cindy. Bodyweight workouts are my favorite, and Cindy is the queen of bodyweight WODs. I've loved every variation of Cindy I've tried: half-Cindy, three-quarter Cindy, full Cindy, task-priority Cindy, double-under Cindy, Murph, you name it. When I saw Cindy on the whiteboard today, a huge grin broke out on my face.

In fact, I'm sure I was practically drooling.

Still, it's not like a dozen rounds of Cindy is a walk in the park. In particular, the pull-ups gave me some grief after the first half-dozen rounds. After Round 6, I had to pause a couple of times during each set of pull-ups to wheeze and shake the sweat off my face. Nonetheless, the pull-ups and squats felt fast and smooth, and I managed to finish fairly quickly.

Result: 10:42 as RXed.

(The worst part of the workout was afterwards, when M made me stop taking pictures of her as she did push-ups. Note to self: Do not piss off the person who makes your food.)

3. Cleans (5-5-3-3-1-1)

After Tuesday's running-push-ups-burpees-squats-pull-ups workout and today's running-and-Cindy WOD, I was happy to see some barbell work on the board. The strength workout was optional, but a good number of us stuck around to practice cleans. It's been a week since I lifted an object heavier than my three-year-old kid, so I was in the mood for some squat cleans.



"Be careful with your back," M warned as I went to grab plates. It was a good reminder; even though my back feels infinitely better than it did a few weeks ago, going heavy would be a mistake. I kept it light, and well below my 1-rep max. But  by that point, I was exhausted anyway, so I doubt I would've been able to hoist a fully-loaded barbell up even if I'd tried.

Going light does have its disadvantages, though; judging from the bruise on my neck, I was cleaning the bar a bit too aggressively. Either that, or I passed out and someone gave me a hickey while I was unconscious.

After class, M and I drove back to meet up with the rest of the family, and we hit the ocean for an hour of outrigger canoe paddling with Maui Paddle Sports. My cousin and his wife are experienced, competitive, kick-ass paddlers, but M and I are total newbies. Secretly, I was hoping to be seated in one of their canoes so I could just coast and let them do all the heavy paddling.

Alas, M and I -- along with our boys -- were put in a separate canoe, so we actually had to work. It turned out to be incredibly fun and challenging, especially with our three-year-old dragging his paddle in the ocean and our six-year-old using his to giddily slap at the water. Paddling in unison, switching sides, thrusting with arms and back and core, bracing with legs -- all of it made for an excellent full-body workout.

"Regularly learn and play new sports," right?

Last but not least: Snorkeling. There's no better way to cool down than to float around in the warm ocean, casually following the fluorescent fish as they dart through coral.

I sorta don't want to go home.

Life Lessons from the New York Times Magazine

Planning to do some reading? This weekend's New York Times Magazine is jam-packed with healthy goodness.

The cover article by Gary Taubes (you know -- the author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat") is about the eeeevils of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, which we discussed a couple of days ago.

But wait -- there’s much, much more crammed into this little issue! For example:

Mark Bittman shows you how to make lamb -- and how to carve it in three cuts!

James Vlahos spells out exactly why you need to ditch your office chair!

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” 

Maggie Jones examines why we need to get more sleep!

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. [psychomotor vigilance task] results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day...

Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

And Gretchen Reynolds surveys a bunch of talking heads in order to find the BEST EXERCISE EVER.

Other than Taubes' piece, this article was the one that piqued my interest. According to the exercise physiologists interviewed, three movements -- all of which are familiar to any CrossFit enthusiast -- stand head and shoulders above the rest:

Burpees (a.k.a., the King of all Exercises):

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Squats:

“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.”

...The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition... Most physiologists believe that only endurance-exercise training can raise someone’s VO2max. But in small experiments, he said, weight training, by itself, effectively increased cardiovascular fitness.

“I used to run marathons,” he said. Now he mostly weight-trains, “and I’m in better shape.”

Intervals:

High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours...

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all.

(What's your poison? Burpees, squats or intervals? Something else entirely?)

So what have we learned from just one issue of the New York Times Magazine?

• Meat is tasty, but skip dessert. 
• Sleep a lot. 
• But when you’re up, don’t sit: Do burpees instead.

Sounds like a plan.

Slow 'N Low Is Not The Tempo

This is from a two-year-old Men's Journal article, but it's a good reminder that it's A-OK to forego daily hour-long workouts of moderate intensity in favor of 15-minute-long balls-to-the-wall metcons three times a week:

“If your definition of fitness is keeping fat off, having a stronger heart, and being able to endure rigorous activity, like a day of skiing,” says Nick Delgado, president of Newport Beach, California–based Ultimate Medical Research, “then you want to be doing anaerobic exercise.” As opposed to aerobics, this type of exercise involves maximum-effort training, such as sprinting and lifting weights, in which the intensity of the exercise exceeds the body’s ability to supply oxygen to muscles. “Shorter, high-intensity workouts burn off glucose much faster than long runs, so you start burning fat at a much higher rate, your heart beats so hard that it becomes stronger, and you’re pushing yourself to such extremes that anything else you do feels easier.”

Friday's Workout

Strength Skill:

• Weighted Pull-Ups

I managed fine with a 45-pound weight vest, but couldn't quite get my chin over the bar after loading it up with 50 pounds (about 40% of my bodyweight). Dammit.

Metcon:

Tabata:

• Max rep 53-pound overhead kettlebell swings
• Max rep Abmat sit-ups

Then:

• Max rep double-unders in 2 minutes

Result: 178 total reps (swings + sit-ups) / 32 double-unders

The Tabata protocol consists of 20 seconds of all-out, maximum effort work, alternating with 10 seconds of rest. Typically, one does eight rounds. For the workout today, this meant doing 20 seconds of max rep kettlebell swings, followed by 10 seconds of rest, and then 20 seconds of max rep sit-ups, and another 10 seconds of rest. And immediately doing the sequence again, eight times in total. Once this is done and you're gasping for air, you try to crank out as many double-unders as possible in two minutes. Total workout time: Just 10 minutes.

Believe it or not, this was incredibly fun. I love Tabata intervals. They're efficient, intense, and flexible enough to accommodate just about any kind of exercise -- from sprinting and jumping to squatting and pressing. The Tabata protocol's been shown to be super-effective at increasing anaerobic capacity and VO2 max, assuming you're pushing yourself as hard as you can during those 20 second bursts of energy. Plus, it's more effective for fat loss than long but low-intensity training.

Sunday's Workout

• Row 500 meters
• 70 one-handed kettlebell swings
• Row 500 meters
• 70 one-handed kettlebell swings

I rested briefly in between, but my actual time spent exercising totaled less than 7 minutes. Who needs an hour of cardio when you can get all the benefits from a short, intense set of intervals?