Street Trials/Parkour on a Bike

My friend Sarah sent me this video, describing it as "parkour on a bike", which is about as good a description as someone could give to trials riding, I'd say. Of course this assumes you know what parkour is. You may have gotten a sense of it from the video on brachiation, but it is really about moving through a space quickly and efficiently. Like we try to do with our workouts in crossfit - move quickly and efficiently. Anyway, if you've not seen parkour before, or if you want to see more, the second video is a good example of pretty pure parkour (without the flips and tricks of freerunning)

Barefoot Running

Ok, so I'm sure that pretty much everyone reading this blog knows that I run (and train) barefoot and that I have done so for several years. In that time I have had no injuries due to running, not counting the couple times I bruised my heels in the early stages of learning, and not counting minor inconveniences like having to remove cactus thorns during trail runs. Now I'll admit up front that I have probably only once run any further than six miles, so maybe I could have been injured by now if I ran longer distances more often. On the other hand there are many people who have been running barefoot a long time, and for long distances who are injury free, and there are now a number of studies supporting the conclusion that barefoot running is safer and more efficient than running shod. The first video is about a Harvard scientist, Daniel Lieberman, who has been studying running for a while and is now a barefoot runner. We had an article about him and his most recently published study kicking around the gym a while back.



The next few videos are of the foot strike of a couple Kenyan runners, both of whom grew up running barefoot. The first clearly is a forefoot striker.



The second is considered a forefoot striker as well, but you can see that he lands more "flat-footed" than the first runner, and in the video of him in shoes, he would certainly be considered a mid-foot or potentially a heel striker. You can see how the huge wedge that it the sole of the running shoe changes the contact with the ground even though nothing in his stride has changed.





Any way, if you want to find more info on barefoot running I recommend

http://therunningbarefoot.com/

this was the first website I found when I started running barefoot and it has a lot of good info. I also just came across this site

http://www.runningbarefootisbad.com/

which does not support barefoot running, in case you want to see a different point of view. I personally feel that the author of this site is guilty of many of the same kinds of inaccuracies he accuses barefoot runners of, but he does raise the issue that people often make assumptions about studies that do not reflect the actual data presented.

Ukelele Madness

So, this doesn't have much to do with CrossFit, but in the grand tradition of our former Directer of Training Mr. Dave Smith, I may occasionally include stuff on this blog that I just think is super cool. This certainly fits that description in my book. The following video is of Jake Shimabukuro, a virtuoso with the ukulele, playing George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." If you don't think this is awesome, I'm not sure I can be your friend. Just kidding..... Kind of.

Brachiate; because it's your birth right, you ape!

Alright, what the hell is brachiation? Basically it's to move about by swinging from hand to hand. This is a very rare mode of locomotion on this planet, apes being about the only family of animals capable of true brachiation. But guess what! We are capable of this amazing feat too because we're apes! Now, there is reason to believe that in our evolutionary past we gave up some of our brachiating prowess in order to run around better (long legs), and throw stuff better (wider shoulder girdle, shorter forearms, more stable wrists), but the ability remains, so lets put it to good use. Besides, there are some people (myself included) that believe you can't have truly healthy shoulders without doing some brachiating now and then (I think I heard Kelly Starret PT talk about this once on CrossFit Radio). After all it's what our shoulders were originally designed for.

The first video is of a couple of white-cheeked gibbons showing the extreme of what is possible for brachiators. The second shows a bit of what is possible for us humans. We might not be able to swing around quite as well, but check out what our long, and strong, legs make possible.

A Reason for Endurance

This being my first blog post, I want to start off with something cool. As I'm sure many of you know I'm very interested in the skills of our collective hunter-gatherer past and present. My hope is that I'll be able to share some of that information, as well as information relating to CrossFit specifically and health, fitness, and nutrition more generally, with the readers of this blog. I'll also use this blog as a platform for highlighting activities and accomplishments at CrossFit Works.
Those of you familiar with CrossFit probably understand why we don't spend a lot of time training mono structural (running, rowing, biking etc...) endurance activities, but if you don't, talk to me or one of the other trainers for the reasoning behind this. Now this isn't to say that cardiovascular endurance is useless, in fact it is quite useful and one of the aspects of our fitness we are constantly trying to improve.
The following video is an example of the persistence hunt, perhaps the oldest hunting method in the world, and culminates in the killing of a kudu by the San bushman. So, in case you can't think of a good reason to run and keep running, then here is one use for endurance...



I hope you'll notice the hunters running technique. Despite the fact that he is wearing pretty thick soled shoes, he is running with a forefoot strike for the most part. However when they show a close-up he only forefoot strikes on the left, while heel striking on the right. It makes me wonder whether something he is carrying is throwing off his stride, or if he was just filmed at an inopportune moment.