Olympic Snatch
Barbell lifting, both the Olympic and and Powerlifting varieties are enjoying a bit boost from their inclusion in Crossfit’s syllabus. The snatch is by far and away the toughest of these lifts, and I have the utmost respect for anyone able to snatch their own bodyweight or more, let alone the champions who are closer to double their bodyweight.
For mortals, here are some resources to help learn this complicated lift, which demands a lot (and I mean a lot) of flexiblity, coordination, balance, speed and strength. Again Faster have a whole load of good videos for Crossfitters on technique, here their snatch series:
This is Mark Rippetoe, but on the power snatch, still I like some of the cues he uses:
Glenn Pendlay at California Strength’s approach a bit different:
California Strength, Snatch Part 1
California Strength, Snatch Part 2
California Strength, Snatch Part 3
Diets and Supplements
A confluence of factors in the last year have made me more interested in the science of diet and food supplements. For many the Crossfit training I regularly now do goes hand in hand with “eating Paleo” (low on dairy and processed carbs), and although I don’t do Paleo myself I’ve lost almost 20kg doing Atkins-style low-carb diets in the last 12 or so months. One of my latest projects is in the area of high quality sports training supplements. On the inter-web Paleo, low-carb and supplement discussions tend to be accompanied by a lot of zealous advocacy and cast in stone beliefs, whose foundation often seems to owe more to endless repetition than substance.
This will be the first post linking on-line resources that seem to apply some scientific rigour to these topics, and help sort the wheat from the chaff…
Whole Health Source a blog-site by a biochemist whose hobby is the study and convey time-tested strategies for achieving and maintaining health and well-being.
The Ancestral Health Society organises an annual conference on the science surrounding the Paleo eating movement. The speeches are available on Vimeo, and my endurance athletes might be interested in this presentation by a cardiologist about the (un)healthiness of endurance events.
Finally for this first post, for those who are really interested in the science, and how to critically look at studies there’s Alan’s Blog.
Together these provide a pretty good launch pad to other resources positioning themselves at the scientifically critical end of the Paleo and low-carb “cool-aid” spectrum.
For my next post I’ll focus on the science (or lack thereof) surrounding exercise diet supplementation.
Free Management Coaching
Who needs a life or management coach when you can dip into the collective wisdom of the inter-web?
Want to learn how to be a better manager in the eyes of your staff? Check out some views on reddit
Feeling frustrated with your mother in law, make yourself feel better with some schadenfreude.
I guess the structure of this site is a bit different from your average chat forum, and it’s appeal is in it’s surreal at times, but often insightful content…
Great local weather site
Do you ever feel you can only get a weather forecast for somewhere near where you want, but isnt quite the right place. We live in the upper part of our village, about 150m above the nearest weather station most weather sites want you to lock in on, so in winter that can make the difference between rain and snow in the morning.
This site allows you to get the weather at your house by choosing the exact spot on a map, and gives you very comprehensive weather report, including local weather satellite forecasts for rain etc. Give it a whirl. Here’s the example for the weather at my house this week: MeteoBlue.com weather at Daniel’s house. I can confirm at the time of writing it is snowing…
SEO Results to Date
Happy to say my Google SEO results are paying off. A search for “templeman” now features www.templeman.net on page 2, where it was page 40 or so a few weeks ago, a satisfactory result I feel!
Templeman Advisory GmbH
I’m delighted to announce that Templeman Advisory GmbH has been formed and will be my service company going forward. In the next few days I will rejig the website to reflect this.
Find of the Day – Google Voice
So I’ve been fishing around to find the cheapest way to call my colleagues at Traderoot in South Africa, especially trying to cut the cost of the weekly conf call, that was costing 30c a minute even on Skype.
After browsing through 101 suggestions on various calling services and calling cards that frankly I’m not too keen sending my CC details to, I chance upon something hidden in plain view… Google Voice. In the US it offers all sorts of bells and whistles including a personal portable number than unifies your mobile and land lines etc
In Europe or at least Switzerland for now it is basically a Skype (which is of course owned by Microsoft now) clone, but cheaper in particular for calls to mobile phones and premium numbers, costing about 25% of Skype’s already fairly decent rates. It also has a iPhone app (as does Skype) but it doesnt seem to be available in the Swiss store but is in the UK and US iTunes store.
I’ll update this once I’ve used the service a bit but, definitely looks very interesting. Watch this space.
SEO Search Engine Optimization and Traffic Generation
OK, so I’m trying to put myself and my services “out there” a little bit more. Feels a bit strange and in your face, but there you go.
So I’ve overhauled my templeman.net site here and I updated my LinkedIn page. What next? Get some traffic. Since I like dabbling around and keeping abreast of internet and IT technology, I embarked on a DIY voyage of discovery and here is what I discovered so far.
WordPress site content manager. I actually started using WordPress a couple of years ago, but it turned out to be a very good choice. It’s easy to use and maintain, and it has a massive selection of free and paying layouts, and has some really great plug-ins to make life easier; Askimet to kill spam, All in One SEO for SEO optimization, and Google Analytics for WordPress to make activitating your site for Google Analytics.
Google Analytics. At the risk of promoting Google’s world domination you cant really complain at a free product like this. You need to understand who is visiting your site, how they are getting there and how they are using it. You can do all that with Google Analytics.
Paying for traffic. For about 2 dollars a click through LinkedIn will serve up a little adverted to a selected user population. I’ve decided to spend 100 dollars seeing what results this generates, and will report back at the end of the experiment.
Traffic for free. Search Engine Ranking. Here is a good video explanation of what you need to be doing to get your website ranked higher in search results. In a nutshell find the right keywords, litter your site content and meta data with them, litter the internet with links to your site.
Constant tempo playlists – Part 3
I decided to smarten up my Spotify Playlister application and here is a screenshot of the finished product. If you have a Spotify premium account you can give it a whirl: download the zip file from my site and follow the instructions in the readme file. Enjoy.
Constant tempo playlists – Part 2
OK, a couple of hours later here it is. Not pretty but functional, a page that will generate a 20 track playlist within a given tempo range from artists similar and including the chosen artist.
Give it a whirl Daniel’s Artist Tempo Spotify Playlists generator. It wont play directly in iPhone but you can easily take the playlists to Spotify. Thanks to www.musicmachinery.com for the inspiration and a good chunk of the code… I didnt have time to learn jQuery in an evening.
UPDATE. Two days later, I’ve now got a home-brew app running inside Spotify itself that will generate playlists using the various EchoNest filters. It was a bit fiddly involving getting a developer license from Spotify. I can’t share it with you except as a picture or as source code… mail me if you are interested, it’s along the lines of the linked web page above but more user friendly.
It’s been an interesting exercise, now it’s time to use it…