Category: Training

Continuing from No Regrets Part 2, where I had wrapped up in Austin and gone to Salt Lake City.

It Begins

It would actually be about a week before I got a pair of blades for my boots so I couldn’t get on the ice immediately.  My first task was to find a gym, I did this before finding a place to live.  I found a fantastic one down the road about a mile and joined immediately.  Sadly it would get bought out by Gold’s Gym a year or two later and ruined before being closed.  But I could continue my weight room assault and cardio until I got my blades.

They finally arrived and I started going to club ice sessions.  Now, the oval has a ‘coaching’ program in place, it’s run with about the same level of competency and organization as everything else they do there; which is to say, with less skill than the average little league soccer team.… Keep Reading

If you didn’t read No Regrets Part 1, I’d strongly suggest that you do or what follows won’t make any sense at all.

2004: Ice Camp

By the summer of 2004, my fitness was improving but I was still without a race circuit to attend.  I wasn’t sure what to do. I was biding my time in Austin, not really doing much with my life, books were selling, I was dating a very crazy girl.  And in poking around the Internet, I came across a used pair of ice speed skating boots (that turned out to be six sizes too big) on Ebay.  What the hell, I thought, let’s pick them up.  You know, just in case.

Part of me must have been thinking about the ice because, somehow, I then managed to stumble across an Introduction to Long-track camp being held at the Salt Lake City Olympic Oval.   I signed up immediately. … Keep Reading

This is the start of a very different series of articles than I tend to write.  For the most part, I haven’t and don’t talk that much abut personal stuff here.  I used to do that on a separate blog but I tend to think of those as places where people chatter inanely about myself.  But this piece is a little bit different.  Today I want to start a fairly long series describing the 5.5 years I spent in Salt Lake City pursuing ice speed skating.  How I made the choice to do that so that I’d have no regrets.

Introduction

For the past 5.5 years, as many of you know (and some of you probably don’t), I’ve been living in Salt Lake City training full time at the Utah Olympic Oval (aka the Fastest Ice On Earth).  I moved up here in the late summer of 2004 to pursue a singular goal which I’ll get to in Part 2.… Keep Reading

The importance of rest in training cannot be overstated even if it doesn’t get talked about enough.  Many people train too hard too often, often overtraining.  Factually, they would benefit from more recovery both in an acute (day to day) and long term sense.  In general, I recommend most take 1-2 days of rest from training. But that raises the question: is active rest or passive rest superior from a recovery standpoint.

Defining Active and Passive Rest

First some definitions.  Passive rest should be pretty easy to understand, on a passive rest day you do nothing.  No training at all.  Some might allow for something like a brisk walk.  But basically this is a day completely off.  Sit around, do nothing, relax, recover.   I don’t have much else to say about passive rest beyond that for the time being but I’ll come back to it near the end of this article.… Keep Reading

Today I want to cover proper and improper exercise technique for the split squat.  I’ll go ahead and note up front that everything I’m going to discuss would apply to the myriad lunging variations as well.  The only difference is the added component of movement (forwards, backwards, alternating or whatever).

The Split Squat

Recently the split squat in one form or another has come sort of the forefront due to a rather popular strength coach’s belief that the split squat (more specifically a rear foot elevated split squat) can and should replace back squatting for athletes.  While I won’t go that far, the split squat can certainly be a useful movement in many situations.

One is when a bilateral leg imbalance, that is a strength differential between the right and left legs, develops for some reason.  The split squat is one of many ways to go about correcting this.   A second place where the split squat can be useful (and this seems to be the main thrust of the strength coach mentioned above’s argument) is when the low back is limiting squat poundages.… Keep Reading