1. It’s come to my attention that over 54 million people have come to recognize this young YouTube guitar dude as a total bada**, so it seemed only fitting that he be today’s music selection:

Had I not won the Nobel Prize at age 12 and hopped up Mt. Everest on one leg at 16, I might be wondering what the heck I was doing with my life at age 27 after watching that.  But, let’s move on to the good stuff.

2. It wouldn’t be a week in my apartment if my girlfriend didn’t watch “The Biggest Loser” with me in the room contemplating ripping my hair out.  I got a kick out of it this week when they had a 30″ plyo box in the center of the gym.  I don’t know of many 400-pound folks with vertical jumps that good, but apparently, it does make a great platform on which you can set your bottle of water.  Now that’s training economy.

3. If you thought the kettlebell trend was getting out of hands, just have a look at this:

Bench Pressing Dwarves: I Kid You Not

As long as they don’t call me “comrade,” I’m cool with it.  Success is all about adherence, so if it takes the weight and attitude of a feisty human exercise prop giving you hell on every rep to get the job done – and that person doesn’t mind – so be it.

4. We do a lot of anti-extension work with our athletes.  While these progressions start with basic prone bridging, you can progress them to overhead medicine ball throwing variations and (my personal favorite) ab wheel variations.  We’ll do isometric holds, regular reps, and – as seen below – band-resisted ab wheel rollouts.

This is just one of over a dozen innovative, effective exercises Jim Smith introduces in his Combat Core resource; it’s definitely worth checking out.

5. It’s come to my attention that a tiny portion of my readers get all huffy when I don’t post references for my blogs.  While I could go to the trouble of posting references in all of them, the truth is that it clutters things up and takes away the informal tone of this blog.  And, frankly, I often write these in my boxer shorts and unshowered, with a raging case of bedhead and some kind of angry, belligerent, “my mother didn’t love me” music in the background.  It’s not exactly academia.

Suffice it to say that I can provide references for most of this stuff, and if I can’t, I can sure tell you about a ton of bright professionals who have seen awesome anecdotal evidence – as the research world is typically years behind the smartest people who are in the trenches.  If that’s not good enough, oh well.

And on that note, I need to get back to the trenches.  Have a great weekend!