If you’re not a regular runner, don’t sign up for a 5K, show up to the start line, and hope for the best—even if you’re in pretty decent shape. An actual training plan will help you cross the finish line strong, injury-free, and not feeling like you’re about to puke. Here’s our offer: You give [...]
Participating in an Olympic event for the majority of athletes requires a great deal of determination and perseverance in order to make it to the Olympics. The Olympics is a culmination of a lifetime of hard work striving to be the World’s best. This year’s Olympic Summer Games in London will be no different in that every competitor will have overcome the odds to end up on an international stage, but for some those obstacles are more readily apparent.
The London 2012 Paralympic Games will be the biggest Paralympics yet, with 20 sports involving participants from 163 competing nations. The UK is considered to be the birthplace of the Paralympic Games and has a strong history in Paralympic sport. In 1948, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann organised a wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville hospital for World War II soldiers with spinal cord injuries. Four years later, competitors from the Netherlands joined and the International Paralympic Movement was born. In preparing for the 2012 Paralympics, London has been praised for venue readiness and accessibility.
Paralympic sport venues will be spread across London in many different locations, including the Olympic Stadium and the ExCel Center, as well as the impressive Aquatics Centre and The Royal Artillery Barracks.
The London Games will be broadcast in Europe, with UK’s Channel 4 planning to broadcast over 150 hours of television coverage. Live web streaming and social media will play a big part in broadcasting news and updates for the Games.
The video was produced by the Canadian Paralympic Committee.
With the motivation of knowing that hundreds of orphans with Down syndrome were waiting for a family to find them, Racing for Orphans with Down Syndrome was launched. Our purpose is to create awareness for these special children and raise funding that will go towards making what seemed like a distant dream of having a family of their own become a reality, one child at a time.
The seed for RODS Racing was planted in 2007 when founder Brady Murray had his newborn son placed in his arms. The doctors told him that his son has Down syndrome. What seemed like an overwhelming challenge has evolved into one of Brady’s biggest blessings. Brady’s son Nash has been the inspiration behind the creation of RODS Racing. The unconditional love that Nash shows to all and the desire to help these precious children is truly the driving force behind RODS Racing.
The athletes of RODS Racing consists of individuals from all different backgrounds. Whether it’s a 5k, Marathon, Sprint Triathlon or a full Ironman, we race for the cause of helping these children find a home.
Together with the organization Reece’s Rainbow, hundreds of children have been saved, but there are many more still in need of an adoptive family.
If you’re looking to really build your core, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve taken and outlined the keys to the core of UFC champ Jon Jones. So whether your looking to get in the ring for an MMA bout or want to look great at the beach this summer here’s a few tips that will get you exactly what you want. Find your threshold
A fight doesn’t end when one guy does 12 kicks or 12 punches. Combat sports are ruled by the clock. That’s why you don’t count reps or sets at the Wat. Instead, you exercise in 3-or 5-minute intervals to simulate rounds in a fight. “The goal is sustained intensity over time,” Kru tells me. It’s brutally efficient. Time-based training forces you to go as hard as you can for as long as you can and to find your own maximum work rate. You learn to pace yourself—fast.
To try it, pick three exercises—the pullup, squat thrust, and goblet squat, for example. For each, see how many you can do with good form in 1 minute, with no rest. As soon as you finish pullups, start doing squat thrusts, and as soon as you finish those, start squatting. Rest for 1 minute and do another set. The short-term aim is to improve the total number of reps you can do in a minute. In the longer term, you also want to increase the resistance you use. Typical Kru workouts are variations of this: 10 to 20 rounds of calisthenics, lifting, striking drills, and sparring, and then stretching. Read More »
Have you ever known an athlete afflicted by everything from bee stings to forgotten equipment, bike crashes, blisters and missed wave starts? Bad luck seems to follow them. If something can go wrong, it does for them.
The opposite is the athlete who races and trains like an accountant. Everything is tabulated, check listed, prepared and re-checked. For them preparation and racing is a well-charted movement from point A to point B. Organized athletes experience a lower level of anxiety and spend less mental energy worrying.
One of the greatest performance coaches ever, author Steven Covey of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People coined the phrase “sphere of influence.” Covey was teaching the ability to separate the things we can control from the things we cannot. He emphasized the importance of focusing on things within our sphere of influence, the things we can exert control over. For the athlete that means meticulous attention to details of hydration, nutrition and equipment. It means knowing the exact route a race course takes before you ever arrive at the venue. It means occupying yourself with every detail you can control and ignoring the ones you cannot. Read More »
Stanford sophomore Marissa Ferrante and UC Irvine graduate student Dustin McLarty outlasted nearly 1,300 competitors to take the overall titles at Saturday’s USA Triathlon Collegiate National Championship at the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater.
A standout runner, Ferrante put together a complete race to cruise to victory on the women’s side. She lifted the tape in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 28 seconds — more than five minutes clear of the field on the 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike, 10-kilometer run course. Read More »
When it comes to fitness trackers, the psychology behind them is just as important as the technology inside them.
Gadgets like the Nike+ FuelBand, Fitbit Ultra and BodyMedia Fit Link use accelerometers, altimeters and algorithms to track everything from how many steps you took to how many calories you burned. By providing this data instantaneously, and in some cases allowing you to share it via social media, they do more than inform. They reinforce, motivate and reward by turning exercise into a game.
Motivating couch potatoes and providing everyday athletes with data will be an increasingly lucrative business as so-called “wearable” computing devices like fitness trackers take off. Companies like Nike, Adidas and Motorola are expected to ship 90 million “wearables” by 2017, according to ABI Research.
Forrester Research is equally bullish, noting in a report this week that wearables are the “next wave of consumer technology product innovation” and companies like Adidas, Nike and Under Armour should work alongside the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook to maximize their potential.
How these devices work is a straightforward technological issue. Why they work delves into two important facets of activity: measurement and motivation. To know whether you’re getting better at something, you need data. As physicist Lord Kelvin said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Once you’ve got data, you need specific goals or standards to provide the sense of accomplishment that will make you work harder. Read More »
Burn Fat and Build Muscle without Lifting a Weight
Though Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley make a convincing sales team, you don’t need their Total Gym to work your total body. “Body-weight workouts can be just as effective as those done with barbells, dumbbells, or machines,” says Craig Ballantyne, M.Sc., C.S.C.S., owner of turbulencetraining.com. The secret: choosing the right exercises. Try Ballantyne’s body-weight circuit, below, which trains every muscle in your body while challenging your cardiovascular system as intensely as a hard treadmill session.
Directions
Perform this workout three times a week, resting at least a day between sessions. Do the exercises as a circuit, completing one set of 8 to 10 reps of each exercise before resting for 2 minutes. Then repeat two more times. Too easy? Shorten your rest period or add another circuit. Read More »
