Labor Day Weekend Wrap-up

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A client emailed me last week and asked if there were any variations that he could use with regards to box jumps. I had originally sent him this video of a prone explosive pushup to box jump.

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So I put together a little vid with 7 different body-weight variations on box jumps that he, as well as you, can play with until blue in the face.

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I don’t know if anyone else is as excited for football to be back as I am, but I can’t wait to spend my Sundays lounging on the couch and catching up on some lazy time with the dog. While Lindsay probably isn’t as thrilled with this as I am, she always tends to fall for it, seeing as how she’s such a huge Saskatchewan RoughRiders fan, she can actually understand the game, when fouls should be called, who sucks and who is playing like a demon. Yeah, I love her.

As a result of being kinda busy these past few weeks, I haven’t been able to give any team a good look to see who would be a realistic contender, and who will be busting out the golf clubs in December. Top it off with the fact that I’ve had three different friends ask me to join their fantasy football league, and I can’t bear to shuck out the money without knowing enough about who I want to pick. Lameness

As a general rule, I don’t pick favorite teams. I pick favorite games. Sure, it may not have the die-hard essence of those who are going to pull for their teams whether they’re 18-0 or 0-18, but I want to watch good football, and occasionally the team I think is great at the start fo the season completely makes me want to sob quietly in the corner while hugging my knees and rocking softly. As a result, I watch games that I think are going to be great, not the grind it out 3 yards per down, defensive battle, where no one takes a risk and steps their game up to a world-class level. I want to see Troy Palomalu dive across the field to get a pick. I want to see Tom Brady throw for 500 yards. I want to see Adrian Peterson steam roll someone on his way to the end zone (barring another season of fumble-itis). And as a defense guy, I want to see some QB’s pulling turf out of their visors.

With the end of the lockout, there was definitely a large segment of Youtube videos being released showing NFL and college hopefuls running the 40 yard dash with a handheld timer, touting the results as accurate and amazing. Here’s the thing: combine testing uses laser sensored gates to get accurate readings, as the instant the light is broken the timer sets off. The athletes in combines will either make the team and be offered multi-million dollar contracts based on their results, or be told to come back next year when they’re ready.

Rondell Mendez, a wide reciever, set the current record of 4.24 seconds in the dash back in 1999. There’s only been 5 others to run it in less than 4.30 seconds. Hand timer results don’t matter at all when it comes to this, because it’s almost impossible to get accurate results from them. Try this at home. Start your timer, and try to stop the timer on exactly 5.0 seconds. It might take you about 40 or 50 tries to get it. This is why laser gates are used, and any one reporting results that don’t use a laser gating system has to have their results taken with a grain of salt.

One reason a lot of trainers wouldn’t get something like this is because they’re crazy expensive, with most starter sets costing roughly $1000-2000, and some complex computer-aided systems with multiple gates costing upwards of $20,000. You get what you pay for. I’ll accept someone’s times if they’re recorded with laser timing gates and repeated at the combine. Until then, you’re just creating page views.