Monthly Archives: February 2011

Surf Training Body Weight Exercises to Maximize Your Surfing Power

Using your body weight to improve your surf training for optimal surfing performance has many benefits. Firstly you can train anywhere and at anytime. You can choose to do your surfing workouts outdoors in the fresh air, down on the beach or in your hotel room when traveling or competing on tour.

Secondly, you do not need to carry any additional equipment or training gear, all you need is your body. If any other training equipment is required you can quickly adapt to your surrounds and use things like chairs, benches, playgrounds or even just a wall to help with your surfing workouts.

Lastly and most importantly is that by using your entire body you are training muscle patterns rather than specific muscles. This is important because surfing is an athletic sport that requires integration of many movement patterns happening all at once. Training your body to become stronger in entire movement patterns will greatly assist with surfing endurance and surfing power.

While many people believe that surfing workouts are all about building muscle or bulking up. This is not the case. Effective surf training means focusing on developing postural muscles crucial for joint stabilization, general strength and improved ranges of motion and not putting on excessive muscular bulk. Body weight surf training is ideal for these purposes and means that once your body has adapted to full body training methodologies and basic endurance it is more likely to respond better when power movements are introduced.

By using body weight to develop strength and strength endurance we can then safely increase the intensity of surfing workouts to incorporate more dynamic and explosive movements. Surfing training must have some component of power development and the best way to do this is through dynamic body weight movement patterns that mimic surfing requirements. This will quickly assist with powerful rotational movements performed in critical sections of fast moving waves.

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Climbing Tips to Improve Your Skills

Becoming a better climber is a goal that most climbers strive for. Most climbers simply just climb route after route and end up plateauing. Here are some climbing tips that will help you become a better climber. In this article, we’re going to take a look at the mental, physical, and technical aspect of climbing.

The first thing we’ll look at is the mental aspect of this sport. You should already know that rock climbing isn’t exactly the safest sport. There is definitely a real risk of seriously injuring yourself if you make the wrong mistake. There is this fear that might run through your mind as you prepare to climb your route and during your climb as well. This fear can hold you back from reaching your fullest potential. One way to overcome this is to visualize your climb as well as progressively improve so that you will have greater confidence in your climbing abilities. Of course, trusting your spotters and equipment will help as well.

With many rock climbers, it’s all about getting stronger. Specifically, it’s all about getting stronger fingers and forearms. If you think about the routes that you failed to complete, chances are, you failed because of a hold that you couldn’t hold onto or a move you didn’t have enough strength to do. So how do you get stronger for climbing? One thing you can do is to simply climb with the focus of doing hard moves. This might mean skipping your projects and just doing moves that forces you to get stronger. You can also work on doing pull ups as well as use a campus board to train your fingers. Adding weight such as using a weight vest will do wonders as well.

One of the best ways to increase your climbing ability is to focus on your technique. Many beginner climbers focus solely on strength and have very sloppy technique. With the right technique, you can do many moves effortlessly while people who use only strength burn out on. Watch the more advanced climbers climb and notice how they do certain moves that may seem a bit tough for you. Knowing different techniques such as knee drops, flagging, Gastons, heel hooks, etc., will make doing certain moves seem almost effortless. It should be your goal to figure out the easiest, most efficient way to send a route instead of trying to muscle your way through the problem like so many beginners do.

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Olympian Translation Needs

With the next Olympic Games looming in 2012, and London frantically trying to prepare itself for an invasion of tourists, athletes and spectators a question which might not be oft considered is that of translation. For the Beijing Olympics in 2008 the Chinese invested both time and money (perhaps not enough!) into providing English translation for the Olympic visitors. However, although many improvements were made to new and existing translations the overriding preference for quantity and price over quality and accuracy was fairly obvious. ‘Chinglish’ translations were still appearing on billboards, shop signs and menus despite best efforts to remove embarrassing mistakes. Anyone who has visited China will smile in recognition at this point, as they will have undoubtedly come away with several pictures of amusing signage- invariably with one or more ‘toilet gags’.

It seems the huge demand for translation and interpretation from human translators during the Beijing Olympics was supplemented with the unreliable likes of Google Translate or other machine translation tools. Preparing itself for 2012 is one ginormous task for London in terms of improving infrastructure and ensuring the event for millions of spectators is not a disaster. Translation and interpreting services may come further down the list after developing tube lines and building stadiums, but it is still hugely important to the functioning of the games.

The official languages of the Olympic Committees and, therefore, the Games are French and English, and (if applicable) the host country’s language. Fortunately, as English is the 2012 host country’s language every announcement made during the Games will only be made into 2 languages and not 3, which will speed up the proceedings considerably. Although there will ‘officially’ only be requirements for interpreters and native speakers of French the other 215 countries taking part in the 38 sporting disciplines will need their own translators and interpreters out of English both for the media coverage and for the competing athletes. This could be a very lucrative time for freelance interpreters and English translation providers interested in sport.

Moreover, it is not only sport specific translation and interpreting services that will be in demand. London’s restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions are gearing themselves up for the extra 500,000 visitors expected to flock to the capital next summer. Menus, leaflets and websites are all being translated so that the visiting Olympic fans can enjoy London’s sightseeing and gastronomic delights.

One thing is for sure the London 2012 Olympic Committee should learn from the Chinese example and invest in reliable language service providers for their translation requirements. This will ensure that the only red faces during the Games belong to the medal winning athletes and not the host nation’s event organisers.

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Badminton Courts and New Materials Considered

Perhaps you didn’t know, but there are some folks working on new futuristic badminton courts right now. For those in the United States, they may not realize how important this sport is throughout Asia, or in other parts of the world. It is for that reason that high-tech and new materials are being brought into this sport to increase the agility of the players to compete at the upper end of the tournament spectrum. These new courts will be lined with carbon composites and graphene coatings.

Now then, you might think that sheets of graphene, or carbon nanotubes might be more apropos to international space stations, satellites, stealth aircraft, and products and equipment in other super high-tech industries. Still, you be wrong to think that badminton is not considered equally important in many of the countries who find it one of their favorite pastimes and most competitive sports. The reason this technology is so incredible is that graphene and carbon composites can be made to conduct electricity.

In fact, they could work just like a giant touchpad. In other words every time a player took a step, it could record exactly where they put their feet, and later that could be played back to help a player better themselves, and train at improving the muscles needed for those types of agility based moves. For Olympic coaches it will be a godsend, and it will only increase the already furious pace of the game.

If you doubt somehow that badminton is not one of the fastest played sports on the planet, or one that doesn’t require the greatest agility a human body can offer then I suggest you go to YouTube and download some of the recent tournaments in Southeast Asia, and see for yourself. Indeed, these new courts will play extremely fast because they will be nonskid, not to mention the fact that they will be literally indestructible.

They will not need resurfacing, they will not show wear and tear, and they will be worth every penny for those who play on them. Being able to hone your skills on a graphene coated carbon nanotube composite court will make the difference between those who move on to be world champions, and those that are able to compete in the lower ranks.

Not long ago when I looked at what these researchers were doing, I was blown away by some of their discoveries, and how they will be using this material, in fact, I think it will change everything, the game they never be the same again. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

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