Crushin

The one thing I have been diligent about of late has been my crush strength. I have been closing the grippers every other day and now incorporated the extensor band on the opposite days. But I didn't go buy IronMind brand bands. Seriously the one I pulled off the broccoli is working great. I completely forgot about wall walks. I need to incorporate them back in to my routine. I just dropped a hundred bones on the hand balancing mastery course from the hand balancing kid. It should be worth it. Its a huge folder with like a zillion workouts to do some of the craziest shit ever. Plus Cds with interviews with the best gymnast, hand balancing super humans ever. I was rocking some one legged squats the other day and doing pushups on the pipe and board have become a staple of my workout. If you keep your feet together it makes it really hard to balance and sometimes it can be rough doing like twenty pushups. Some days I work on making the board real uneven so I am doing 1 handed pushups essentially. I have been making it to the attic to use the rock rings now too. I was doing 4 sets of 8 or 10 I forget. I would start on the top grip for the 1st set and then work my way down to the tiny crimper for the last set.

Iron Mind has been school work. I was enjoying watching movies and playing chess the past month and now all of my large projects are due so I am spending all my time doing those. It was however worth it. I'll come visit when the semester ends before I go to Japan.

first joint workout with kaj

for the first time today, ii worked out with my son, kaj. he was doing his "tummy time," which is when we put him on his stomach and he works on whatever he wants to try - holding his head up, squirming forward a bit, or just chilling, and i did explosive pushups and wall walks. kaj lasted a good 10 minutes, so i got 3 sets of pushups in and 1 set of wall walks.

over the weekend, i cleaned out my space in the barn and started finally using my chains and handles for some serious stuff. i did a lot of rope climbing this weekend, too. not for time, but i'd do 2 climbs every time i walked past while i was building a new sheep shelter that could be used in winter or summer weather.

as for iron mind, i have been thinking of the whole election deal coming up next year. i have only been thinking of ron paul so far. i don't think he has much of a chance because he's pro life, which will immediately turn off most democrats, despite the common sense he uses to form policy. he wants to negate roe v. wade on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, the federal government meddling in state affairs, which is how he views most issues. the big issue for me, though, is not the fact that he wants to negate roe v. wade and make the abortion thing a state issue, but because of the sanctity of life act. he tried to pass a bill defining life as beginning at conception, which i think is not for any government to define. i personally don't think abortion should be addressed federally. making it a state issue is more in line with how our government was supposed to work, but still not addressing the heart of the matter. why let any government body draw conclusions about situations that are not provable? it should be a person by person basis, case by case decision, made by the parties actually affected by the decision. and, really, i don't see why we're trying to stop abortion anyway. the world is so overpopulated with poorly raised people, adding "50 million" more into the mix would only make things worse. abortion is good population control, and it will happen either way - legal or not. i think it's ridiculous how pro lifers are allowed to show pictures of aborted fetuses, but if you show a picture of a mangled soldier (especially american) its poor taste.

s long as there are enough democrats in the senate to not pass the sanctity of life act i think he's the man to have in charge, mostly because he's about having a local government run most everything while the federal government does the big stuff like defense and infrastructure. i normally include health care in there too, but he doesn't. i suppose if you provide universal health care, the government gets to decide what health is and what falls under its various headings, which i would oppose. more later i guess.

Football

I played football on Thanksgiving. It hurts. I have also been addicted to ChessMaster and get nothing else done in my life. I started doing pushups on the wobble board. I almost have the captains of crush 1.5 closed. I started using the wheel for abs. And my rope is getting soggy and nasty at the bottom.

motivitation

i think its the coming home from work in the dark that kills motivation. i actually started doing the volume thing too, trying to do as much as possible every chance i got, but even that has been tough to keep up with. tomorrow i plan on a serious workout - possibly riding in to work, to start my time off.

for the mind, i designed and built a portable sheep shelter. it has removable side walls for winter and summer use. i will post a picture soon. i have also continued with the plant propagation techniques, and as long as it stay cold this next week, we'll be making hardwood cuttings of all our fruits and nuts.

Countin

I am doing the volume idea I had, but I am gonna start counting. I am constantly doing push-ups on stability ball and now on the board on the pipe. Its good stuff. I am going to get my pump rocks out of the attic so I use those more too. I have also been doing alot of inverted pushups.

I am also reviewing lots of Japanese on my drives to school.

brooks in the house

hello.

this is brooks. my latest iron mind has been raising a newborn. he's a genius, or a wizard. he's trained us to have him pee and poop in our sinks or other liquid catching basins. also, i've been reading up on plant propagation and edible forest gardening as my wife and i are preparing to propagate several of our fruit plants from root cuttings so we have seedlings to take with us to newport when we move. we'll be propagating clove currants, red currants, hardy kiwis, nanking cherries (bush cherry), and probably some rosemary and blueberries as well.

my last workout was friday. well, sort of. i spent all day sat and sunday dumping loads of wood chips onto our garden paths. but friday i rode a hilly 17 miles each way on my commute to and from work. lately i've been trying on the ride in to incorporate tabata intervals, but since i dont have a watch on me i just do 80 pedal strokes at like 80% and then 40 at a resting pace. it gets me to work faster and gets me a better workout.

i haven't balanced much lately.

New Method

Iron Mind - So I have been playing loads of chess and doing chess lessons on Chess Master. Also I got this game called goblet which is really good.

Iron Body - Hit the heavy bag for awhile and did lots of inverted pushups.

I just cant motivate myself to set a large chunk of time aside for exercising for somereason so my new method is Volume. I am just gonna do workouts throughout the day whenever there is free time. Like crush grippin while I drive, doing pull ups on everything I see, a handstand here, claf raises there. Just continuous little workouts all the time. We'll see what happens.