Sidelines, August challenge

Aug01
by Duf on August 1, 2012 at 10:14 am
Posted In: Injuries, Physical challenges

I have been trying to really lay low this week with my exercise, trying to avoid anything that potentially could aggravate whatever I did to the deltoid area of my left shoulder.  Unfortunately that eliminates a large chunk of the body weight exercises that are a staple of my routine.  I hate not being able to do what I normally do, it makes me feel like shit.

So I was considering giving myself a one month summer vacation from running the Bar-barian Forum challenges.  Participation in July’s challenge had been light and I thought a month off might build the demand back up.

Well the last week of the month saw a bunch of entries fly in so I reconsidered and quickly thought up of an August challenge. I wanted to do something where I could give out the Bar-barian bracelets I was sent as prizes.

I decided, based on the other contest we did in the past that involved prizes that this challenge had to not have a lot of form variables since that can be subjective.  It was a pain in the ass having to dissect form when prizes were on the line.  So with this challenge form has a very minimal role, instead endurance and balance will take center stage.

All three modes are handstand variations for maximum time.  Normal mode is a handstand held against the wall, hard is a one handed handstand against a wall and Bar-baric is a free standing hand stand.  This is the first hand balancing challenge we have had in quite awhile.

I know first hand trying to stand on your hands against a wall  for anything past 60 seconds can get very difficult, very quickly.  I have never successfully done a one handed wall handstand and my best free standing handstand was probably 5 or 6 seconds max.

It should be an interesting month as I know we have some real strong hand balancers in the forum.

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Paid for pull ups, 600

Jul27
by Duf on July 27, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Posted In: Exercises, General Fitness Talk

So I was a bit surprised when I had an email this morning saying I had a check for $116 on it’s way to me from Google.  It is payment for the ads that run on some of my videos on YouTube.

I know I had monetization turned on for my YouTube account ages ago but to be honest I never thought much about it since I have never seen a single penny up until this point.  Well evidently part of that is because it seems they only will start paying out once you hit $100 in revenue.  Well I just passed that number last month.  It took me something like 4 years to make my first 100 bucks.

However a quick look at my account showed that my monthly income has been accelerating at a rapid pace.  I am now making somewhere close to 20 bucks a month.

I posted this on Facebook and several of my bar buddies asked how they could start making money as well.  Well the first step is you have to get an invite from YouTube to monetize your videos.  This only happens once your the videos on your channel have something like a total of 10,000 views.  (right now I am close to 300,000)

So if you are new to YT you have some work to do, namely putting some content up there that will get you enough views to get the invite.  Once the invite is sent there is a web form you have to fill out to enable your account for monetization.  I did mine a long time ago obviously so I don’t recall the details but it wasn’t hard to do.

Once you do that a couple days later if all goes well you will be notified that your account is now enabled for monetization.  Once that happens your videos will have the option to display ads.  Display ads on a video that takes off and you can have a pretty decent pay day.

There are restrictions on what sort of video you can monetize.  If you have a music track more than likely you can not monetize it. If it has commercial content of any type it will get red flagged as well.

So anyway getting this check made me go back through my videos and turn on monetization on a bunch of them.  I have some older videos that actually have become relatively popular much to my surprise.  That was all missed money opportunities. Did you know over 10,000 people have watched me shave my head?  It’s pretty funny how stupid content can actually generate a lot of views.

Anyway, now that I know the potential is there, I will be trying to monetize whatever I can.  My YouTube library is 300+ videos and counting.  There is a lot of potential there.

The YouTube bar community has COUNTLESS videos out there with a ton of views.  We are all missing out by not monetizing wherever we can.

Today at the gym I was limited on what I could do because of my tweaked left shoulder.  I decided to do two things that didn’t hurt, push ups and air squats.  I alternated between sets of 10 push ups and 10 squats.  It seemed pretty easy early on.  By the time I finished my 300th push up and air squat I was soaked in sweat. It got very tough.

My push up form was real solid with good depth and extension.  With the air squats I went as deep as my creaky knees will allow me to go.  I am sure I will be quite sore tomorrow.

Any ideas that my shoulder is significantly better were dashed when I raised my ass up in pike position, transferring my weight across the shoulder in a different way.  It instantly gave me a nice little stab of pain, sigh….

 

 

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Final mode

Jul26
by Duf on July 26, 2012 at 10:01 am
Posted In: Injuries, Physical challenges

I completed the only mode of this month’s BB challenge that I had not tried yet, normal mode.   This challenge is max push ups in 5 minutes.  Luckily my shoulder injury doesn’t seem to bother me doing push ups, the other two staple movements, pull ups and dips, still hurt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLqpuAdYdkg

For my attempt I pulled out my balled up sock that I used in some previous BB challenges when Lee used to run them.  By sticking the sock under your chest you have an easy way to make sure you are getting deep enough on your push ups.  Once you feel the sock hit your chest you are good to go.

Push up contests can be tricky to judge because there are a lot of variables that can change the geometry of an attempt, including hand position, distance hands are apart and head position during the reps.

My 110 reps was nothing fantastic but I hit the sock every time and my form was basically sound which is always my primary goal.

Last night I don’t think I hit my basic calorie needs for dinner.  Supper was a small salad with kale, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, sliced almonds and sunflower seeds. Desert was some home made apple crisp.  I did have a few Bud Light Platinums to make up the difference.

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Hurting, inspiration is only a wrist away, just add honey, a few turns of the socket

Jul23
by Duf on July 23, 2012 at 10:12 am
Posted In: Fitness Equipment, Injuries, Nutrition

Late last week at the gym I managed to hurt myself.  I was doing slow negative handstand push ups while on top of push up handles.  The different hand position and extra height from being on the handles made the negatives feel quite difficult.  As I got to the bottom of of the movement I felt tremendous strain in my shoulders and triceps.

Well on Friday I was going to try Ray’s routine but the shoulder pain, which felt like it was in my left front delt, changed those plans.  I instead decided I would do some weighted pull ups, figuring those would not aggravate the shoulder much.  Well I was wrong.

After rep 2 with 45 pounds hanging around my waist I dropped off the bar after I felt a sharp pain from that area in my shoulder.  I flipped over the rest of my workout to be legs only, anything dealing with the upper body did not feel good.

I avoided any body weight work all weekend as I can still feel the pain.  I am hoping it is just a strain that will work itself out in a few days.  Until then I will be sticking to exercise that doesn’t hurt.

On Friday I received an envelope in the mail with a return address of New York.  At first I was confused what it was but the I recognized the name, it was Keith who is part of the NYC Bar-barians group.

Inside the envelope were a number of rubber Bar-barian bracelets.  Zef told me he was going to send me a few to give away as prizes in upcoming forum contests.  I took the liberty of commandeering one for myself.

I think the bracelet will actually be a great source of positive energy for me.  When I am feeling negative or unmotivated a simple glance at my left wrist should be all that is necessary to give me a kick in the ass.

I am not sure which contest will be the first one where I use the bracelets as prizes.  The past couple months participation in the contests has dropped off pretty significantly.  I am not sure if it is just because it is summertime or something else. I am actually considering taking August off with contests as my “summer break”.  Maybe a month away would make interest ramp back up.

Whatever contest we offer up the bracelets as prizes will need to be carefully configured.  When loot is involved there has to be strict guidelines in place so subjectiveness plays very little in the eventual outcome.  Sometimes there is too wide of a field of  acceptable attempts where sloppier form/rom gets thrown together with perfect form attempts.

Last week I bought a jar of locally produced Mangrove Honey at the farmers market.  Honey is a great superfood and getting it locally means it doesn’t have all the negative side effects of processing that nationally distributed honey has.

I plan to add a tablespoon of honey into my morning food/supplement routine which currently includes a multi-vitamin, fish oil capsule, scrambled egg beaters, wheat toast with peanut butter and a small glass of orange juice.

I was considering doing some work on Lou’s parallelettes to try to strengthen their mounting point to the 4×4’s.  After not coming up with an easy/simple way to do that I actually considered building a second set out of 1 1/4″ galvanized pipe.

That idea got thrown in the toilet after I priced out what I would need.  Galvanized pipe is very expensive, I would have spent $100 or more just buying the materials.  Considering I could buy a set of parallelettes for less than that I scrapped that idea.

Well last night as I was watching tv, I was on the floor working again on the bars. I was considering my options.  One of those options would be to drill a second hole in each mounting point to eliminate the slight side to side movement I was seeing.  But I decided to try something simpler at first.

I brought out my socket set.  When I first got the bars I just used a small adjustable wrench to try to tighten the bars.  With the socket I was able to torque the bolts much tighter.  When I was done I didn’t feel any more side to side slop.

If they loosen up again I still may opt to drill a second hole that would be perpendicular to what is in there now which in theory should eliminate the movement.  It would be accomplished much easier if I had a drill press.

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Timed out

Jul20
by Duf on July 20, 2012 at 8:25 am
Posted In: General Fitness Talk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfxWt3xxOdM

Last night I hit up a hard mode attempt of this month’s BB challenge, which is maximum dips in a 5 minute time period.

I was not sure if I wanted to make an attempt at all.  My shoulders and triceps felt mildly strained from doing slow negative HSPU’s on push up bars at the gym.  That extra height of being on the bars allows you to go extra deep.  That extra depth resulted on new levels of stress and strain on my shoulders and triceps that I had not experienced before.

I hopped on the bar and did a couple reps to see if I could dip.  It didn’t feel great but I was able to do the movement so I called it as good enough to go. I wanted to get a set in pretty badly since NOONE has even tried a dip set this month.  Participation overall has really been low.

I used the Round Timer app again to time the attempt, unfortunately I misused it.  I hit the stop/start button for the timer, heard the bell and started my first set of 25 dips.  When I was finished with the set I glanced down at my phone and saw the clock was still at 5 minutes, shit.  Evidently I hit the button to stop a round instead of start one.

At first I thought maybe I would just start the attempt over but I realized with that first set of 25 under my belt, a restarted attempt would result in poor numbers.  I wasted a lot of time screwing around with my phone.  Eventually I got it restarted and decided I will just keep dipping and whatever number I was at when 5 minutes expired on the video would be my attempt.  I wound up squeezing out 65 dips, not a good number in my mind at all.

Despite the relatively low number my tri’s were pretty burned up.  I imagine if I tried it again with fresh triceps, without the timing snafu delays I may be able to squeeze out another 10 reps or so.

Last night I harvested kale out of my garden for the first time.  I threw kale seed in the ground maybe a month and a half ago, unsure if they would grow or not in a hot Florida summer.   Well I was glad to see it did, I have 5 or 6 good looking kale plants at this point.

If you know a little bit about healthy foods, you know that kale is one of the healthiest greens that you can consume.  I threw a bunch of it into my juicer and used the rest on a veggie wrap I had for dinner.

I stopped at Home Depot to see if I could find some hardware that could help me make Lou’s parallelettes even better.  I didn’t find anything that seemed to fit the bill. However I was walking around I did come up with an idea.  I could use Lou’s design to make something identical out of threaded, galvanized 1.25″ pipe.

I could use a threaded flange to attach it to the wood base which would be rock solid. I would need a total of 6 lengths of pipe, two 90 degree elbows and four threaded flange pieces. The bad thing is that pipe is not exactly cheap.  I saw 1 inch threaded flange at HD for $10.50 EACH, ouch.

Of course I would be fine just using Lou’s bars as is and I will will continue to use them.  But now that I have this design in my head I want to make a set and document the process for both me to use and to share with the community if it works out well.

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