Is More Exercise Always Better? | Sweat Science.
Favorite quote from the article:
The basic result (more exercise = more healthy) held true for both moderate and vigorous exercise; however, the effect was more pronounced for vigorous exercise
Well that’s good news! 🙂
If you’re like me, it’s rare that I go anywhere without my phone. Well… ok, I frequently run without the phone if I’m not expecting an important call and I’m going to be in a populated area where a pay phone or taxi/transit would be easy to come by, but other than that I live a pretty tethered life. I like the convenience of having my phone at hand with it’s plethora of apps and the ability to connect with people if needed for whatever reason. When I’m out for a long ride, I’ll frequently use my iPhone as a mp3 player, etc.
Of course, constantly having a piece of somewhat fragile electronics on your person adds greatly to the possibility that said electronics will get dropped, banged, dripped on or otherwise abused. This is where the huge assortment of iPhone cases and protectors come into play.
Until today, I had never held my iPhone 4s outside of it’s Otterbox protective skin. When I bought the phone, I had the store put it in the case and didn’t actually put my hands on the phone until it’d been screen protected and enrobed in the rubberized shield. Today, that changed. Today I *gasp* removed my iPhone 4s from the Otterbox housing to test the Ballistic LS iPhone case.
The Ballistic case is pretty cool. It’s a hard rubber case in one of 6 colours with interchangeable coloured rubber bumpers on the 4 corners that allow you to personalize your phone but still have good protection in a thin and lightweight design. The 4 corners are also slightly more cushioned than the rest of the case to give extra protection should the phone land on a corner (which would definitely cause more damage to an unprotected phone).
Inserting my iPhone into the Ballistic case 2 things were immediately apparent: the Ballistic case is generally a bit thinner than the otter case, which provides a better hand feel and, the Ballistic case doesn’t offer quite the same level of protection as the Otterbox.
You can see from the picture above (old Otterbox case on left, new Ballistic LS case on right) that the Otterbox case is roughly as thick as the Otterbox case on the corners, but tapers to a thinner profile in the middle. This thinner profile is surprisingly noticeable, it gives the phone a better hand feel, generally feels better in the pocket and, perhaps most importantly, gives better access to the edge of the screen when you’re dragging applications from screen to screen and need to be able to swipe right to the edge of the screen (this is something that frustrated me with the Otterbox case on a regular basis).
You can also see that unlike the Otterbox case, the Ballistic case does not offer any protection to the docking port on the bottom of the phone, nor is there any covering the headphone jack on the top. Having previously used phone protectors with a similar lack of headphone and dock lint protection, I can say (at least for me) that these extra flaps of rubber are at best a false sense of security at the cost of extra weight. Given the amount of grime that was inside the Ottercase after 6 months of use, it’s fair to say that the little rubber flaps may serve to stop/slow a drop of water from entering the device, but otherwise they have no purpose. All that said, it’s be nice of the Ballistic case gave you the option by including a coloured rubber (removable) dock cover flap and/or headphone jack cover.
I, unfortunately, don’t have a budget for drop tests, but I feel, by examining the two cases, that the Ballistic LS case would provide better drop survivability to my phone than the Otterbox case. Again I don’t have any test data on this, but the Otterbox case just seems to be good general protection where the Ballistic case, while offering that general protection, also seems to be built to offer better drop protection.
Having spent a day with the Ballistic LS case I can say that I prefer it over the Otterbox case. Yes the Otter case may offer slightly better overall protection, but the Ballistic case feels better, provides better access to the phone and is lighter. Too bad Otterbox case, you’ve been replaced.
Time Versus Distance For Pacing and Training | Sweat Science.
Interesting study.
I’ve overcome the time based pacing issue by using programmed workouts either with my computrainer or with my 910xt. I don’t look at the time, I just wait for the next alert and go at the proscribed level until it happens. Seems to work ok.
I was fortunate to have borrowed a Recovery Pump system for Ironman Mont Tremblant recovery. I wasn’t sure what to expect or if it’d make any real difference. I wore the legs for 2 hrs after the race and for 30 minutes the next morning, and while I saw people in the village hobbling around, my legs felt really good. Was this the Recovery Pump, my pacing, my physiology or some other factor.
Ian and I decided to put them to a test. Here was the plan:
On 2 subsequent Saturdays (Friday is a rest day), I’d do the following workout at 8am and again at noon. Before the 8am I’d have my normal breakfast (yogurt, bran buds and a banana), after the 1st workout I’d have a First Endurance Ultragen. During each test I would drink 1 bottle of water with First Endurance EFS Drink.
The workout was controlled as a programmed .ERG workout with the computrainer, as follows:
On the 1st week, we did the control. No specific recovery between the trials, just nutrition, tv, web surfing, etc. The 2nd week I used the recoverypump legs for 45 minutes after the 1st workout.
The Results
The Control
| Trial 1 | Trial 2 | Delta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long Intervals | 7 micro-rests | 13 micro-rests | Performance drop by ~40% |
| Sprint Intervals | Max 626w | Max 603 (but most ~590w) | Performance drop by 5% |
(micro-rest: just can’t keep the pedals going any longer, 3-5 sec rest and go again)
The Recovery Pump Test
| Trial 1 | Trial 2 | Delta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long Intervals | 12 micro-rests | 10 micro-rests | Performance improvement by ~17% |
| Sprint Intervals | Max 675w | Max 736 | Performance increase by 9% |
To me these results are pretty compelling and corroborate my gut feel that the Recovery Pump system was making a difference. I was actually surprised to see a performance INCREASE when using the system. It wasn’t just that my performance didn’t decrease as much, but the invigorated legs were able to do MORE than just “morning fresh”.
Ongoing Testing
Obviously, I’m not done with my investigation of the power of the Recovery Pump system. I’ve used it before track workouts to pump up my legs before the speedwork and after to refresh them. I have to say, I’m pretty convinced that this system lives up to every claim on the Recovery Pump website.
In this review we’re going to take a look at two goggles from Finis: the lightning and the bolt. Both are swim racing goggles, the bolt labeled “comfort racing” and the lightning “minimalist racing”.
The Finis Lightning
The lightning is a very adjustable minimalist racing goggle. The lenses come in your choice of red, blue or aqua. Each set of goggles comes with 4 nosepieces to get a good fit.
The Lightning also has a quick adjustment strap which makes getting the band to the right level of fit pretty easy.
I really enjoyed swimming with the Lightning. The minimalist eyecup really fits my face well. I found the optical quality of these goggles to be superior to many I’ve tried with very little distortion. I expect this is because the eye cup is so small that you rarely look through anything but the main lens part of the cup.
The Finis Bolt
The Bolt is a larger eyecup racing goggle. Labeled as a comfortable racing goggle it has a little more padding than the Lightning and with the larger eye cup may give wearers a little less eye strain than a smaller more minimalist goggle. The Bolt also comes with 4 interchangeable nose bridges and a fully adjustable strap to get a good fit.
For me, the Bolt required a bit of fussing to get a good facial fit. Unlike the Lightning that formed a great fit to my face, the Bolt needed some nose bridge and strap adjusting to get a watertight seal. Once it was there though, it was solid and comfortable.
General Comments
Both of these are good goggles. They are both very adjustable and have good optics. Both have UV and anti-fog coatings. With respect to anti-fog coatings, I must have very moist eyes or sweat through my eyes a lot because I find that unless I use an anti-fog product on my goggles, after 10-15 minutes of effort, they all fog. Both of these goggles lasted about 30 minutes before starting to fog, which may speak to having a really superior anti-fog coating and just my body’s ability to overcome them 🙂
If you’re in the market for goggles, definitely check these out. Like so many things, this is especially true with goggles: one size does not fit all. Make sure to get a goggle that suits your face shape and you’ll be setup for many hundreds of hours of leak free swimming.
Well this is a different spin on the “one and done”.
WTC Announces End Of Ironman NYC.
Can’t say I’m terribly surprised.
They could go just slighly upstate and have so much better of an event for a lot less cost (think Catskills Mountains).
Wow! This looks pretty cool!
ICEdot: This yellow sticker is like OnStar for your helmet – Bike Rumor.
You know, I’ve really wanted to believe that Lance didn’t dope, but realistically, esp in Pro-cycling, even today, doping has been and continues to be rampant.
If anything, Lance was historically just better at not getting caught. Ok fine. They all doped (or most did), but doping doesn’t make an average guy into a super-star. It does eek out some more performance in the already elite athletes.
Ok fine. Lets move on. What happened a decade or more ago has nothing to do with anything anymore. Put an asterisk beside Lance’s name for those Tours and be done with it.
Now then. Lets now, work at getting sport today clean. Randomly spot check all pros without warning. Test the top 5 male and female pros and age-groupers in all age groups, and then randomly test 10% of the remaining field.
Want drug testing to be a deterrent then make testing real.
Also, lets just generally shut-up about drugs in sport. Would I know about blood doping, EPO, steroids, etc. if the media wasn’t talking in detail about these substances? No, I wouldn’t. I can’t help but think that if performance enhancing substances weren’t talked about so widely there’d be much less of it in amateur sport. I’m not no naive to think it wouldn’t exist, but I can’t help but think it’d be much less common.
In my blog overview of music while you train devices, I mentioned the Cardo BK-1 Duo as an on-bike bluetooth enabled wireless device for getting music from an iphone (or other bluetooth enabled music player) to your ears in a way that doesn’t interfere with ambient traffic noise, etc. I wrote that I really like the BK-1 for this and that the bluetooth reception is amazing, with no drop-outs and great signal strength. But the BK-1 is so much more.
The BK-1 is a bluetooth enabled full-on, voice activated transceiver. It gives you bike to bike easy to use and quality communications for up to 3 riders at a range of about 500m.
The BK-1 Duo comes in nice hard-shell protective box, seen here beside my RudyProject helmet for sizing. This helmet will soon be BK-1’d.
Unpacking the box, everything you need to install the setup is included, right down to alcohol swabs to clean the velcro mount points on your helmet.
The Duo even comes with 2 chargers so that you can charge both radios at the same time, in different locations. I was at first surprised they didn’t just provide a dual charger, but the 2 chargers later made more sense.
Installation is pretty quick and easy, but does require a little trial and error to get the mounts in the right place for the earphones to comfortably cover your ears.
As I said in my music survey, the BK-1 is great for on-bike tunes, the battery lasts over 6 hrs from experience in my longest training/test ride. What’s really surprising is the transmission sound quality from the little boom microphone.
I had assumed that wind noise would be a terrible issue with the BK-1, either when using it as a cell phone headset or when used for bike-to-bike communications. Not so! Cardo has done a great job of isolating (and perhaps electrically filtering?) wind noise. It’s barely perceptible to the listener when you’re in motion, sure there’s ambient noise that gets picked up, but you have to expect that. Still the transmission quality of the BK-1 and the isolation of your voice from background noise is pretty amazing. The voice activation feature is solid, without word clipping or transmission delays (very much unlike the old VOX systems of the past where your 1st and last words of any sentence would never reach the listener).
Range-wise I found the advertised range of 500m to be pretty accurate, depending on terrain. On a flat, straight, open road, the useable range was closer to 600m, but this dropped off in hills or forest to closer to 300-400m, still very acceptable in my opinion. In really dense forest, on single-track trails with lots of hills and corners, the BK-1 started to have some troubles and the range dropped pretty low (we didn’t measure but it was pretty much the case of “I need to be able to see you”).
The BK-1 is a 1st gen product, but they have built software upgrade-ability into the devices so as they work on upgrades you’re not stuck with an end-of-life product, which is very nice.
One thing that occurred to me, late in the season, was that the BK-1 could also be a great coaching tool: coach with 1 unit, athlete with the other on the bike. The coach could drive a car and be providing feedback to the rider in a way that doesn’t require them both to stop and have a conversation. This could be extremely useful when trying to adjust form or provide technique coaching “on the fly”.
All in, I really like the Bk-1. While I normally train solo, it’s an amazing on-bike music and bluetooth headset device and when I have the opportunity to go for a social ride, it’s super-nice to have easy bike to bike communications. By far, the BK-1 is the leader in this space today with a solid product launch and a long history of radio communications, I expect great things for the BK-1’s future.
Lance Armstrong vs. USADA: What are we to believe? – The Washington Post.
Couldn’t have said this better myself.
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