Friday Thoughts 141
Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts, where I share what’s been on my mind this week. Enjoy!
Training Ramblings
I’ve had a great week of training, and I’ve got to say, my body is feeling really good after that week off. I’m still operating with my checklist, certain movements or styles of workout to get each week, and it’s working well. Last night when I went to bed, I was surprised to see that I had 12,000+ steps on the day. Then I remembered, I did a running workout in the morning. Nothing crazy either - 5×200m with a 200m recovery, so all in all just over a mile.
I felt like my running workout in the morning was kind of lame. Only 1000m worth of running hard, plus another 1000m with the recovery, but those 2000 extra meters got me 2500+ more steps in the day.
Obviously more running impacts my steps, and I haven’t been running much. It was nice to notice last night that even though I did a very low volume running workout that took me 15 minutes, it’s still have a positive impact on my day. I probably wouldn’t have even hit 10k steps without that workout.
Two Hours Per Week / 104 hours per year
When people join the gym they’re sometimes unsure if they can make an impact with just two workouts per week.
Oh yes you can.
But you need to stick with it. It’s only 104 hours of your entire year!
No Wonder
The scale of this is crazy. It really puts into perspective how big those soccer fields are. And why they’re such good runners.
Slow Feet Don’t Eat
My new favorite toy is the OVR, which can measure stuff like vertical jump, or in this case here, ground contact time (GCT).
GCT is measuring how much time your foot is on the ground before stepping or jumping. This gives us insights in you your reactive strength, elasticity and rate of force development.
What’s so important about it?
Less ground contact time typically means more athletic - more explosive, quicker reactions. Springiness-if you will.
There isn’t one perfect exercise to do this, and this is want I want to highlight.
This coach was gamify GTC for his athletes, and it got them all to train hard and push each other. There isn’t a magic exercise or protocol, but being able to put a number on something gets everyone in the game, cranks the intensity and gets a good training effect.
More Reading Stats
Believe me, the irony of learning about and sharing these things on social media is not lost on me.
If you don’t know, I’m a big time reader and have been for a while. Recently I’ve been on a sci-fi kick. During vacation I read Three Body Problem, which was honestly not all that great-but I also can’t stop thinking about it.
This week I’ve been reading Old Man’s War, which has been on my TBR for years, and I’m enjoying it as much as the internet said I would.
Thanks for reading, see you in the gym!
—Justin Miner