SportsGeezer

How to Tell if You're Too Competitive

It's possible that you, like Geezer, have noticed that many of your friends seem a bit hyper-competitive. OK, perhaps all of your friends are totally hyper-competitive, and the only thing that can make them less competitive is a competition for "least competitive person."  Not to worry. Help is just a click away, thanks to this Men's Health questionaire designed to reveal exactly how disturbed your friends really are. Hope you win.

LA Times on How to Keep What You've Got

It's Men's Day at the L.A. Times. The paper's excellent special health section, How to Keep What You've Got, includes 23 stories on the importance of such things as friends, sex, brain power, and small changes at the last minute. Also sex.  Geezers says this one is definitely worth bookmarking.

Coke's Idea of a Calorie Killer

The Wall Street Journal had some interesting questions about the usefulness of Coca-Cola's latest beverage, Enviga, a green-tea based concoction that promises to help consumers burn calories. The company told Journal reporters that three 12-ounce cans of Enviga over a 24-hour period would help a healthy person of normal weight burn anywhere from 60 to 100 additional calories. OK. that sounds good. So how many can's of Enviga would it take to counteract the caloric effect of say, a Big Mac, or a can of Coke? 

Best Long Term Cure For Tennis Elbow: Do Nothing

Forget the cortisone. Forget the sonar beam therapies. Forget massage.  Want to know the best way to cure tennis elbow? Do nothing. That's the conclusion of an Australian study that looked at 198 sufferers of tennis elbow and divided them into three groups. As reported by CBC News, one group received physiotherapy, the second got steroid injections, and the third had to "wait-and-see." CBC reports that after six weeks, 78 percent of the group that got the corticosteroid injections reported significant improvement, compared with physiotherapy, with a 65 per cent success rate, and just 27 per cent in the wait-and-see group. But wait. The injected group quickly lost ground, with 47 of 65 "successes" regressing and reporting much poorer outcomes in the long term, and in the period after the initial six-weeks, the physiotherapy group healed better than the injection group. After a year, the researchers found, there was no difference between physio and wait-and-see.

Boxing: Bobbing and Weaving Your Way to Fitness

In the comforting age of hot yoga and aqua-jogging, why would anyone elect a road to fitness that requires one to get punched in the face? Jeannine Stein has a few answers to that one, and they are (almost) persuasively presented in her review of "The Gleason's Gym Total Body Boxing Workout for Women" (Fireside, 2006) , authored by gym owner Bruce Silverglade and trainer Hector Roca. Here's what Silverglade has to say: "The workout is addictive, because of the combination one-two punch of physical and mental challenges. You have self-confidence and you're looking and feeling better, and when you go into a ring, you have such total concentration and focus, the same focus that you can use in the workplace." Read more in the L.A. Times.

When Sex Is Not an Athletic Endeavor, Anymore

Geezer knows that sex is not an athletic endeavor.  Or, to put it more accurately, Geezer knows enough to not argue with one particularly close family member who reminds him, on occasion, that sex is not an athletic endeavor. Anymore. It is, at least, an endeavor. So Geezer found it somewhat reassuring when he read this story in the New York Times about a 53-year-old man who decided to turn up the heat of his sex life with the help of Viagra, and ended up turning up the heat of his wife's resentment of his sexual demands. His exhausted wife, the piece reports, finally lost her patience and told him that he had to stop the Viagra if he cared about their marriage. He did.

Still More on Soccer Fitness

Now that we've learned how to look like a soccer player and how to eat like a soccer player, it's time to discover how to perform like a soccer player. For this, we turn to the Washington Post's Moving Crew, who directs us to the advice of John Philbin, a former Olympic coach and owner of Philbin's Family Fitness in Rockville, Maryland. Philbin has four words for us: speed, strength, core and agility. Here's what the Moving Crew says about each:
Speed Grab your energy gel, striker: It's interval training time."You want to get your heart rate up to 80 to 85 percent of maximum, keep it there for 30 to 60 seconds, then back down for a minute or so," Philbin explains. "Repeat that 10 to 20 times." (No heart rate monitor? Just alternate sprints of different lengths with jogs.) Gradually increase interval time, then boost the number of intervals. "This gives you the ability [like soccer players] to exert hard, then recover, then exert again." This type of (brutal) training burns more fat and boosts stamina more than keeping a steady pace.For those pursuing this advanced state of fitness, Philbin suggests three interval days per week, augmented by two days of easier runs of 25 to 50 minutes.
Strength For sinewy strength without that post-spinach Popeye look, do single-set strength training sessions, targeting each muscle group with 10 to 15 reps (to near failure). "Go slow," Philbin says. "Three seconds up, pause, four seconds down."
Single sets are less likely to produce bulk than multi-set pump-ups. Choose 10 to 14 exercises targeting different muscle groups to spread the strength body-wide. Mix up the order to keep your body from getting used to the routine.
Core Resist nouveau-cool tricks -- standing on a bosu ball on one leg while while juggling three dumbbells, say -- and focus on heavy-duty abdominal and lower-back exercises, says Philbin. Yup: crunches, planks, back extensions and other unpleasantries.
Agility Embrace the basics of sports training: side shuffles, crossovers (left foot over right for 10 yards, then reverse), cone-weaving runs and a dance-like move called carioca. (Look it up on the Web, Ronaldo.) Troublesome joints? Proceed with care, if at all.

Adventure Racing Is the Crazy Person's Next Big Thing

The New York Times takes a willing look at adventure racing in this report from the Endophin Fix, a 130-mile competition in West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. The paper reports that in this race, in which 28 teams were given 41 hours to complete a course that included wilderness trekking, white-water kayaking, rope climbing and mountain biking, half of the athletes would drop out. Only half? Geezer is concerned about the high percentage of crazy people riding bikes through the woods-- at night--in the rain. And that number, apparently, is growing. The Times tell us that last year, the United States Adventure Racing Association sanctioned roughly 300 races, a tenfold increase from 2000. The paper reports that races range from the half-day "sprints" to the medium-length races like the Endorphin Fix to the weeklong Primal Quest, a 500-mile epic to be held in June in the Utah desert..
Read more in the Times.  Check out Adventure Race Reports, where crazy people share their race experiences.

Beach Tennis Rocks Strange World of Southern California

Yes, it started in Southern California, and yes, it is often played by people wearing swimsuits, and yes, many of those people wearing swimsuits are beyond their swimsuit-wearing prime, but then, yes, it started in Southern California and those people are also swinging tennis rackets, which might ordinarily provide enough respectability to offset the swimsuit thing, except in this case they are not swinging tennis rackets on the tennis court but on the beach. Whatever. It's Southern California, and the sport is called Beach Tennis, and, as this piece in the L.A. Times reports, it "provides an excellent workout for the glutes, quads and hamstrings and, to a lesser extent, the arms. The sand not only forces the muscles to work harder, it slows the game considerably, making it adaptable for seniors and kids..."
The Rules:
The Times reports that Beach Tennis is played with standard tennis rackets and balls, and the goal is to get the ball over the net. The scoring sequence — 15, 30, 40 — is the same as in tennis, but there's no deuce point, and players are allowed only one serve. Beach tennis is played like badminton, in that the ball is swatted back and forth, like a shuttlecock, and doesn't hit the ground. The net is four inches lower than a beach volleyball net, and the court is 60-by-30 feet, similar to a beach volleyball court. The winner is the first to win eight games, rather than the standard six in tennis. Ideally, the game is played with two people on each side, like doubles tennis.
The Danger: Singles games are strenuous, and games with more than two players per side can be dangerous — teammates tend to get beaned by flailing rackets.
More on Beach Tennis from USA Today.

Exercising With Spouse: Good Idea or Bad Idea?

Is it a good idea to exercise with your spouse? Geezer would very much like to go on to the next question, but because there is no next question, he will gently suggest: only if your relationship doesn't already have enough problems. As this piece in the New York Times explains, exercising together can reveal the "nuances of power and ego in a relationship." (Geezer rests his case.)  Times reporter Gretchen Reynolds does find some happy couples who exercise together--there's the pair from Crested Butte, in which the woman is a former member of the United States Olympic ski team-- but generally, the article is somewhat cautionary. The bluntest caution comes in a quote from Kendra Wenzel, of Wenzel Coaching, a company in Portland, Oregon that develops training programs for endurance athletes. "It's not generally a great idea for one person in a couple to try to coach the other," says Wenzel. "Often, there are problems."
Read more about couples who exercise together.