Reading Material 4.8.08

Thought I’d pass on this article from the New York Times Health blog on the eight worst foods in America. Sounds kind of hyperbolic, but it’s worth a read:

• Worst Fast Food Meal: McDonald’s Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips with creamy ranch sauce. Chicken sounds healthy, but not at 870 calories.
• Worst Drink: Jamba Juice Chocolate Moo’d Power Smoothie. With 166 grams of sugar, you could have had eight servings of Ben & Jerry’s.
• Worst Supermarket Meal: Pepperidge Farm Roasted Chicken Pot Pie. One pie packs 64 grams of fat.

That one about the Jamba Juice Chocolate Moo’d killed me – I think I drank about eight of the Peanut Butter Moo’ds over last summer. 

Also, since I’ve been eating oatmeal for breakfast lately, here’s John Williams on the awesomeness of Oats. Mmmmm. Enjoy.

pat m.

Training Journal – 4.8.08

Today was pretty light. My toe is still out of commission – I feel like such a wuss writing that, but it’s true – so I’m not rolling tonight, though I did a conditioning workout in the morning: 10 “dumbbell swings” (in quotes because I don’t have actual dumbbells – a topic for a later post) with each arm (26.4lbs or so), then 10 burpees, then 9 swings, 9 burpees, and so on until zero. Took me just over 10:30 to do, which was way longer than I expected, though a lot of the time came from switching arms. Phew, that was good stuff.

I’ve become a big fan lately of switching up my workouts, especially when it comes to conditioning, because I don’t want my body to get too used to certain interval schedules or movements. There’s been an interesting discussion at the Sherdog Conditioning forums on the value of Tabata-format sprint sessions (that’s 8 sets of 20 seconds-max-effort-sprints, 10 seconds off for those not familiar with Tabata intervals). While I won’t conclude one way or the other – sometimes I add them to my workout, sometimes I don’t, especially when my running shoes are deteriorating – I did come out of that discussion thinking that I wanted a good variety of workouts in my cardio sessions, if for no other reason than to prevent myself from getting bored. We’ll see how this goes once I’m back on the mats, I guess.

pat m.