Friday, October 16, 2015

Training - "When in doubt..."

10/16 - stretch, bench [PR 280, repPR 205x15], db rows, incline press, curls, pushups






Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Training - "If you think lifting weights is dangerous..."

10/13 - stretch, deadlifts [PR 465 - mixed grip, chalk, belt], situps, back xt
10/9 thru 12 - light daily stretching




Katie Anne - Katie Anne's Photos: "January 7th, 2011. One of the lowest points in my fitness journey. I have been there - struggling with binges, feeing horrible in my own skin, and always comparing myself to the fitness models in the magazines, thinking I would never be good enough. I have been underweight and I have been overweight. Once I stopped focusing on others and where they were - and started focusing on taking my journey ONE day at a time, I started to see results. Time will pass whether you decide to move forward or not. Have I had slip ups and set backs in the four and a half years since that photo? Oh you bet I have. But I see far too many people focusing on the end result when there really is no destination. I may have transformed externally but I am just as much of a work in progress as anyone else. A physique won't make you happy. A body weight will not make you happy. Focusing on the process is easier said than done but is VITAL for success in anything. I let go of my obsession with the stage and finally was working out because I loved it - not because of a date on the calendar. I stopped looking at photoshopped fitness girls, unfollowed a ton of people who posted daily naked "progress" photos (that actually left me feeling down - cut that shit out if it does for you too!). Instagram and social media are like a highlight reel of mostly good stuff going on in people's lives. If you are struggling, it does not make you weak, it makes you HUMAN. One damn day at a time. What we leave this earth with is not our physical - so focus on improving yourself from the inside out - the external will be a reflection of that. Too many words to tell y'all not to give up on your dreams. Don't be so hard on yourself. Would you talk to your best friend the way you talk down to yourself some days? Bless you if you read this I owe you a hug #neverquit #morethananumber"


Katie Anne - Katie Anne's Photos: ""I do not believe that any of us have dreams that were not given to us without the purpose of accomplishing those particular dreams. I do not care how far fetched it might appear to be... Here is what I know: that dream you are holding in your mind: it is POSSIBLE. Sometimes you cannot say you can do something - but you CAN say it is possible... In the process of working on your dreams, you will encur a lot of pain, defeat setbacks, defeat, etc. But in that process, you will discover some things about yourself that you never knew before. That you are more powerful than you ever thought possible. That you do not have to be a victim of your circumstances..." I have never shared this photo on the left. In fact, I remember taking it and thought I deleted it. Found it on my computer today. It was post #binge/rebound period where I put on 30lbs - weighing 170lbs - in only a couple months. BUT, I still had dreams of one day competing. I was told I would always be "too thick", my hamstrings were as flat as a pancake, I would ALWAYS binge/restrict. Do not let others determine your destiny. Each of us have dreams for a REASON. The dream of competing one day and being in the fitness realm was far fetched back then. Some of my dreams seem out of reach now. But they are POSSIBLE. #LESBROWNYALL #NeverQuit #YouCANOvercome #TeamNorton #TeamScience"




Monday, October 12, 2015

We don't really understand how anything works. Here, have some lobster.

The enigma behind America’s freak, 20-year lobster boom - Quartz: "Even more remarkable than sheer volume, though, is that this sudden sixfold surge has no clear explanation. A rise in sea temperatures, which has sped up lobster growth and opened up new coastal habitats for baby lobsters, is one likely reason. Another is that by plundering cod and other big fish in the Gulf of Maine, we’ve thinned out the predators that long kept lobster numbers in check. Both are strong hypotheses, yet no one’s sure we really understand what’s going on."
Sidenote: This kind of thing always reminds me of the hubris of things like "We can reconfigure climate change to our liking."  The sheer audacity of that given we we don't understand the simplest things very well.  See also: "complex adaptive systems" and unintended consequences.


Unintended consequences, "complex adaptive systems," and 'The Problem With International Development...'

The New Republic: "If someone is chronically malnourished, to pick just one example, you should give them some food, right? Duflo and Banerjee describe dozens of projects finding that, when you subsidize or give away food to poor people, they don’t actually eat more. Instead, they just replace boring foods with more interesting ones and remain, in the statistics at least, “malnourished.” In Udaipur, India, a survey found that poor people had enough money to increase their food spending by as much as 30 percent, but they chose to spend it on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals instead. Duflo and Banerjee interviewed an out-of-work Indonesian agricultural worker who had been under the food-poverty line for years, but had a TV in his house. You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand the underlying dynamic here: Cheap food is boring. In many developing countries, Duflo and Banerjee found that even the poorest people could afford more than 2,000 calories of staple foods every day. But given the choice between the fourth bowl of rice in one day and the first cigarette, many people opt for the latter...

The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk...

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company is ready to take on the responsibility?

...My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant. “That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives...

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

According to Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos, international development is just such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history, laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict."


Dick Van Dyke Gets It.

Dance, Sing, Just 'Keep Moving,' Dick Van Dyke Tells Seniors : NPR: "Keep moving is the main thing. I think I reiterate three or four times in the book, "do not start going down the stairs sideways." It feels good on your knees but it throws the hips out and the back starts to go out, the next thing you know, you've fallen down and broken your hip. So even if it hurts a little, go down the stairs front-ways. It's more in my nature to be optimistic, I think. I'm one of those people who gets up on the right side of the bed in the morning. I get up and have a cup of coffee and go to the gym before I talk myself out of it because I will as anybody will...

On the hardest part of getting old 
Giving up the things that you enjoy doing. I can't handle the tennis court anymore. I can still run and dance and sing. You know, I made a habit of asking other people in their old age: of all the things you enjoyed doing when you were younger that you can't anymore, what do you miss? And some people mention golf or tennis. One woman said "I miss having lunch with the girls." But the people who said I wish I had made smarter business decisions, I think they're missing the point. The point is to enjoy. You have to pick what you enjoy doing, what fulfills you, what interests you. And I realize that's not possible for a lot of people. As Thoreau said, a lot of people are living lives of quiet desperation. But almost anyone can find that one immersing hobby or pastime that they love to do ... and someone."