David Croushore

How to Use a Tennis Ball to Make a Grown Man Cry

How to Use a Tennis Ball to Make a Grown Man Cry How to Use a Tennis Ball to Make a Grown Man Cry

Before you giggle your giggler off about the title of this post, I should mention that this is not an article about throwing tennis balls at the gonads of unsuspecting strangers (or friends)… (or family).  This is an article about therapeutic soft tissue work.  But just so you can get the laughs out: here.

Now that that’s over, today I’m going to talk about soft tissue.  Soft tissue is defined as “nonepithelial, extraskeletal mesenchyme exclusive of the reticuloendothelial system and glia,” but I have no idea what that means, so let’s use a different definition.  Soft tissue is pretty much everything that isn’t bone, or an organ with a name everyone knows.  That includes muscle, tendons, ligaments, fascia, and lots of other crap.  During the course of your daily activities, workouts, etc. these tissues get all jostled around and stressed in different ways, and that can lead to problems.  You are probably at least somewhat familiar with tightness in muscles, tendonitis (inflammation of a tendon), muscle soreness, and lack of flexibility, but what can be done to rectify these conditions or prevent them from occurring?  One option is stretching, but today I’m going to talk about another option, massage - but not the kind that feels good and relaxing – the kind that hurts like hell.  It’s called “myofascial release,” but I’ll just call it soft tissue massage.

There are several implements that can be used for soft tissue massage, including foam rollers, tennis balls, lacrosse balls, and golf balls.  The smaller and harder the object, the more painful but effective the massage will be.  Regardless of which one you use, the concept is the same, so I’ll focus on the foam roller or tennis ball for the remainder of this article.

The question that arises is “what part of the body needs this massage treatment?” The answer is simple: any soft tissue can benefit from soft tissue massage, but the upper leg is probably the biggest problem area for most people.  The quads, hamstrings, and illiotibial (IT) band are prime candidates for some good foam roller work because they tend to hold a lot of tension and the American chair-bound lifestyle causes large adhesions to form in the soft tissue around the hips and knees.  To roll out the IT band, for example, place the foam roller on the ground and lay across it with your leg pressed against it just below the hip.  Roll slowly towards the knee, stopping momentarily when you feel pain to let the roller break up the adhesions.  This video shows how this looks.  Rolling the IT band is extremely painful at first.  It will feel like your leg is being punctured by an angry Viking (probably after Brett Favre unretired again).  For the glutes (that means butt muscles to all you laymen), a tennis ball works more effectively.  Just sit on the ball and roll it around to find adhesions and let the pressure work them out.  Like this.

In general, it is more beneficial to massage muscles in their contracted and relaxed state.  That means contract the muscle to put it in position, then use some other body part or cushion to hold it there so it can relax.  For quads, straighten the legs; for calves, point the toes; etc.  This allows the massage implement to penetrate deeply into the tissue and pinpoint the adhesions that need to be worked out.

Try out a tennis ball or foam roller next time you get the opportunity.  Roll out your IT band, calves, glutes, hamstrings, and quads and post your experiences to the comments.

Friday Progress Report - 2/12/2010

Friday Progress Report - 2/12/2010 Friday Progress Report - 2/12/2010

This has been a ridiculous week, stranded at home during the Snowpacalypse, but I did manage to finesse a way to make some headway on my 30 day challenge goals.

Physical - Despite the storm, and it forcing my gym to close several times, I was able to get all of my workouts in and started focusing on my new diet to bulk up.  I’ll be explaining this diet and workout regimen sometime next week.

Mental - Unfortunately, I haven’t worked on my speed reading every day.  Being home all day altered my routine enough to throw me completely off.  I did do one exercise on Thursday to help eliminate regressions (that is, going back and rereading either consciously or subconsciously).  My reading rate tested at 480wpm, but that was after reading the same section 4 times.  Reading a new section, I tested at 360wpm.  A decent improvement from my starting point.

Social - I have written a couple of guest posts for other blogs.  I’ll be sending them off today so hopefully they’ll be featured soon.

Financial - I’m doing well in this category so far.  Being snowed in certainly helped kill the urge to spend money.  All that I buy these days is food and books, and my reading list is so backed up that I won’t be buying more books any time soon (that’s probably a lie, but I won’t buy that many).  Food, on the other hand, I will need… always.

Developmental - I made some progress on my programming skills this week.  Video tutorials are the way to go when it comes to learning programming.  Having a double monitor setup helps as well, which I am currently lacking, as the snow has disrupted the delivery of my computer docking station.

How are your goals going?  Tell us in the comments

What it Means to be Smart

What it Means to be Smart What it Means to be Smart

“Smart students aren’t the ones who know all the answers, but smart students know where to find them.”

My sixth grade English teacher said that.  There are only two meaningful quotes I can remember from elementary school, and the other one is about the effectiveness of the West Coast offense (that’s a football subject).

Regardless of the source, this notion packs a lot of truth into a simple concept.  No one knows the answer all the time.  IQ scores are worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on.  What matters is the ability to find answers, solve problems, and realize that “I don’t know” and “I can’t” are never acceptable excuses.

In many ways, the extreme ease of finding information has reduced the number of smart people in the world by the above definition.  It is so easy to find so many answers that when people encounter a more difficult problem, they give up more easily.  Information overload causes people to become lazier.  Why struggle to synthesize hypotheses or seek innovative solutions when someone else has already written a book about a problem?

Be smart.  Stay sharp.  Learn to find the answers to difficult questions and question the conventional wisdom when it seems flawed.  The Google knows a lot, but it doesn’t know everything.  Only smart people can do the work that will change the world.

How to Design a Blog Theme

How to Design a Blog Theme How to Design a Blog Theme

For the new readers and those of you with very bad short term memories, this is what my blog looked like until last Friday:

This article will show how I built the current theme, which I hope you agree looks much better.

What is CSS?

To create a blog theme, you have to define the way that each aspect of the page will look.  That includes the overall page layout, text sizes, fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.  To do this, you use CSS, or a Cascading Style Sheet.  CSS allows all of these things to be pre-defined so that unique HTML markup isn’t needed for everything on the page.  To help me learn CSS and to build the page, I used Adobe Dreamweaver.  Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG editor that creates the CSS code for you when you specify how things are supposed to look.  By using this program to create a foundation of code, then tweaking the code (in Dreamweaver’s code view), you can build a great looking webpage in very little time.

When you open up dreamweaver, this is what the page looks like:

That page is a template with two columns (a main content area and a sidebar) a header and a footer.  Here’s how each part of this template was designed.

Building the Header

There are two ways to build a header.  I could have used dreamweaver to create the background coloring and then created CSS styles for the header to make my logo, but I decided to simplify the process by using photoshop.

By creating a layer for the background, then adding additional text layers, I had more control over the final look of the header, including a wider selection of fonts that were easily interchanged.

After building the header, I simply loaded the image into dreamweaver and specified the dimensions.  Since the header of a blog should be a link back to the home page of the blog, I made my header a link, but that caused an annoying problem.

In this image, notice the blue outline around my header:

To erase that line, I needed to manually edit the CSS code.  If you look at the source code for my page (right click and select “view page source”) you’ll see this line of code:

a img {border: none;}

That line specifies that links designated by images should have no border.  (The HTML tag for a link is <a>).

With that bug fixed, the header was finished.

The Page Background and Font Selection

I knew that I liked the textured background image from my old theme, so I used photoshop to change the color and darken it.  Since several people had commented that they would prefer dark type on a light background, instead of my old white type on a dark background, I restricted the pattern to the margins and found a good off-white color that blended the different purple hues in my header and background together.  Similarly, using dreamweaver, I experimented with fonts and colors until I found a combination that worked will with the overall feel of the page.

With the background, header, and fonts established, the only thing left to do was build the sidebar.

Building the Sidebar

One of the worst aspects of my old design was that it lacked a sidebar.  The sidebar is useful for displaying static information that should always appear.  One reason I omitted the sidebar originally was that I had no content for it (yes, it’s still a little bare, but more will come soon).  The sidebar is set up using a “div” tag in CSS.  This tag designates an area of the main content section as a second column.  Anything that is entered into this div will appear in the sidebar.  I could have chosen to change fonts, backgrounds, or anything else in the sidebar, but I liked the consistency across the page.

Replacing the Old Design

Once the design was finished, all I had to do was copy the new code over the old code, but in order to properly import the blog feed, I needed a playground environment for testing.  That’s why the site test30days.tumblr.com looks so similar to this site.  There, I tested integrating my design with the tumblr blog until they worked nicely together.  Then: Copy. Paste.  Done.

And now I have a brand new design that I built myself.

I could have paid hundreds of dollars for someone to do this for me, but all told, it took only a few hours to learn what I needed to do, and now I’ve acquired a new skill.

Not Yet a Pro

Of course, I’m not yet a blog design pro.  My comments are broken and for 2 days google couldn’t find me, but lessons learned.  Next time those mistakes won’t be made… well, assuming my comments come back.  That remains to be seen.

Don’t be a Tight-Ass!

Don’t be a Tight-Ass! Don’t be a Tight-Ass!

And for that matter, don’t have any other tight body parts either.  Yes, today we’re going to talk about stretching, because it’s something that just about everyone needs to do differently.  Most people stretch too little.  Some people stretch too much.

Huhwhat?  It’s possible to stretch too much?  Yes!  Muscles are only useful if they can do something, and over stretching leads to useless muscles.  Yoga can be wonderful, but you need to take advantage of the benefits so you don’t turn into Gumby.

Let’s assume you’re a busy person who values time.  Pretty big assumption, I know.   You don’t have hours to spend stretching and breathing into your stretches.  You need quick and dirty stretches so you can loosen up and be on your merry way.  Luckily, the most effective method of stretching doesn’t take very long.  It’s called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, or PNF, and it works.

PNF is a combination of isometric contraction, meaning muscle contraction without movement, and passive stretching, which is what most people think of when someone says “stretch.”

Here’s how it works.

First, get the joint into a static stretch at the end of its range of motion (feel the stretch).

Second, using a partner, rope/strap, or other object, contract the muscle and apply force against the stretch.  The best way to think of this is to “try to move” the joint out of the stretch while external resistance holds it in place.  Hold this isometric contraction for 5 seconds.

Third, release the contraction and relax the stretch momentarily.  It is important to come out of the stretch slightly to prevent injury.

Finally, extend the range of motion beyond where you started and hold it for 10 seconds.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Ok, an example would probably help.

Let’s say you want to stretch your hamstrings.  This is easy with a partner, but let’s say you are alone.  Get a length of rope or a strap with no elasticity to help with the stretch.  Lie down on your back and loop the strap around the bottom of your foot, holding the end in your hands.  With either a straight knee or a bent knee (the hamstring attaches at both the knee and the hip) raise the leg off the ground using the strap to apply force until you feel a stretch.  After 10 seconds or so, contract the hamstring and try to drive the leg back to the ground.  Use the strap to hold your leg in place.  This should be physically strenuous.  After five seconds, relax the muscle, slightly lower the leg, then use the strap to increase the stretch.  You will find that the range of motion has increased, often dramatically.  Hold this new range for 10 seconds, then apply pressure again.  Repeat 4 or 5 times.  Here is a video that shows what I’m talking about:

This method of stretching is very effective, especially for joints that are difficult to loosen up with simple static stretching (hamstrings and calves are great examples).

Try it out.  See what kind of progress you can make (and how little time it takes).  Post your experiences to the comments.

Exciting Goings On at 30DaaT.com

Exciting Goings On at 30DaaT.com Exciting Goings On at 30DaaT.com

Hello loyal readers and readeresses!

As probably became totally apparent when you came to the site today, I’ve done an overhaul on the site.  This week, I’ll be sharing the story of how I learned to design my own blog theme and the tools I’m using to create other websites as well.

Expect more changes in the coming weeks as I add the little extras that separate a great blog site from a decent blog site.  Also, expect some fixes to the many bugs that I know I have right now.  If you find a bug, please email me and let me know.

Yes, comments are currently broken.  This makes me sad.  However, I have top men working on it (aka - the delightful fellows at Intense Debate who set my comments up in the first place).  I hope to have them back by early next week.

Last order of business: the newsletter.  As you can see (if you aren’t using an RSS reader), there is a newsletter signup form in the sidebar.  If you enjoy this blog and want more, sign up for the newsletter.  (required note: I will never spam you and all of your information will be kept totally private).

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Ok, now for an update on my 30 day challenge progress from week 1:

Physical - I haven’t been to the gym since Monday when a little jumping caused by peroneal problem to flare up.  I decided to take this week off to recover before shifting my focus to power and speed development, more on that later this week.

Mental - I’ve begun working through Breakthrough Rapid Reading and so far I’m finding it very interesting.  My initial reading speed was 308 words per minute in The Blind Side.  The next day, during my first practice drill, I read 311 words per minute in Superfreakonomics.  Effectively my reading speed did not change magically.  That is a good thing.

Financial - I’ve been good, but it’s too early to put a number on this.

Social - If you read my goals for this realm, you’ll see that I’ve accomplished most of them already.  That’s great.  Now I can focus on content, which means better posts for you to read.  Huzzah!

Developmental - Aside from building this blog, my programming and web development learning is going well.  I hit a big of a snafu when I had a weird SQL error early in the week, but I’ve figured out how to fix it and am moving on to databound web applications (I know that sounds just thrilling).

All in all, I’d call this week a home run.

If you have comments, put them in a safe place until my comments are fixed, or email me.

Happy blizzard to everyone on the Eastern Seaboard.  It’s times like this that I love living above a grocery store.

Do or do not – I’m going Yoda on your ass

Do or do not – I’m going Yoda on your ass Do or do not – I’m going Yoda on your ass

Even if you have never seen The Empire Strikes Back, the second Star Wars movie, you’ve heard two lines from it.  One of them actually isn’t even in the movie (“Luke, I am your father”), but the other one is.  People might pay even more attention to it if it didn’t come from a two foot tall Buddhist alien with Fozzy Bear’s voice.

“Do or do not.  There is no try.”

This line isn’t just remarkable because it’s Yoda’s only line without mixed up syntax; it’s remarkable because it is completely true and relevant to everyone.

The word “try” gets thrown out a lot.  What percentage of the things that people “try” to accomplish do you think get done successfully?  50%? 20%? 10%?  I think everyone will agree that the number is low – probably lower than anyone expects.  What happens when people try?  They often fail, but they don’t fail because their goal was too difficult.  They fail because they decided to fail before they even began.

“Trying” means attempting to accomplish something you don’t think you can do.  If you think you can accomplish a goal, you don’t say you’ll “try.”  You say you’ll do it.  “I’m going to lose 10 pounds” sounds much more confident than “I’m going to try to lose 10 pounds.”  Trying builds in an excuse to fail and as humans we like excuses.  When things get tough, we grasp for any excuse to quit.  Saying you’ll try is presupposing you’ll fail, and giving you leeway to backtrack from your original goal.

We’re all guilty of it.  I’m training for a marathon, and I told my fiancé I was going to “try to go under 3:20.”  Well, one month out, I’m nowhere near the training pace that would get me a 3:20.  I can blame injuries and other setbacks, but the truth is that I was never really committed to that goal.  I said it so that I would “get credit for trying.”  I could run over four hours and say “well, I tried.  If only I had been healthy or the weather had been more agreeable or I hadn’t taken so much time off at Christmas, I could have done better.”  I was trying to get an A for effort.  Unfortunately, effort isn’t a subject on the report card.

Eliminate “try” from your vocabulary.  Set goals, make plans to achieve them, and do what you have to.  Don’t ever try.

Half of you just thought, “That seems like a good idea, I should try that.”  Don’t try it; do it!

What was the last thing you “tried”?  Did you succeed?

Are You Ready for the Sonic Boom?

Are You Ready for the Sonic Boom? Are You Ready for the Sonic Boom?

The following is a review of the book Sonic Boom by Greg Easterbrook.

Despite the global economic crisis that has characterized the last 2 years, overall economic trends remain unchanged.  Economic growth is likely to continue into the future while the effects of globalization become more profound.  What will the result of this global economic growth?

In Sonic Boom, Greg Easterbrook tackles this question.  His conclusions are, in his characteristic style, radically unradical.  The world has, and will continue to have problems, many caused by our economic system; however, on the whole, everyone will be better off.  Growing prosperity will be coupled with growing uncertainty, and in the Sonic Boom global economy, rising standards of living will be accompanied by the stress of increasingly rapid change.  Job transitions will become more frequent; innovation will struggle to outlast commoditization.  Efficient manufacturing will decrease the time it takes for new ideas to be adopted, and ultimately abandoned for other, newer ideas.

The changes that occurred in the twentieth century would amaze the people who knew the world at the turn of the century.  Imagine a nineteenth century business man looking at today’s economic landscape.  In 100 years, the world will likely resemble modernity even less.  Our current high tech gadgets will seem outdated in less and less time.  In this scenario, almost everyone in the world benefits, but almost everyone will feel worse.  The fear cause by lack of job security and increased stimuli will mean more stress and less peace of mind.  A large shift to self-employment will erode the separation of work-life and home-life that developed during the last century.  The Sonic Boom world will be a stressful one, but living standards will be higher than ever.

I cannot possibly do justice to the thorough examination of this topic that Easterbrook gives in Sonic Boom, but I do believe that this is a book that everyone should read.  It offers a sense of perspective that will prove invaluable in the future, and that may mitigate the stress caused by the coming Sonic Boom.

30 Day Challenge: February 2010

30 Day Challenge: February 2010 30 Day Challenge: February 2010

Ok, fine, so it’s only a 28 day challenge.  Sue me.  Here is what I will accomplish in February.

Physical – I am incorporating a soft tissue massage/stretching routine into my workout regimen to overcome injury and prevent future injuries.  I will be explaining this in detail in a post later this week.

Mental – My goal for this month is to increase my reading speed.  I will be doing that by taking a one-day course in speed reading and working through the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading.  I honestly don’t know what to expect from this pursuit.  The goal is to finish the book and to test higher at the end of the month than I test at the beginning of the month for my “words per minute” reading rate.

Financial – February is a great month for people like me who get paid twice monthly.  For people who get biweekly checks, February sucks.  I plan to capitalize on the opportunity by saving an additional $500 over my normal savings rate, which I will not be disclosing, but which I will tell you is very high for my income level.

Social – I am definitely a newcomer in the blogosphere, and I need to get more exposure for this site.  That means networking with other bloggers, expanding beyond my facebook friends and twitter followers (though I do love all of you), and making my blog more reader-friendly.  So, this month I will be fixing my RSS feed, tweaking the look and feel of my blog (read, completely overhauling this stock theme I installed), and creating more content to enhance the site.  Ultimately, I’d like to start writing some guest posts for other blogs, but I cannot put a timeframe on building contacts.

Developmental – I will be spending a lot of time this month learning programming.  My main focus will be on developing ASP.NET web applications in Microsoft Visual Web Developer.  I have already created a sweet Tic-Tac-Toe game with 3 levels of artificial intelligence (which sounds way more complex than it actually is).  I’ll be writing a post about this project soon.

There you have it, my 30 day challenge goals for February 2010.  Are they sexy?  Extremely.

What are your goals for this month?  Post your plans to the comments.

The Paradox of Natural Ability

The Paradox of Natural Ability The Paradox of Natural Ability

Sometimes, in order to accomplish your goals, you will need to develop new skills.  In most cases, with enough effort, this learning can be done alone; however, it is often more expedient and beneficial to have a teacher, a coach, or a mentor.  Searching for a good teacher can be problematic because you cannot know whether a certain teacher will be able to address your individual problems and help you overcome them.  Only after you have invested a large sum of time (and probably money) will you really know if your selection was a good one.

What indicators might there be of a teacher’s quality?  If you could use only one criterion to select your teacher what would it be?

It is tempting to leap to the conclusion that the best teacher will be the person who is most successful at the skills you are learning.  If you were learning to swim, you might think Michael Phelps would be a good coach.  For golf - Tiger Woods.  For investing - Warren Buffett.   In some cases you may be right, but often, you will find that success does not necessarily correlate with the ability to teach.  In fact, in many cases the most successful people in the world are clueless when it comes to teaching what they do.  Their success comes so naturally that their minds cannot grasp the difficulties that others face trying to emulate them.  This phenomenon is the paradox of natural ability.

Possessing natural ability does not mean that someone has not worked hard to perfect their craft.  It means that, early on, they were lucky enough to get the big things right.  From there, they focused on the small details that separate the competent from the virtuosos.  Having never needed to establish the foundation upon which they built their virtuosity, their teaching skews to advanced details that will confound beginners.  In many cases, their descriptions of “what I do” will differ greatly from the reality that can be externally observed.  Take for example, Tim Ferriss’s story about Tango, swimming, and language learning.   In each case, traditional conceptions of the “right” way to teach the discipline were ultimately flawed, while deconstruction of successful examples revealed true insights.

Does this mean that deconstruction is the only way to develop skills correctly, and that teachers always fail?  Of course not.  What it means is that successful teachers will be able to deliver the insights that allow you to develop the foundational skills that facilitate mastery.  That means that successful teachers will likely have had to deconstruct the skills themselves.  And who has to deconstruct skills?  People who are struggling to learn!  Indeed, it is often the people who struggled most with learning to develop a skill (and ultimately succeeded) that make the best teachers.

When selecting a teacher, look not only at their ability.  Look at where they started.  People who struggled to learn their skills will have personally encountered many of the problems you will face in your learning.  This experience will help them help you to overcome those problems efficiently.  In the end, you’ll be better off because of it.

Have you ever had a great teacher?  How would you characterize their ability level?

Have you ever had a terrible teacher who excelled at what they taught?

Post your experiences to the comments.