Just when we all thought that Tina Fey was going to get a bit of a break ...

... when we all thought that perhaps Governor Palin's Warhol-ian "15 minutes of fame" had already gone into overtime ...

... she reappears to endorse none other than Governor Rick Perry of Texas in his run for re-election in 2010.

First questions first: why do the media continue to attend to her? Is anyone seriously listening to any of this?

Read more...

It was a memorable Looney Tunes cartoon. You might remember it – the one in which we hear Bugs Bunny’s witty repartee with Christopher Columbus - "the world, she's a round" ... "no, the world she's a flat"! It might be as funny now as it was when I was 10 years old.

The perceptual debate that underlies this snippet of animated humor is a common challenge in the world of health and fitness and just about any topic of conversation or study. And it never seems to go away.

Let’s just give this phenomenon a name and call it "Flat Earth Syndrome". Better yet, so that it looks more “medical”, or perhaps more imposing, let’s give it an acronym – FES. Ohhhhhh. Ahhhhhhh, The power of the acronym.

But why a syndrome? It has a consistent pattern of symptoms that are characteristic of a particular disorder – a disorder of thinking, a fight between evidence and belief. It could be the shape of the earth, the treatment you receive for your back pain, or the fitness program you use to lose weight.

Read more...

I never thought I would say that phrase ... "Football Bracketology". Sounds good. A college football national championship - football bracketology - ahhh gives me the warm fuzzies, just like I get when we're looking at the college basketball brackets in March.

A few posts ago, I proposed a structure for a college football national championship. Let's call it "December Delirium" after college basketball's "March Madness". College football, a great thing as it is now, would only improve for the better. Better for the fans, better for the coaches, better for the student-athletes, and better for TV and the sponsors.

So what would December Delirium have looked like for the 2008-2009 season?

Read more...

The Top 10 list of endurance sport training errors covers, in my estimation, about 99% of all training errors. Imagine if there were ways to deal with these 10 training errors. We might just find ourselves in training nirvana. Optimal training, fewer injury risks, and improved performance – I think they call that a win-win-win situation.

The basis for any discussion of training needs to begin with a simple concept – there must be a specific intent for each and every workout in the training plan. A training plan’s primary purpose is to build sports performance capacity, and to do so by applying the principles of the sports sciences. When we do so, we then find that the top 10 training errors can be addressed effectively via just 5 simple adjustments to the training plan.

Read more...