Thursday, April 1, 2010

April Fish.

One popular theory on the origin of April fools day is that in parts of France early Christians felt that the new year should have more religious significance, so they started their year at the end of March (to coincide with Easter). In 1564 the French government (such as it was at the time) decided to use the more commonly used Julian Calendar (which starts the new year January 1). Those who doggedly refused to change would have pranks played on them. Mostly people stuck paper fish to their backs (the whole Jesus/fish thing) they were called Poisson d’Avril or "April Fish." Which some how became "April Fools." Makes you wonder about those folks with the fish on the back of their cars.

Tuesday's training:
Deads: 10x370
military: 9x140
bent rows: some at 185
chins: some at bw.

Mahalo.

1 comment:

J.B. said...

Sorry CES, but I blew away your comment with a bunch of spam..
you commented:
"I was wondering where you were going with this, all the way to the very last sentence. Made me laugh out loud. Well done.

Also, in your previous post you mention training one’s external rotators (of the arm & shoulder.) aside from the obvious band and cable exercises, do you have any advice or any exercises you’d recommend?

Are there any non-isolation movements that would be helpful?"

I thought you'd get a kick out of it.

Isolation helps fix folks with bad motor patterns, but I head pretty quickly to chin-ups and rows. Both of which strengthen the external rotators.
As do things like barbell russian twists, and grappler's twists. I am a big fan of heavy dead lifts to teach the scapula to stay retracted under load.

Cressey has a bunch of good stuff on strengthening the ex. rot. on his site also (no point in reinventing the wheel)