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Check out their 603 PTP Program. A good way to build up your strength.

I mentioned before about Robb Wolf’s gym being kicked out of Crossfit. Now another group, Whole 9, has lost their affiliation. From the letter Whole 9 received from Crossfit HQ:

“I am writing to thank you for your year of affiliation with CrossFit and to inform you that we will not be renewing your affiliation when it expires on 3/17/2010. ..  Since you are moving in a different direction, we cannot continue to carry you as an affiliate and we feel that our continued association is no longer mutually beneficial. We wish you the best of luck in your new endeavors.”

Seems strange to me. Whole 9 has  a successful and popular program going, but Crossfit doesn’t like the direction Whole 9 was going. Probably too much strength work and not enough met-con for Crossfit’s liking. I could post some of the babble Crossfit posts at time, cream rising to the top, let’s see who has the best program, yada yada yada.

I wonder who will be next to lose their affiliation?

Maybe you should take a peek at some recent news across the pond:

Hundreds of NHS wards to be shut in secret plans

To save money, you shut things down. Don’t worry, I’m sure services won’t suffer.

Stafford Hospital caused ‘unimaginable suffering’

Doctor’s worried about costs, because the government tells them they got to meet the budget, and patients suffer.

If you don’t think the same things would happen here in the US once the government starts calling the shots then I got a ocean front property in Arizona to sell you.

Want to lower health care costs? Start allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines, do away with the minimum package an insurance company has to offer. As a single male insurance covering the cost of pregnancy is of little concern. Allow people to purchase insurance with pre-tax dollars. Just a few things the government could do to help lower health care costs.

What we all can do is get some  exercise, eat right, and get plenty of sleep. Since this involves personal responsibility I don’t have high hopes for it succeeding.

I wrote before about some of the things that make me shake my head over on the Crossfit boards, but I’m at the “you just got to laugh at the craziness” stage. I should add it’s Crossfit’s message board that they offer for free so they can make the rules and do what they want.

One of the way Crossfit promotes itself is as “open source”, meaning they say here is what you do if you think you have a better way lets hear and debate the issue. Sounds great, unless the Crossfit powers that be don’t like the message. Starting yesterday on the message boards if you posted a link to the Starting Strength website or Robb Wolf’s website the links get filtered, meaning they get changed to *******. In effect those sites are now banned on the Crossfit message board.

Why you may ask? Well those two along with others have stated they think they could do something better than the way Crossfit is currently doing something. In Robb Wolf’s case it is nutrition, for Mark Rippetoe (Starting Strength) it’s the importance of strength. In these cases Crossfit becomes closed-source. I’ would guess that it has to do with Crossfit’s tie-ins with Barry Sear’s of The Zone and Louie Simmons.

Crossfit even does some wacky things if you try to link to their message boards and they don’t like you. As an example if you post a link to the Crossfit boards in The couch thread (a thread making fun of Greg Glassman and Crossfit) on the Irongarm boards, you’ll just get bounced back to Irongarm if you click on the link.

As I said, their boards, their rules, but what are they afraid of facing? Someone that may have a better idea?

We often over-complicate things in our life. Just look at how people tend to deal with health. All sorts of weight lose plans are advertised on television, pills for this, pills for that, more ads for how to get into shape, never ends. What if we instead said “Stop!” and got back to the basics of fitness and nutrition? That is what Mark Sisson proposes in his book “The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy.”

In his book, Sisson outlines a philosophy on how to live life. He does this by looking at two fictional families, the Korgs and the Groks. The Korgs represent a typical modern day family, one you’ll probably recognize from the description Sisson outlines. The other family, the Korgs, represents a family on the other spectrum, one that lived 10,000 years ago. By comparing how these two families handled everyday life, from eating to how they received their exercise, Sisson shows how our ancient ancestors had it pretty good. The Korgs tended to be healthier then us and deal with much less stress in their lives. Sisson believes that if we lived more like the Gorks we would be much better of health wise.

Sisson outlines how to do with his “Primal Blueprint Laws”, which there are 10. These laws, based on how Gork would have lived his life, cover everything from what to eat, exercise, sleep, and having fun. In these 10 laws Sisson shoots an arrow through conventional wisdom around health and fitness. Low fat diets? Gork wouldn’t approve. 60 minutes on the thread mill? Not for Gork. Eat plenty of whole grain foods? Gork never would have touched the stuff. Sisson  gives his rational for his laws and provides evidence to support his arguments.

Is Sisson right? That is something you’ll need to decide. However I have a hard time believing that if you follow Sisson’s advice that you won’t get into better shape. I should note that this is aimed at people that fir into the description of the Korgs in the book. My advice is to read the book and try following its suggestions for 30 days and see how you feel. Even if you think you are in good shape, that you eat right, and doing pretty good, Sisson might trigger a light bulb in your head and make you think about what you are doing.

Mark Sisson over at Mark’s Daily Apple has a PrimalCon 2010 Event planned for April 23-25, 2010, in Oxnard, CA. If interested in health and fitness this could be something for you to check out. I’m a fan of Mark’s work and if I lived in the area I would be attending.

Instead of making a resolution to start off the new year, lets do it with a challenge. And what could be a better challenge than the One Hundred Day Burpee Challenge? Right, pretty much anything. Therefore it is the perfect challenge to start the new year off with. So on January 1, 2010, kick off the challenge.

If you don’t what the One Hundred Day Burpee Challenge is exactly, here is a run down. Day on (1/1/10) you do 1 burpee, Day 2 (1/2/10) is 2 burpees, Day 3 (1/3/10) is 3 burpees, and keep going till you get to day 100 (4/10/10) where you are now at 100 burpees. So on 1/1/2010, 3-2-1 Go!

FAQ

Q: What’s a burpee?
A: Wikipedia has a write-up on the burpee. You can also check out this video or this one on YouTube.

Q: I can’t do 100 of those evil things!
A: I’m willing to bet you can do one. Start with one and on day 2 do one, and then one more. Look at it as doing 1 burpee and build upon that. The proper mental approach will help you make it through this.

Q: On a given day, do I have to do all the burpees at once?
A; No, you just have to do that given number for the day. Using day 50 again, if you need to break it down into blocks of 10 with a rest in between, then that is what you do. The goal is getting all the burpees done for that day.

Q: What if I miss a day?
A: You poor fool… You still have to do the burpees. Lets say you missed doing the burpees on day 50, on day 51 you have to do those burpees (51) and the ones you missed (50). That should be a good incentive not to miss a day

Many Democrats are complaining as how the Republicans are being hypocrites on health care reform. The argument goes like this: Republicans are bucking the Democratic proposals, which I agree they should be stopped, but the Republicans had no issues when proposing unfunded Medicare reform.

Myself I was ticked off at the Republicans for pushing this 6 years ago. It was bad policy and bad economics. And I’ll agree that the Senators that backed Medicare reform 6 years ago are being hypocrites. This however is politics as usual.

My personal opinion is the Federal Government has zero business in being involved with health care. They can regulate a health care company that does business across multiple states, that is the power given to them by the Constitution, other than that stick to those limited powers you are suppose to have and leave the rest to the states or the People.

In this post I mentioned that Robb was no longer doing the Crossfit Nutritional Certifications. Latest news is that Robb has been stripped of his Crossfit affiliation. Greg Everett of Catalyst Athletics received the same notice.

Best of luck to you Robb, the cream will rise to the top.

Update: Dr. Kurt Harris weighs in on the issue in his blog post Crossfit Nutrition Eats its Young.

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