Since January, I've been on thirty-nine flights. The madness started with a writing assignment to cover cat skiing in southern British Columbia: ten days. Three weeks later, I was called to hop a few planes to a Canadian mountain range called the Monashees for a backcountry skiing photo shoot for Mountain Hardwear with a few other athletes: nine days. Two weeks later, I left on a month-long assignment for National Geographic Adventure in northern Norway, where I retraced the steps of a WWII escapee on skis across Lapland, about ten degrees north of the Arctic Circle: twenty-nine days. Ten days at home, then I jetted to Nepal for a month to write dispatches for MSN.com on Ed Viesturs's historic mountaineering ascent of Annapurna, making him the first American to climb all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks: thirty days. No rest for the weary, but I like it that way. I like to pack it all in; it feels more efficient that way, like I’m getting things done. Unfortunately, with that "efficiency" that I fiendishly suck energy to achieve, thirty-nine flights in no way augments my level of fitness. CrossFit does.

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The most strident objectors to the kipping pull-up advocated by CrossFit have been the kettlebell swingers. They despise our "sloppy" pullups. Other communities have been confused by kipping but are ultimately receptive to it after an explanation of our reasons. The reaction of the Kettlebell community has been to call us a cult.

I know how much they love swinging kettlebells, so here is my attempt to show that their flavor of Kool-Aid is really not that different from ours. The trajectories of the kettlebell swing, snatch, and clean are eerily similar to the trajectory of a kipping pull-up. Both use horizontal displacement to generate momentum along an arc that ultimately produces vertical displacement. In simpler terms, the backswing adds power to the movement. My grandpa had a good term for this motor recruitment pattern. He called it "the old heaveho."

Dragon Door's brochure claims, "Amazingly, the Russian kettlebell will make you good at many things you have not practiced. Gireviks report on our Strength Forum that they run faster, bend sixty-penny nails, bench or deadlift heavier, etc., just from lifting kettlebells. The only time they see the barbell, a nail, or running shoes is during the test!"

I put emphasis on the heavier deadlifts because it goes to show that the ballistic loading of kettlebell swings can improve your limit strength. If you look at Dragon Door's testimonial page, you will find no less than eight happy customers who report new personal records on the deadlift following a period of nothing but kettlebell work.

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How did you first become exposed to recovery and regeneration techniques?

My first focus on the recovery process was from my high school swim coach Peter Foley. He explained to us, the team, how to be a total athlete for 24 hours a day, not just 2. A total athlete was a person that organized their lifestyle to get a full night's sleep and not eat junk food. He understood the reality of the situation with student athletes not learning ways to juggle what I call the four S's. The four S's are Sleep, School, Sport, and Social.

If you distribute the hours among priorities of needs over wants, you can have it all in life. This process worked for me and I transformed myself from a neophyte to a part of three state championship swim teams. By just learning how to construct a foundation of principles and guidelines on doing the basics and being consistent, I could expand the individual basics and become more precise and more aggressive with modalities later. Don't build on quicksand by rushing to get into supplementation and soft tissue therapy.

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In my article in last month’s journal, I described our baseball team’s strength and conditioning training this past fall. This month, I will outline an entire year of our women’s basketball training, taking into account the demands and interruptions of student athletes’ schedules.

Before I delve into describing the team’s the training regimen, here’s a little background information. This off-season began on the heels of our first Big West Conference tournament championship and the team making it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history. The best news is that we did this with mostly freshman, two sophomores, and two seniors. Way back in August 2005 I knew we had a special group that would one day be conference champions, even before I had ever seen most of them dribble a basketball. The crop of frosh that year were athletic, hardworking, and coachable. I knew our outstanding basketball coaches would be able to take these young women to the top.

Our trip to last year’s NCAA tournament was a short one, as we drew #1-seeded UNC in the opening round. We simply were unable to compete with their size, athleticism, and skill. The head coach came back and asked me if we could put 20 pounds on all the players so we could be more competitive the next year. I told him that 20 pounds of muscle would be essentially impossible for our team, but that 10 was an achievable goal.

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Sprinting is a skill. It is beautiful, violent, functional, and potentially destructive if conducted in an unsafe manner. It can bring glory to an athlete or be a factor in the survival and success of a warrior on the battlefield. At its simplest, it is a means of getting the body from one point to another in the shortest possible time, yet it is also a very complex, specialized motor skill that requires a high degree of coordination. Broken down into its fundamental components, it can be thought of as repetitive maximal force efforts; as such, it clearly exposes any muscular imbalances that exist in an athlete.

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One of the major differences between swimming and land-based sports is that breathing in the water is a skill, and a fairly advanced one at that. In recent weeks, since opening a new Swim Studio in New Paltz, NY, I’ve spent many hours teaching in an Endless Pool, where proximity to my students has allowed me to observe the extent to which breathing comfort is essential to their progress and success. This has convinced me that, until breathing becomes routine, effective focus on other aspects of the stroke is impossible. But once students master breathing, other skills follow much more rapidly.

Breathing is such a natural activity that we seldom give it a thought. The only time we even become conscious of it is when we’re breathless from exertion or, well, panic. Or, in the case of swimming, sometimes both at once.

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The first several parts of this series on functional bike maneuvers will be directed toward anyone looking to improve their technical riding and will not be discipline-specific. Later installments will present strategies for improving riding performance for those already skilled on a bicycle.

In this series we will be looking at functional skills drawn from primarily from mountain biking, bicycle trials, and BMX freestyle. For our purposes, we’ll consider only the skills that help you navigate your environment smoothly and efficiently or that allow you to ride terrain that you otherwise couldn't. Hopping over a log or jumping down a set of stairs would be considered functional; doing a 360-degree spin in the process wouldn't. (This doesn't discount the value of learning skills such as a 360, as pushing your level of technical skill development will only improve your overall ability as a cyclist.

However, the 360 is not needed to clear the stairs, so it would be outside the scope of these articles.) Since this series won't be riding-style specific, we’ll be looking at functional skills that can be done on almost any kind of bike. Moves that require BMX bikes with axle pegs or trials bikes with bashguards won't be considered here. Basically, we will be borrowing the useful skills from across a range of biking styles.

My riding background is primarily in BMX, though I have competed in trials riding and done some mountain biking as well. My specialty has always been BMX flatland or ground riding. It is possibly the least functional of all the riding disciplines, but it does allow you to develop a very high level of balance and bike control.

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Slacklining (slacking) is borrowed from the climbing population, where it’s often prescribed as active recovery after a hard day of mountaineering. A slackline is a lead of nylon webbing strung between two fixed objects. Upon looking at a slackline setup most people think “tightrope walking”. Actually it is quite the opposite. While a tightrope does not sway or move, a slackline does. Known to recoil, sway madly and bounce with every step or transition – it has been likened to surfing. These characteristics focus on movement, not musculature. Bringing focus to stabilization in the most destabilized environments. Think hula-hoop on crack. This simple device can help to improve coordination, agility, accuracy, concentration, and balance. I have personally seen a slackline humble the freakiest balance junkies.

Potency can be adjusted for all skill levels. Tension on the webbing can be varied to manipulate line response time – the looser the line the slower the feedback. We employed ski poles, human shoulders, and crash mats to get even the most balanced-challenged on the line. Baby steps are important. It is amazing to witness the smile on someone’s face when they discover that the line responds with bounce and recoil against weight transfer. They just keep coming back!

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The world’s best swimmers move through the water with grace, economy, and flow, while novices are awkward, clumsy, and inefficient. But the rest of us can learn to swim well if we take the time to master swimming as an art before tackling it as a sport.

How many land-based athletes have concluded that swimming requires some exotic or elusive kind of fitness after an experience like this: Joe, who can breeze through a 5-mile jog without breaking a sweat, decides to try a pool workout one day. Within a few minutes, he’s panting for breath and wondering, “How will I ever get in a decent workout if I can’t even make 100 yards without dying?” Experiences like that convince many adult athletes that swimming is only for those who swam competitively as kids and leave them suspecting that the time and effort required to master swimming may not even be worth it.

But mastering the “swim challenge” is decidedly worthwhile. Not only is it ideal as a restorative, general fitness workout for virtually any aging athlete; learning to swim well also gives you the option to try triathlons or Masters swimming. And I’ve yet to meet an otherwise well-rounded athlete who could not learn to swim well enough to stay fit or tackle a triathlon. All they have to do is discard everything other aerobic activities such as running have taught them, as soon as they enter the pool.

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In the past six months or so I’ve noticed more conversations about how having a solid strength and power base really drives top performances on the CrossFit storms (the named benchmark workouts, also known as “the girls”) and some discussion on what is the best balance between strength workouts and circuit-type work, etc. I first came across CrossFit about three years ago and immediately began implementing ideas I learned from Coach Glassman and others in the CrossFit community into my job as the head strength and conditioning coach at the University of California, Riverside. With the strength and power discussions heating up and the recent emergence of the CrossFit Total, I thought I’d share an example of how I have incorporated CrossFit in the training of the athletic teams here at UCR.

This article describes the training that we on the strength and conditioning staff did with the position players on our baseball team during the fall off-season. (Next month, I will discuss the specifics of how we used CrossFit in training the women’s basketball team.) The pitching coach is very conservative, so the pitchers do a separate program consisting mostly of squats, some plyometrics, and medicine ball work. I will say, though, that out of seventeen pitchers, thirteen back squatted 300 pounds or more, with seven guys squatting over 350 pounds.

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