If you heard that you should isolate your abdominal muscles (abs) by crossing your arms over your chest while doing situps, and now you’re suffering headaches, neck aches, or migraines, then go back to the old way of doing situps: clasp your hands behind your neck, with your elbows and arms out straight in line with your shoulders and back.
Category Archives: Fitness
Best Places to Comparison Shop for Outdoor Gear Online
I enjoy comparison shopping for adventure products, especially hiking gear. When I keep up with my comparison shopping routine, I know a good price when I see one. You really can save hundreds of dollars when you stay abreast of prices, because then you know a deal when it stares you in the eye. This year I found a brand-new $600 2010 North Face Free Thinker Gore-Tex Pro Shell Rain Jacket/Ski Jacket for $195.
Here are places I visit online for prices and deals on outdoor gear:
Endurance Training & Long-distance Hikes: Tips & Tricks
The training and nutritive techniques are virtually identical — endurance athletes minimize weight, eat high-calorie, easily digestible carbohydrate gels and fluid proteins, hydrate often, and take electrolytes — but if you compare the numbers (if you can find the numbers), you’ll find that marathoners and long-distance runners outnumber endurance hikers. While an average marathoner might finish a 42.195 kilometer run in about 5 hours, an endurance hiker will often take 11 hours to complete the same distance on rough wilderness trails. Recent mothers, fathers, and young professionals often find that the travel times to worthwhile hiking trails (plus the hiking times) are prohibitive.
Julbo Availability in Canada
I wish Julbo would somehow get its products reviewed in the Canadian media so that Julbo sunglasses would become readily available here in Canada. I live near Toronto, Ontario, but when I searched the Internet last year, I found only two places selling Julbo sunglasses in Canada, and both of them were in Montreal, Quebec.
Hikers recognize my Julbo Race sunglasses when I’m on the trails in Arizona, but here in Ontario, Canada, almost no one has heard of them.
Winter Hiking on the Bruce Trail South of Speyside, Ontario
Click on the thumbnail photos (and then when you are done, click on the full size photos to close).
Toronto Waterfront, Leslie Spit, Cherry Beach
It was over 90 degrees in July, and with the humidity, that temperature had the effect of 104 degrees, but starting at 2 PM, I hiked from Yonge and St. Clair to the waterfront and then on to Cherry Beach and the Leslie Spit in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Then I hiked back to where I started on Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue. (Yonge is the longest municipal street in Canada.) Click on the photos:
Also see:
Hiking Photos from Bruce Trail and Grand Canyon
Here are a few of the photos I took on my hikes in Arizona and Ontario. I use a small Japanese-made Minolta.
I took the Arizona shot on the Tanner Trail in the Grand Canyon and the Ontario shots on the Beaver Valley and Sydenham sections of the Bruce Trail (Maps 28 and 29 of the Bruce Trail Reference: Edition 25), about 10 km south of Meaford, Ontario. (Did you know that John Muir once lived in Meaford?). Compared to Arizona, the Bruce Trail does not present large elevation changes, but its moss-covered rocks and boulders are extremely slippery.
Flat Feet and Arch Supports
Maybe you visited your doctor after taking up running, and the doctor told you that your feet hurt because your arches fell. In other words, you have flat feet. Well the chances are that it’s your shoes, not your flat arches, that are causing the pain. The arch supports hurt your feet: You do not want humongous arch supports. You want shoes that are built with very mild (low) arch supports.
Both New Balance and Vasque make athletic shoes that fit flat feet and wide feet. Vasque even says that their Perpetuum last is “comfortable for people with flatter feet.”
