Knee position when squatting
The other day I was sharing the squat rack with this guy at the gym; he was doing front squats. I see him at the gym all the time. He's in his early 20's and he's a competitive powerlifter. Compared to the guys he lifts with, he's got good form on most of his lifts. However, there was one aspect of his front squat I thought he needed to work on: his knee position. At the bottom of his squat, his knees went about 3-4 inches over his toes. As a result, he seemed a bit awkward and unbalanced at the bottom. I didn't say anything about it to him because, well, who am I? He's a powerlifter and I'm just a Joe Schmo off the street. Had he asked me for advice, this is what I would have told him:
- Stop your knees from going over your toes!
- Sit back further into your squat (like you're sitting on a toilet).
- Stretch those hamstrings: tight hammies can keep you from sitting back far enough.
Connect to Cisco routers using screen
screen is a Linux utility that I use to connect to the console on Cisco routers. If your router is plugged in to a serial port on a Linux box, you can use the following command to connect to it:
[dacaprice@FedoraBox ~]$ screen /dev/ttyS0
Are you injured?
I've been lucky with injuries throughout my athletic career. More than often, my biggest complaint is chronic soreness cured by a few days rest. By the end of the summer I had A LOT of low back pain. I dialed down my training and started stretching like a mad man but but it never got better.
Fast forward to mid-October, after visiting a sports chiropractor I had started to feel better (he told me I needed to stabilize and strengthen my abs--and I agree it was an area I had neglected). I should've knocked on wood after telling my chiro that I felt great. I re-injured myself doing Back Squats and thought my days of heavy lifting were over.
I looked all over the CrossFit message board for people who were dealing with the same issues. It turns out, I was not alone and I found a link to a post from Mark Rippetoe that offered a solution to my problem. I used this protocol and felt better after 10 days and was back in the gym working hard after two weeks (PR'ed Jackie by 44 seconds!) I think my injury was a result of weak abdominals, poor sitting position (have you ever seen the way lifeguards sit in their stands), overstretching, and not enough consistent strength training. I'm working on fixing these things to avoid anymore speed bumps in my training.
Most recent migraine
My most recent migraine occurred after a hockey game about 8 weeks ago. I have to admit, I hadn't been stretching my neck like I should have been and it was 5 or 6 weeks since my last adjustment. The migraine came with the normal symptoms: black aura, followed by numbness in my hand then the pain in the head and eyes. It was interesting this time around though, because the aura wasn't that big, the numbness slowly spread from my thumb to my pinky, and the pain wasn't that bad. I didn't take any medicine. I just stretched for a bit and went to bed. I was even able to sleep.
Since then, I've been making a point to get adjusted by the chiropractor every 4 weeks and I've been stretching my neck everyday, many times a day. I haven't had a migraine since, which is good considering I play hockey once a week and do a serious MetCon at least once a week. I am consistently reaffirming that my formula for prevention is regular stretching and chiropractic adjustments every 4 weeks or less.
Changing sdiff column width in Linux
I use sdiff pretty often to do a side-by-side comparison of config files on my Linux box. The thing that annoys me the most is the default column width; often whatever it is I am comparing, gets cut short because the width is too narrow. I like use the -w ColumnWidth to set a wider width and the -s to supress any common lines.
[dacaprice@fedora]$ sdiff -s -w 150 file1 file2