Run to Win

This week last year got away from the football theme and concentrated more on news that impacts athletes or athletics and the Red Sox. I also started my new animated how to series, which has been neglected since I got married and has not started up again because my photographer moved away.

• I began my animated series on how to do different exercises a year ago. The series began with how to do dumbbell shrugs.
• I reviewed the McMillan Running Calculator, which can be used to project different goal paces based on the distances you have already run. It works pretty well.
• A community in Texas instituted a mandatory sports training program for parents of children who wanted to participate in the sports in that community. They were tired of parents getting out of line and misbehaving at games and practices.
• I talked about how tough Washington’s anti-smoking laws are.
• Tim Montgomery and Chryste Gaines were both given 2 year bans for doping after being implicated in the Balco trial. In the comments, john y and I disagreed about whether these were bad bans or not.
• The Australian swimming team staged some mock executions in an attempt to motivate the swimmers.
• The Red Sox decide not to hire a new general manager, and city counselor John Tobin wanted to bring a minor league team to Boston because Red Sox games cost too much to bring the family to. I have been lucky enough to always live near some minor league markets. In other baseball news, Cuba was barred from the World Baseball Classic (temporarily, at least).

In the gym today, I was doing some deadlift shrugs. It is a fairly simple compound exercise. You load a bar on the floor as you normally would with a deadlift: feet shoulder width apart, over hand grip, and your back in a natural arch. The only difference is that rather than stopping the deadlift when your are standing straight up, you continue the motion and shrug shoulders, lifting the bar that extra six inches or so. You then relax your shoulders until your arms are straight hanging as they normally would be at the end of a deadlift and return the bar to the floor.

In the process of performing this exercise, however, I discovered a new danger for men when they are lifting weights. I am sure that this is not the only exercise where this is apparant, but it is the first time that I had trouble with it on almost every single repetition.

Note: The rest of this article discusses the male anatomy. If this bothers you, please do not click through to read the rest of the article.
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How to perform dumbbell shrugs with an animated image showing the move.
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