Form follows Fun

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays. Baffled? Intrigued? Charmed? Discuss here.
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reinhard
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Form follows Fun

Post by reinhard » Mon Jun 26, 2006 1:50 pm

A lot of exercises require proper form. Those that minimize the importance of form tend to do so by sacrificing a lot of the workout value (nautilus machine vs. free weights). But form can be tricky.

Shovelglove, at first glance, seems even trickier than free weights in terms of form. The movements are more complex, they require more space, and many involve that potential danger zone, the back. Proper form is critical. But it's much easier to achieve this proper form than with free weights, because shovelglove is intuitive. You just imagine the real world movements you're imitating. The movements involved in regular weight lifting, though simpler, are fake movements. There's no real world analogy to guide you. What's more, attention to form, which can be so irritating with other exercises, is precisely what makes shovelglove interesting. The attention is the pretend, the play, the fun.

Reinhard

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david
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Post by david » Mon Jun 26, 2006 3:50 pm

Reinhard,

I totally agree. Some common sense+moderation+imagination=good form.

thanks,
David

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