“Punch that word into proper position,”
the angry god of grammar cried.
It started surgically.
Teams tapped in pry bars,
popped out words,
and spackled in a space or a substitution.
Then they found rot,
and it’s all wrecking balls and dynamite from here.
[National Poetry Month: Poem #6]
I rue the hearing of that tune
like a sandworm from planet Dune
it burrowed from ear to brain
where its bouncy pop egg was laid
but when the alien overlords arrive
fresh out of intergalactic drive
sitting parked up in our Thermosphere
we’ll offer them a welcome beer
they’ll think us weak in being kind
until we lodge that f@#%ing tune in their hive-mind
watching them gyrate in a spastic dance
their minds melted in a Zombie trance
like lemmings they’ll plummet from the ship
with that infernal tune on all eight lips
[National Poetry Month: Poem #5]
Taken in July of 2014 in Kochi (Cochin), Kerala
Taken in July 2014 at Bharachukki Falls
Greatest Ever Boxing Workouts – including Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather, Roberto Duran by Gary Todd
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This will be a quick review as the book is simple and straightforward in its approach. The author interviewed 30+ boxers, and each chapter corresponds to a boxer. A few of these boxers are household names, e.g. Tyson, Duran, Pacquiao, and Mayweather, but others may or may not be known to those who aren’t fight fanatics.
Each chapter consists of three sections. The first and longest of each is an overview of that boxer’s career, but it’s the other two sections that are most relevant to the book’s title and theme. One of these sections is an interview that asks a series of 14 questions about how the respective boxer organized his training day, and the other is a description of the boxer’s workouts (typically there was more than one workout—i.e. sparring v non-sparring days.)
If you’re a big boxing fan, this book will be interesting to you particularly for some of the insights about the boxers. The author is clearly knowledgeable in that regard. If you are mostly interested in the book from a fitness perspective, and seek to learn about working out for combative sports, it’s of decidedly less value. It still has some fascinating information, but you’ll probably find it tedious and of limited usefulness. The question and answer section elicits answers from one word to a couple of sentences and the workouts are a page each. What is fascinating is how similar the day in the life of a boxer is, and, specifically, how standardized workouts are. What I mostly found intriguing was when someone stuck out as having a different mode of operating. For example, most started their days very early (often going back to sleep after road-work) but a few were clearly night owls. One can also see a little of how approaches have shifted between the earliest fighters and the ones active until recently.
There are plenty of photographs in the book, but they are the only graphics. There isn’t much else by way of ancillary matter. (i.e. there is a section of pictures of the author with various boxers, but that—of course—is primarily of interest to the author.)
In one sense the book is quite limited and tedious, but it’s also interesting to see how thirty different fighters answered the exact same pallet of questions. There is some insight into nutrition, sleep schedules, optimal time for workouts, etc. However, the book doesn’t drill deep.
If you’re a fight fan, fascinated by boxers and their careers, I’d recommend this book. For those who are buying it thinking they’ll get some insight into how to prepare as a boxer, I’d say said insight will be extremely limited. That said, the book isn’t much of a time investment, and so if you can get it cheap you may find it of some benefit.
Head in the Game: The Mental Engineering of the World’s Greatest Athletes by Brandon Sneed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There are many factors that influence whether an athlete can reach an elite level. Physical factors such as VO2 max (maximum oxygen consumption) and musculature have long been at the fore in the minds of coaches and trainers, but they’ve never told the full story. There are athletes who have the muscles, lungs, and general physiology to dominate their sports who fall apart under pressure. One also sees the occasional athlete who is consistently good even though he seems puny by comparison to his peers. It used to be that mental performance was considered an endowed X-factor–you either had it or you didn’t. Coaches didn’t know how to coach for issues of the mind and often exacerbated problems with old school attitudes and approaches.
We’ve now entered a new era in which a bevy of techniques and technologies are being exploited to strengthen the mind and improve psychological deficiencies, just as gyms have always been used to build the body and combat physical deficiencies. These range from techniques of meditation and visualization that have been known to yogis and Buddhists for centuries to advanced technologies that have only become available in recent decades and which are constantly improving and being made obsolete. Sneed examines the gamut of these approaches as they are applied to improving performance in sports: from the meditative or therapeutic to the electronic or pharmacological. One no longer need give up on athletes who are great at their best, but who get the yips at the worst possible times. The performance of mediocre athletes can be improved and that of the best can be made more consistent.
Sneed has a unique qualification to write this book. He counts himself among the athletes who couldn’t reach his potential because of inconsistency rooted in psychological challenges. His willingness to be forthright about his own problems makes the book more engaging. His own stories are thrown into the mix with those of athletes from football, basketball, soccer, baseball, adventure sports, and mixed martial arts (MMA.)
The book’s 19 chapters are divided among four parts. The first part lays the groundwork, helping the reader understand the rudiments of how the brain works, doesn’t work, or works too hard for a competitor’s own good. A central theme is that the ability to analyze and train through the lens of neuroscience has removed some of the stigma that has always been attached to psychological issues in sports (not to mention the days when they were written off as weakness.) Much of the six chapters of Part I deal with assessment of the athlete’s baseline mental performance. The last chapter (Ch. 6) covers a range of topics that have been around a long time as they’ve been reevaluated through modern scientific research. These include religion, faith, superstition, meditation, visualization, and the immortal question of whether sex is good or bad for athletic performance.
The second part consists of five chapters taking on one fundamental truth: mind and body are not two disparate and independent entities. This section starts at the most logical point: breath. Practitioners of yoga (i.e. pranayama) and chi gong have known for centuries that breath can be used to influence one’s emotional state and level of mental clarity. Sneed evaluates the technology that is being used to help athletes master the same age-old lessons. Having laid the groundwork through breath, the section advances into biofeedback technology. There are two chapters in the book that deal with pharmacological approaches. One is in this section and it deals with legal (at least in some locales) substances such as caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, nootropics (alleged mind enhancing drugs), and marijuana. (The other is in the final part and it deals with hallucinogens.) There are also a couple of chapters on technologies used to produce or enhance desired mental states.
For most readers, the third part will be seen as the heart of the book. Having considered how to evaluate an athlete’s mental performance (Part I) and how to influence mind states by way of the body (Part II), this part explores the range of technologies that are used to exercise the mind in a manner analogous to working out the body. These technologies focus on a range of areas including improving the nervous system’s ability to take in information, process that information, and respond appropriately. Much of this part focuses on video games; albeit video games using state of the art virtual reality and which are customized to improvement of athletic performance. Some of the games are used to train general cognitive performance (e.g. Ch. 13) but others are specifically tailored to the game in question (i.e. Ch. 14.) Just as simulators are used in aviation, part of the advantage of these games is the ability to put players in progressively more challenging conditions.
The last part of the book was the most interesting to me, personally. [It’s also the part of the book that will be the most relevant and readable a few years down the road because it’s not as modern technology-centric as most of the book—especially Part III–is.] It’s entitled “The Spirit” and it explores X-factors to performance, but sans the assumption that these are endowments, but rather under the assumption they are trainable. The part has an important introduction that presents the research about how “soft” factors like gratitude play into outlook and performance. Then there are the Part’s three chapters. The first describes an experiment involving taking elite athletes into physically arduous conditions of the kind normally experienced by military special operations forces in survival training. The second tells the story of MMA fighter Kyle Kingsbury’s use of hallucinogenic substances (most intriguingly, ayahuasca, a powerful drug long used by Peruvian shamans.) Finally, the last chapter deals with sensory deprivation—a technology some will associate with the movie “Altered States” but which many athletes swear by.
The book has an extensive section on notations and sources organized by chapter. There are no graphics.
I enjoyed this book and found it to be informative. There are a number of books that explore the techniques and technologies of optimal mental performance, but this one develops a niche by focusing on the realm of sports and some of the technologies that are only available with the kind of deep-pockets seen in professional sports. The book is heavily weighted toward the technology part of the equation, which is both good and bad. If you’re reading it now (2017), it’s great because you’re getting an up-to-date discussion of the subject from the perspective of entities that are awash in money for tech. The downside is that this book won’t age well, at least not as well as it would if there was more emphasis on approaches that aren’t based on cutting-edge technology.
I’d recommend this book if you are interested in optimal human performance, and if you have an interest in sports, all the better.
coracles twisting
a placid river drifting
marine dervishes
[National Poetry Month: Poem #4]
A trick of the light
Turns leaves pallid and frosty
Under dusky skies
[National Poetry Month: Poem 3]
