Training for sport competition is rapidly changing. Fifteen years ago almost every team was using weights as their main training focus. Today, training is about explosiveness, hip flexibility, and sport-specific (in some cases, position-specific) training. Greg Bishop wrote a great piece for the NYT detailing Stanford’s world class training program that includes weights, hot yoga, and core work.

Via NYT

Inside the Stanford weight room earlier this football season, there were weight vests and wooden sticks and core boards. There were kettle bells and roller pads and something called a Bod Pod, a white, egg-shaped contraption that measures body fat.

There were football players, too: pairs with legs bent, a towel held between them for balance; others climbing ropes like back in gym class; working on hip mobility and shoulder stability; the focus not on brute strength, even for a team as physical as Stanford.

And there was Shannon Turley, the architect of a training regimen among the most distinct in college sports. He is Stanford’s director of football sports performance, and for years, he felt it necessary to write letters to N.F.L. scouts to explain the Cardinal’s nontraditional approach. He stopped that practice this year in the wake of Stanford’s success.

…..

Many players sign up on their own for classes with Nanci Conniff, a yoga instructor at Stanford since 1999. She worked with the men’s and women’s golf teams, the women’s swim team and football players. She found Turley especially innovative. They cared about the same principles. They wanted balance; players with large chests needed their shoulder blades drawn back; specialists needed loose hips, not tight ones.

Click to read more on Stanford University Athletics and yoga.

“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”

~ C. Joybell C (via thesewanderlustchronicles)

Here’s another arrow — or astra, if you will — in the quiver arguing for allowing yoga and meditation in schools and for kids and young adults.

It is an Op-Ed from the San Francisco Chronicle. The author, David Kirp, is a well-respected professor at UC Berkeley who has a reputation for telling things like they are — even if that means upsetting the powers that be:

At first glance, Quiet Time – a stress reduction strategy used in several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as in scattered schools around the Bay Area – looks like something out of the om-chanting 1960s. Twice daily, a gong sounds in the classroom and rowdy adolescents, who normally can’t sit still for 10 seconds, shut their eyes and try to clear their minds. I’ve spent lots of time in urban schools and have never seen anything like it.

Now these students are doing light-years better. In the first year of Quiet Time, the number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. Within four years, the suspension rate was among the lowest in the city. Daily attendance rates climbed to 98 percent, well above the citywide average. Grade point averages improved markedly. About 20 percent of graduates are admitted to Lowell High School – before Quiet Time, getting any students into this elite high school was a rarity. Remarkably, in the annual California Healthy Kids Survey, these middle school youngsters recorded the highest happiness levels in San Francisco.

Reports are similarly positive in the three other schools that have adopted Quiet Time.

While Quiet Time is no panacea, it’s a game-changer for many students who otherwise might have become dropouts. That’s reason enough to make meditation a school staple, and not just in San Francisco.

Transcendental Meditation, the core intervention of the Quiet Time Program, is a simple, easily learned technique, practiced by students and teachers while sitting comfortably with the eyes closed. It does not involve any religion, philosophy, or change in lifestyle. Over 340 published scientific studies document its effectiveness for improving health and learning.

This approach has been adopted by hundreds of public, private and charter schools worldwide—with strong support from students, parents and educators.

Originally published on Confluence Countdown.

Tynan compiles five reasons why he would recommend traveling in Japan.

#5 was interesting, this is a great way to get around Japan as a backpacker or traveler:

5. It has the Almighty Train Pass

The subways in Japan are around the same price as subways anywhere, but the inter-city trains, especially the bullet trains, can be very expensive. Going back and forth between Tokyo and Kyoto, a manageable day trip, costs around three hundred dollars.

But… if you’re a foreigner, and you buy it in advance, you can get a train pass for less than three hundred dollars that grants you unlimited use of pretty much all of the trains in the entire country. You can go all the way up to Sapporo, all the way down to Kagoshima, and everywhere in between. On average I use $1500 to $2000 worth of tickets every time I get this pass (which is every time I go to Japan).

If you go outside of the major cities (or to Osaka, for some reason), you’ll find English in shorter supply than in Tokyo. However, given how safe Japan is and how helpful everyone is, you should still be able to manage pretty easily.

I try to go to a lot of new places (I’m in Bucharest right now!), but Japan is the one place I keep going back to, almost every single year since 2007. The things on this list, plus many others, make it my favorite place to go, and my favorite place to show to other people. If you’re looking for a place to go, even if Japan holds no special appeal to you, consider it!

Click to read more on traveling Japan. 

image via google commons

~ Eckhart Tolle

“The best experience with a fan? It happens sometimes where someone will say “I was going through a really hard time. I was going through a really hard time, and I was just morose or depressed.”

And I met one person who said I couldn’t find anything to cheer me up and I was so sad. And I Just watched Caddyshack, and I watched it for about a week and it was the only thing that cheered me up. And it was the only thing that cheered me up and made me laugh and made me think that my life wasn’t hopeless. That I had a way to see what was best about life, that there was a whole lot of life that was wonderful. And I happen to know (from her own spirit) that that person has really triumphed as an artist and as a human being, and if it’s just a moment when you can reverse a movement, an emotion, a downward spiral, when you can quiet something or still something and just allow it to change and allow the real spirit rise up in someone, that feels great.

I know I’m not saving the world, but something in what I’ve learned how to do or the stories that I’ve tried to tell, they’re some sort of representation of how life is or how life could be. And that gives some sort of optimism. And an optimistic attitude is a successful attitude. ”

~ Bill Murray