Niall’s Weblog

I started taking Yoga classes at the SF Krav Maga centre a few months ago and have been doing it pretty regularly since - usually I do two hours a week, in addition to other training. I must admit that for some time I had a negative attitude toward yoga - the association with New Age wishy-washy mumbo-jumbo for one thing, and also that it wasn’t clear to me what yoga actually did for you, what its benefits were.

I mean, you compare yoga with boxing - its pretty obvious what you are getting out of training in boxing. Some serious cardiovascular conditioning and practical fighting techniques. But what is yoga all about? A few stretches and poses and stuff - talking a load of New Age rubbish while barely breaking a sweat - just the pretense of physical fitness? That was my initial bias. However I have since revised my opinion about yoga.

I should mention that I don’t know what kind of yoga my instructor subscribes to, I must ask her. I’ve read that there are many different things which claim to be yoga. In fact I’ve read that what westerners know as “yoga” is a subset of a much larger Indian tradition. So I preface this with a clear admission that “your mileage may vary”.

The yoga class I attend focuses on two areas: core strength and flexibility. Personally I have had quite poor shoulder flexibility for a long time and the desire to improve my flexibility was one of my main motivators for trying yoga in the first place. The yoga core exercises are very intense - in fact more intense than any other abdominal exercise I’ve ever done. Think of ab bicycles but considerably more difficult. Of course core strength is very important, especially to prevent back problems and not least in any kind of fighting situation where you want to protect the internal organs to avoid getting knocked out by a shot to the body.

So what benefits have I noticed from doing yoga then? My flexibility has increased considerably, although I still have plenty of room for improvement. My core strength is pretty good - definitely much better with the addition of the yoga training. Furthermore I think I have a generally increased connection with my body and my balance is better. The breathing exercises have helped with my pacing in cardio activities.

Overall I think yoga is an excellent adjunct to more intense activity. It certainly is relaxing, increases core strength and improves flexibility. There may be other benefits along the lines of reduced stress, increased energy levels, and so on - but those are much more difficult to quantify and are clearly highly subjective. I would recommend a bit of yoga as an excellent addition to a training regime although I would hesitate to practice yoga exclusively.

I’ve been doing chin-ups and pull-ups for a while now, first at the gym and now at home since I bought a $15 chinning bar and drilled it into a door frame. In general it seems that chin-ups refer to the grip with your palms facing you whereas pull-ups refer to the grip with your palms facing away. My understanding is that chin-ups focus more on triceps and shoulders and that pull-ups are more of an upper back exercise. In any case, these are both great for developing strength.

The interesting thing about these exercises is that it is very difficult to do even a moderate number of reps. To score full marks on the US Marine Corps’ physical fitness test, you must be able to do twenty pull-ups from a dead hang. You are not allowed swing around or otherwise use body momentum. Twenty is not such a large number, but its unlikely you could manage even half that number of pull-ups without training. Many people cannot even manage a single pull-up - it is a very strenuous exercise.

Lately I’ve been focusing a bit more on pull-ups - doing them every day instead of a few times during the week when I felt like it. I was looking to see how other people train them - how many reps per set, how many sets per session, how much rest and so on - when I came across a number of pages describing the one armed pull-up and how to develop it. Although I have reasonably good upper-body strength and can do a not-pathetic number of pull-ups (12-13), there is no way I have anywhere near the strength to perform the exercise with just one arm. Beast Skills has a pretty comprehensive guide on how to train it, including pictures and links to other informative articles. What I find very interesting is that all the training guides stress stopping before failure. Failure of course is when your muscles simply have no power left and you are shaking from exertion. For various reasons, it seems that it is better to stop at 2/3 of failure or 3/4 of failure. Otherwise, you risk over-training and/or injury. In fact, over-training can make you weaker. A related technique is “Greasing the Groove” which involves doing multiple sets throughout the day, of low enough reps such that you never reach failure. Un-beknownst to myself, I’ve been using such a method to train pushups for the past few months. I have found it much more effective (and easier!) to train like this, than simply doing as many pushups as possible before you collapse.

Finally, all the guides to training for a one armed pull-up that I have read stress the importance of patience in order to achieve the goal. Time scales mentioned are six months to three years of training before you could do a one armed pull-up! I think this is a great reminder that exercise routines work over the long term, not the short term and that you must be patient and consistent in order to reap the benefits. Personally, I don’t plan to dedicate myself to the one armed pull-up just yet, but some of the other skills seem interesting. In particular, I’ve always wanted to be able to do a hand stand pushup, but have never felt very comfortable doing even a hand stand! Apparently it is better to be able to do a head stand first, then try for the hand stand, then try for the hand stand pushup. I’ll give this a shot. I also tried the elbow lever - as expected, I could not do it on my first try. However, I can see how with patience and practice, it would be achievable. I’ve also been trying some of the Planche progressions, starting with the frog stand, which is fun. Definitely enjoyable things to add to your exercise routine, and plenty to challenge yourself with!

Weightloss is an emotionally charged subject for dare I say the majority of people in the West. Asking someone’s weight is widely considered rude, suggesting someone could do with losing a few pounds similarly so. Huge amounts of money are spent on dangerous fad diets, pills and the Devil knows what else. Why is losing weight such a big deal, and why would we want to do it anyway? I can think of three good reasons to want to lose weight. Most obviously, health. Much greater risks of heart disease, diabetes, and many other illnesses follow from being overweight. Secondly, to look good. Nobody likes to be perceived as overweight - in our society being overweight carries all sorts of negative connotations, such as being lazy, lacking willpower, having low self-esteem, and so on. Finally, many sports are weight-sensitive. Personally, given my height and build, to box competitively I need to be in the 154lbs range. Weight loss is a big deal for fighters and there are many dangerous and unhealthy things professionals do to make weight.

In my experience, losing weight is a very simple thing (note simple things are not always easy!). People often get frustrated, and develop negative attitudes like “oh I’m overweight and thats just how it is”. These are excuses. Simply put, if you reduce input (eat less) and increase output (exercise more) you are going to lose weight. To burn off one pound, you need an approximate 1,000 calorie deficit. The recommended safe maximum for weight loss is 2lbs per week. How much weight you want to lose and how quickly are questions which will affect your weightloss strategy. Typically, people wish not only to lose weight but also to build muscle tone and mass, and achieve a “ripped” look. This is a good goal because it means you are necessarily including exercise in your regime. A “ripped” look is simply the result of having some muscle tone and a low body fat ratio. Very skinny people do not look ripped despite having a low body fat ratio, because they lack muscle tone and mass. Heavier people may be very strong and have large muscles, but do not look ripped because they have a high body fat ratio. Most people will want to lose some weight while building some muscle. An important point to make is that aerobic exercise burns more calories than anaerobic, but will burn muscle. This is why runners, while very fit indeed and with a very low body fat ratio, rarely look ripped. Anaerobic exercise does burn calories, but not as effectively as aerobic exercise. Furthermore one does not derive the same cardiovascular benefits from anaerobic exercise as from aerobic exercise. This is why weight lifters can develop huge muscles but still look overweight. Worth mentioning at this juncture is a common myth that weightloss is area specific. For example, the belief that abdominal exercises will reduce the fat around the belly first. In fact this is not true. Fat is lost all over the body - targeting a specific area is useful only in that it develops the muscle in that area. Some combination of aerobic exercise with anaerobic exercise is the best course in my opinion. If you like running, try doing forty pushups every day and build it up gradually. If you just like doing weights and hate running, try cycling, swimming, or even just walking. In fact, walking is very often overlooked as a way to lose weight. If you have the time, a long walk is actually more effective at burning calories than a short, vigorous run.

Getting back to the subject of weightloss, I think a two pronged approach of improved diet combined with much more exercise is the surest way. I have heard numerous complaints from friends who train very hard in the gym, yet don’t seem to lose weight. The problem they are having is that yes they are training hard, but they are still eating junk. Training hard will increase your fitness and strength, and you’ll lose some weight. But unless you improve your nutrition, you may find you’re not actually losing any more weight. This happened to me personally. Changing diet and training hard is the key in my opinion. Most people are very ignorant of the basics of nutrition. They hardly consider that a can of soda is 150 calories, or that a side of French fries can be up to 350. I find that simple rules to moderate eating work most effectively. In-depth calorie counting can be daunting. Rules such as, no fried food during the week. No potato chips. Avoid bread as much as possible. Get a salad with your burger instead of a side of fries. These things make a huge difference. Moderate alcohol consumption as much as possible, and replace beer with vodka. Avoid sweets and pastries. Treat soda as a dessert, not as a thirst quencher. My best suggestion is to adhere to a few simple rules like this, train hard and watch the pounds fall off.

If you have the interest, a very worthwhile site is www.nutritiondata.com. Get a feel for whats really in the food you are eating. One thing I found when working on my own diet was that I simply wouldn’t feel full if I stopped eating certain foods. This website has a very interesting metric, “fullness factor”, which allows you to compare how full a given food will make you feel vs another. Read more about it here. Generally the healthiest, most broadly beneficial foods, are also those which make you feel the most satiated. Broccoli, spinach, zucchini etc all have very high fullness factors. Highly processed foods such as pizza, white bread and french fries have very low fullness factors. Using this metric can be very helpful in creating healthy and satisfying meals. Finally, another useful site is World’s Healthiest Foods which is full of information and recipes on healthy foods, complete with good references to research papers on exactly what is thought to be beneficial about them. Highly recommended browsing.

Yesterday evening I went to my first Krav Maga class. I’ve been doing boxing for around three years now, and I like it a lot. Boxing is practical, no-nonsense and one of the most demanding sports physically. Unfortunately the location of the gym I attend forces me to drive, which I don’t like because I prefer cycling and parking in downtown SF is a costly and stressful PITA. Also, I would like to learn some more varied things - a bit of grappling, some kicks, other techniques such as disarming opponents and escapes. I thought briefly about some traditional martial art, of which I have some experience from university. However, my experience with traditional martial arts was that they are not taxing enough physically (barely breaking a sweat), that the classes are too big so you lack individual attention, and that the focus is on dance-like movements which are impractical and frustrating. I also dislike the hierarchical belt system which breeds arrogance and a false sense of security. This is all my personal opinion of course, some people love traditional martial arts and that’s great. I believe much depends on the particular club you are a member of. My experience was likely with bad clubs, but nonetheless it stuck.

It turns out that the SF Krav Maga training center is not far off my bicycle route home from work, and from the Wikipedia page the training looked very interesting to me. Emphasis is highly practical. So what is the actual training like? Having only taken a single lesson at a single place, I can’t speak authoritatively. However my impressions are: training similar to boxing in many respects. In fact instructor made numerous references to boxing in terms of stance and movement. Stance keeps the legs a little further apart than a traditional boxing stance, for increased stability in scenarios where someone can push you from the side or from behind. There were some drills similar to those in boxing - try to touch opponents stomach or shoulders while avoiding being touched yourself. An interesting twist was to add multiple attackers. Thinking about attacking opponents from behind and from the sides, and also attacking below-the-belt was encouraged. The attitude was “do what ever it takes”. Striking drills were similar to boxing, although no gloves or hand wraps were used. Strikes can also be open-palm, something I’m not used to at all. Another interesting drill was a standard “hit the pads” drill with the caveat what the striker is backed up against a wall, something I’ve never encountered in boxing - even though boxers frequently end up against the ropes in the ring. The first class ended with the teaching of a simple and highly effective technique for escaping from a choke. I think choking is an attack very frequently used in the real world, and as such knowing how to break out of it could be extremely useful. The technique is very simple, not at all convoluted, and instantly useful. Krav Maga also seems to place a heavy emphasis on fitness and conditioning. At least at this center, they separate conditioning from the classes, although the classes are a reasonably good workout. Apparently the level test process is a grueling four hour affair.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the class and I look forward to learning more. Would certainly recommend Krav Maga to people looking for something practical and physically strenuous.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short entry on some of the software I’d been looking at to reduce my reliance on the mouse. Specifically, I mentioned a window manager, cwm, and a FireFox extension, Conkeror.

Since I wrote that piece, I have refined my setup a little more. I found a Firefox extension called Vimperator which adds Vi-like keybindings. I prefer it to Conkeror mostly because it seems a little less buggy. Both Conkeror and Vimperator have a feature where you press a key and all links on a page get associated numbers (in the case of Conkeror) or letters (in the case of Vimperator). This feature enables you to very quickly visit links on a page. I found that Conkeror’s implementation of this feature would not work with certain focus-manipulating JavaScript used on websites, and also it would sometimes insert the HTML and CSS for these numbered links into HTML you were editing! In fact, because of Conkeror, I ended up with it’s numbered links embedded into an entry on this site - which was very odd and quite annoying. Conkeror also had a tendency to crash in some way which disabled all its keyboard shortcuts on windows, such that the only way to kill a window was via terminal - again, highly annoying. Vimperator is a little buggy still, but doesn’t seem quite so bad. Furthermore, Vimperator makes it easier to open links in a new tab and copy links via the keyboard. Finally, I feel more at home with Vi-like keybindings than with Emacs-like keybindings, and I think they are a little easier on the hands in any case (less chording).

As for cwm, the window manager, I in fact went ahead and made some improvements to it of my own. The cwm code is quite clean and elegant C code, and was a pleasure to hack on. Already, it featured a window-switching dialog which had auto-complete (a.k.a. type ahead find). This feature is very nice and makes switching windows via the keyboard very easy. However, cwm also had an execution dialog which lacked this feature. I felt it would be relatively easy to populate the execution dialog with the executable files in the default path to add such auto-completion. It was a little more involved than I originally anticipated, owing to the fact that the existing cwm API for these auto-completing dialogs was designed for selecting one item from many, not for entering input. With a little hacking, though, I made a working patch. I find this feature very useful, as it allows me to launch common applications like Firefox and Pidgin with a minimal number of keystrokes. The next feature I added was based on something that I saw in the Ion3 window manager - namely, an auto-completing `ssh-to’ dialog. Much like the window-switch dialog or the exec dialog, the `ssh-to’ dialog is populated with entries from your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. OpenSSH has support for hashing these entries - the `ssh-to’ dialog simply skips hashed entries. For me at least, my work involves ssh’ing to a large number of different hosts, many of which have long names. The auto-completing dialog saves me considerable time. After committing these two hacks to the OpenBSD Xenocara tree, cwm was becoming very comfortable for me indeed. Only one major thing was bugging me - window movement. Cwm still required you to use the mouse to move windows around. Unlike a window manager such as Ion3, cwm does not (yet…) support tiling layout, and as such terminals and so on must be moved manually to maximise screen real estate. A simple solution to this is the ability to move windows around with the keyboard. After a productive conversation with OpenBSD developer Todd T. Fries I hacked up a simple patch which moved the active window with a Vi-style M-hjkl keybinding. Todd improved on this initial hack and committed it to the Xenocara tree. With these improvements, I find cwm quite comfortable and have little use for the mouse.

There are still a few niggling things in my setup. Mostly they revolve around X11’s copy/paste buffer management. A thing I do very frequently is to copy a link or text selection from Firefox into an xterm, and vice versa. X11 has effectively two copy buffers - the “PRIMARY selection” and the “CLIPBOARD”. If you select text with the mouse in an xterm, it goes into the “PRIMARY selection”. You can paste the contents into an xterm using the keybinding shift-insert. Additionally, links yanked with Vimperator, or text selected in Firefox with the mouse - this all ends up in the “PRIMARY selection” also. However, typing shift-insert in the “open” dialog (`o’) of Vimperator pastes the contents of the “CLIPBOARD”! Actually, not just the “open” dialog behaves like this, but every text input field in Firefox. Effectively this means I have to use the mouse to paste text into Firefox, which is quite irritating. I hope to find a utility which can keep the “CLIPBOARD” and “PRIMARY selection” synchronised. Personally, I do not find it helpful for these to be separate and it simply causes me annoyance. More information on X copy and paste can be found in this jwz article.

I am typically typing on a keyboard for many hours a day, and have been in this routine for many years. While I have never had soreness bad enough to prevent me from using a computer, unlike some unfortunate people, I definitely get some discomfort in my hands and wrists. This is pretty clearly a form of RSI brought on at least in part by my long hours using computers. It is also likely related to strains I sometimes get from boxing, which can be very hard on your wrists if you are not careful. Improperly throwing hooks on a heavy bag can leave you with a strained wrist for weeks. I will return to boxing-related injuries (which apply to many other sports too) in another post perhaps.

At work, I have a fairly ergonomic setup. Monitor is on a stand at a good level, I have a USB Microsoft Natural keyboard. I believe the keyboard does help my hands to some degree, although I can’t really say it makes a huge difference. My brother claims that he found it made typing more uncomfortable for him, so perhaps it varies from person to person. I find that chording - that is, pressing multiple keys with a single hand, for example left shift + f all with the left hand - would make my fingers feel uncomfortable. Not exactly pain, but a kind of strained feeling. I find the Emacs editor very uncomfortable to use if you have the habit of chording for example. Similarly, GNU Screen and OpenBSD’s KSH Emacs bindings - which I use all the time - are definite source of discomfort. I try now quite hard to avoid chording as much as possible. This seems to reduce considerably the strain on my hands. Additionally, using the Vi cursor movement keys in Mutt and nVi / Vim helps - in contrast to moving my hand over to use the arrow keys.

A second source of discomfort I identified was the mouse. I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to me that shifting my right hand from its position on the keyboard over to the mouse, and also clicking the mouse, was quite stressful. I recall reading at JWZ’s site that he experienced something similar. The two biggest culprits of mouse usage for me were Firefox (obviously enough) and window management. I have gone through using many different window managers over the years. I am not hugely picky. I used fvwm for a while because it did everything I needed it to do, and came with OpenBSD. Then I switched to Ion for no particular reason. I liked Ion quite a bit but the author kept breaking the configuration format with every update. This infuriated me as I hate dicking around with funky configuration files (all Ion config was done through the Lua programming language, which I had no particular desire to learn in order to set a few trivial keyboard bindings). Eventually I switched to KDE from Ion. I figured KDE was unlikely to change their config format with every release and furthermore had a few nice features (task bar and the system tray thingy). Also I thought it would be good to at least try to fill up the 1G of RAM in my laptop. I learned a few key bindings in KDE, enough to switch between apps on the same virtual desktop. However, I am a very heavy user of terminals. I quite liked the tabbed Konsole (even if it is horrendously slow at scrolling text for some reason), yet I never really learned / set up the keyboard bindings properly, which mean I was using the mouse all the damn time.

This morning, since I had nothing really critical to do on my machine, I decided to update my system to the latest snapshot and move over to CWM at the same time. CWM is a little window manager written by people who have over the years been involved with OpenBSD development. Its BSD-licensed and as such was imported into the OpenBSD Xenocara tree. In other words, if you install X on an OpenBSD machine, you now get CWM as a window manager.

The main thing about CWM is that it is quite possible to use it purely via the keyboard. I’m not going to describe all the various ways you can use it, since I’ve only been using it for a few hours. Some really nice features are things like, labeling windows, hiding them with a key combo, then raising them again using a kind of type-ahead-find. I also like how window movement is implemented - you hold the meta key and can move the window by clicking anywhere on it. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of co-ordination to specifically click on the task bar to move a window around.

In any case, I am very happy with CWM so far. I don’t need a lot of frills in my window manager. CWM is very nice to use from the keyboard. It doesn’t require any configuration. One thing is that its not easily possible to change the command line options passed to Xterm when you execute it via C-M-Enter. To get around this and to set my Xterms to use white-on-black and be a login shell, I use the following in ~/.Xdefaults:

xterm*background: black
xterm*foreground: white
xterm*loginShell: true

I’m also now making considerable more use of Firefox’s type-ahead-find feature, and other keyboard shortcuts in that application. Unfortunately Firefox seems to have a number of glitches, at least on OpenBSD-current. Most annoying is that the ctrl+k shortcut, which is supposed to give focus to the search box, doesn’t work unless focus is on the browser component of the tab. This means that if you open a new tab with ctrl+t and then hit ctrl+k, nothing will happen. You have to first click the blank browser component. I’d also love a shortcut similar to tab, but which cycles through only the text input components on a page. This is required apparently because web authors are not setting a ‘tabindex’ property correctly, according to my brother. He suggests I could write a Greasemonkey script to rectify this if I was really bothered. Perhaps I should do that.

Update: After reading a bit on Firefox keybindings, I came across some suggestions that claimed Opera has very good support for keyboard shortcuts. I installed it from the www/opera port and am now running it. So far it does indeed seem very nice. I like the kind of mini-task-list it has for switching between tabs (ctrl+tab). Also it has nice support for cycling through text input fields, and just like Firefox has type-ahead-find. Finally, I was pointed to a Firefox extension called Conkeror which offers Emacs keybindings for Firefox. It also claims to offer Vi keybindings. While I use both Emacs and Vi keybindings in different settings, and I use both as editors, I believe I would prefer Vi keybindings for my web browser. I will have to try this out and see how it goes. The author claims he does not own a mouse which is very encouraging.