Kinomap and non-connected fitness devices

As the basement home gym is in its neverending buildout, we move to the cardio equipment.  We have a low end airbike and low end magnetic rower, a bike trainer for my bike (which is no longer road worthy since the screws on the handlebars are stripped), and recently we got a low end treadmill.  And by low end, what I really mean is at the low end of what people who actually care about this would accept (not the cheapest stuff, which tends not to survive a year of heavy use).  But one way of upgrading the equipment is to use virtual fitness apps, and Kinomap in particular has been designed to make it possible even with low end stuff like we have, and it makes long workouts a lot more interesting.

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Long duration endurance indoors is unspeakably boring, which is the source of the joke that most exercise equipment is used as clothes hangers.  In recent years, one way to combat this are virtual fitness apps.  So, unlike mere exercise videos, virtual fitness apps are characterized by having their play be dependent on how hard you are working on the equipment, typically by measuring your power output and adjusting your in-app speed accordingly.  Zwift is a graphics game version of this, you run or bike inside a computer game and your avatar goes through the course along avatars of everyone else on the platform.  Peloton and Hydrow are a different breed within this category, they try to replace a studio class with videos and measures your performance and progress.  Kinomap, which I use, has real world videos, but plays them at a speed that is based on your power.

One thing virtual fitness requires is equipment that measures power, which is used by the game to track performance and set the speed of play. But this tends to be mid to high end equipment (the sensors and the data displays that goes with them is a big part of the cost for the $1000+ equipment).  Those who have lower end equipment without the sensors (identifiable by cheap data displays that have no accuracy to speak of) cannot take part in that.  Enter Kinomap with use of the camera sensor.

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Kinomap, like all such apps, is based on connecting smart exercise equipment to the app via Bluetooth. It connects to a very wide range of exercise equipment by a wide range of companies.  The very opposite of vendor lock-in.  And in addition to supporting a wide range of equipment, it includes a feature that uses the app device (smartphone or tablet) camera as a sensor to estimate power so the app will still work.  This works through computer vision.  For running, it sees your head jump up and down to estimate cadence (step counters effectively do the same thing, except using accelerometers).  For rowers, the camera can measure distance and watches you go back and forth to measure stroke rate (I'm a little hazy on how cycling works, it seems to track your pedaling cadence but I cannot tell what it does next)

Why is this important?  

1. It is fun.  Rowing to blue sky and blue oceans listening to the boat cutting through water and birds in the distance is a lot more fun than staring at walls. Even with music.

2. It is motivating.  The virtual apps let you row/run/cycle along with others and you can use them as rabbits or chasers.

3. Collecting performance data is the key to improvement. The big difference between athletic training and exercise is in training you record your performance and use performance over time to show progress.  And Kinomap allows that even when using equipment that does not.

So, my contribution to the internet.  As the people who make virtual fitness app reviews and demos are generally serious enough to have the connected, smart fitness equipment that virtual fitness apps use to work, there are not much in the way of demos on using non-connected equipment with these apps. So here is my demonstration of the use of Kinomap with a very low end magnetic rower (good enough that reviewers say it is not bad, but not good enough to collect data) with the Kinomap camera sensor.  

Book Review: The Last Dance by Martin Shoemaker

The Last Dance by Martin L. Shoemaker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a collection of short stories about one Captain Aames, whose has had a role in the initial stages of the exploration and colonization of Mars. And is now Captain of the main transport to Mars, the Aldrin. And the framing device is that of an Inspector General Park as she has conversations with crew and past crew of Aames. And we find that Aames is not nice, to put it mildly. But he is highly competent, and those who stay with him say that this level of competence is what has saved their lives, and in the lessons they learned saved the lives of those they were with.

So, each of the stories is told as a conversation between IG Park and the crew member about a historical episode that is meant to provide Park with some background intended to sway Park to their preferred outcome, and Park is very aware that she is dealing with unreliable narrators who are in some way self-serving. And this dynamic makes the characters believable. Everyone, including Captain Aames, who does not actually appear until late, is flawed (and Captain Aames explicitly states that he knows it, which makes him even more larger than life in the eyes of his crew). All of the sympathetic characters (Aames, his crew, and IG Park) grow over the course of each story.

Yes, the overall story is competence porn, and I'm a sucker for those. And the better versions of that are those where things go wrong, even if the hero is part of how it happened, because things go wrong in life. But the hero does not give up. And it is not one heroic act that makes it work, it is the development of a plan that can work, and everyone doing their part to make it work, because that is how real life works too. And here, the hero is not the hero because of what he does, it is because he gets everyone around him to rise to the occasion and take their role in making everything work.

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The value of competition for youth

This past weekend DS10 competed at the American Taekwondo Association (ATA) Northeastern District Championships in 9-10 Blackbelt forms and traditional weapons.  Qualification was somewhat of a surprise to us.  The ATA uses a NASCAR style points system for qualifying.  You get points for placing in the many competitions hosted around the country during the year.  Then at the end of the year, state champions are determined for each of the categories based on accumulated points, and the qualifiers for districts are determined.  Because of COVID-19, last year's competitions were cancelled, and this year's qualifiers were based on last year's competitions.  While we knew that DS10 had points from last year, we were surprised to find out that he had enough to qualify (we found out when the ATA sent notices to the schools that their students qualified for District Championships).  We suspect that many of those who would have otherwise qualified had dropped out of the ATA and TKD during COVID (while DS10 had continued training through his school that supported virtual classes).  But, since both of us (parents) are in fields where careers are marked by perseverance through the events of life, the COVID-19 pandemic is merely one of those life events, but experienced by everyone, and everyone made decisions that allowed them to progress or not in their chosen areas.

After learning that he qualified for Districts, DS10 now joined the ranks of those who travel for tournaments.  We have typically only gone to tournaments that were local (i.e. no hotel stay required), but we always noticed the number of competitors that traveled to tournaments from other states (in most cases, because the points to be gained were valid in their pursuit of their state and district qualifiers at the end, but there were some traveling competitors at the novice sections as well).  When he was younger, our philosophy of tournaments was that DS10 needed to be exposed to the quality of those outside his immediate circle (school).  Again, both parents have the philosophy that the only way of assessing the quality of a person in an area is to see how they fare when directly compared to a larger population.  Because until you are compared outside your home, you can never know how good you really are.  And then knowing what is possible gives one intrinsic motivation to become better.  And not just in the area of competition, but in all areas of life (i.e. become a better human being).

In preparing for the tournament, TKD had gone from a sideline during the pandemic to an area of focus (it helped that he just had piano competitions that meant these areas were ramping down). This meant regular sessions with dad in the basement and weekly private lessons at the ATA school to ramp up his TKD over two months.

For the competition itself, we did not have high expectations.  The majority of the competitors in the ring had state and district champion patches (meaning they were state or district champions in past years).  So the goal was to do well  (i.e. not get last :-) )  And his scores were in line with reasonably good, but not exceptional.

More useful was the post-competition talk. DS10 reports that during competition his world got very small, and he noticed nothing but himself and the judge.  So we explained that this was the feeling that he wants to have, that sense of being able to concentrate and focus so that nothing else matters and he enters the zone.  This for us is the value of the competition, not winning or loosing, but understanding what it means to prepare to do your best in the moment, and how that moment feels when you are doing your best (and contrast to when you did not do your best). Because that is a feeling that can be repeated in all parts of your life.  Next, exposure to the reality that the world is bigger than your day to day life, and the people around you are not competition, but fellow travelers on that path (even if we are regularly reminded that people around us do not agree with this belief).

Theatre during COVID-19: The Catastrophist by Lauren Gunderson and the Marin Theatre

 

Live artistic performances is something that has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.  We have somewhat filled in that gap in our lives by watching performances by the Pittsburgh Ballet, the Front Row series by the Pittsburgh Symphony, and embracing the online performances by various artists (and paying for them). Because, just like we do with restaurants and other businesses, life just makes much more sense when we take advantage of the experiences that are available instead of dwelling on the experiences that are not.  (and not being in the privileged upper 1%, the peak level experiences like being close enough to see the eyes of the performers that are the hardest to replicate with social distancing were not available to us anyway so these virtual performance give a pretty good experience)

The Catastrophist is a one man play by Lauren Gunderson, commissioned and written during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while many writers try to research their works by immersing themselves, Ms Gunderson was not able to claim COVID-19 restrictions as an impediment. She is married to the virologist who is the basis for the play (Ms Gunderson is known for writing plays centered on scientists, but she usually does not have this close access to them).

Dr. Nathen Wolfe is known as a virologist who achieved some notoriety during the 2014 Ebola outbreak which was more widespread than the normal and threatened to spread into the U.S.  He is one of the virologists that persuaded then U.S. administration to take this seriously and prepare for its arrival.  (I remember being taught procedures we would take in my role as a Red Cross volunteer if it was necessary to support Ebola quarantine by delivering food.)

There are two threads in the play.  

First is Dr. Wolfe's development as a scientist.  There is an discussion woven throughout with his development as a scientist (Jewish grandma: "Why would you go to Harvard Medical School if you were not going to be a medical doctor?")  and a developing conversation on philosophy of science.  But the meat is doing virology, especially in his specialty of zoonotic viruses, viruses that jump from animals to people.  He talks about doing field work in Camaroon (which was partially under Dr. Donald Burke, of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health) going into the countryside and working with people living there and both teaching best practices and doing research with both the people as well as the animals they hunted.   And how this field research led to the discovery in the lab of proof that viruses jumped from animals to people.  (and for those who are linking this to COVID-19, this is the same work that the Wuhan virology lab does in the forests of Asia, they can discover a virus in the lab from sample they take, but any virus they discover is already existing in the forests and caves of Asia).  Then, after going from field work to lab work, how this naturally grows to the insights that showed that the 2014 Ebola outbreak was different and more of a threat to the world than earlier Ebola outbreaks, and led to the warnings that the rest of the world prepared for it and was ready for it when it arrived outside of Africa.  (there is a sidenote here about the accusations that occur whenever anyone actually tries to do anything in the real world saying that the response was botched because of it was not perfect.  But after 2020, we know know what a botched response looks like, i.e. what would have happened if his team was not involved)

Another major thread was about risk and mortality.  In part the conversation about risk was about philosophy of science, but then it becomes personal. There is an abstract conversation about risk, like he promised his wife that he would not do anything that exceeded a certain value on a risk measure. But then it gets more personal. Like the reality that every male in his family dies in their 40s from a heart condition.  So it covers his relationship with his father, and then with his sons. (and that his sons never met their grandfather, who died just before the first was born).

Watching this with family (and after watching Dr. Wolfe's TED talk), we have to remember that theatre requires its actors to exaggerate emotion because voices and body are all they have to communicate, especially in one-man shows where there they cannot use the reactions of the other characters (my wife, who does not like musical theatre, finds this comment amusing). So the play is a caricature of Dr. Wolfe. But is it a very good picture on what it is to be in science, the joys of discovery, and the thrills and hazards of actually doing work that has impact, especially in the politicized world of real life where there are plenty of people who want to blame those who save them.  Highly recommended as a way of understanding how viruses and pandemics work (and the subfield of zoonotic diseases, think how hunters interact with the animals they hunt)

The Catastrophist is streaming on demand at the Marin Theatre through the end of February. Note that there is a one day delay from when you order tickets to when you get the link, so plan accordingly.  For those with young children, note that theatre requires actors exaggerate their emotions, so there is cursing in anger sprinkled throughout the play.

The home gym in January 2021: An ode to StreetParking

The Basement Gym Equipment

Here is the current state of the basement gym.  When we bought this house, we decided to make the basement a gym (the previous owner basically used it as a messy closet), so we had ordered mats that would arrive just after we moved (and before the movers moved our stuff). So the main part of the basement was immediately covered in 3/4" mats suitable for exercise.

The floor is the main feature. The open floor is meant for TKD, so it is always (ha!) clear to do forms. And we move equipment there as needed. The floor is used for our workouts (usually CrossFit or HIIT style workouts), my daughter uses it to dance to music and music videos.  In the corner is the screen with an Amazon Fire stick.  Two bluetooth speakers on the walls provide surround sound music for the workout. The shelves in the corner hold any electronics (remotes, timers, HRM chest strap), accessories, and mobility equipment (foam roller, lacross balls, yoga blocks).  Also along the wall are a pylo box (home made) and steppers (garage sale)

A new addition is along the wall with the mirrors and whiteboard (which is now hanging). We have hooks that we use for resistance band training.  We have started using resistance bands for swimming dryland training, so the bands are clipped into the hooks, and we can practice our strokes, either on our back, or using the weight bench.  I also use the upper hooks to do ski-erg type motions.

This corner has all of the TKD equipment. In addition to two Century Wavemaster standing bags for striking and kicking, we have kick and hand targets for taekwondo.  Also various ATA TKD weapons.  Also important are the posters. We have posters for kettlebell, medicine ball, bodyweight, stretches, foam roller, anatomy, (and other wall) dumbbell, barbell, suspension band, and cable machine, along with posters illustrating the foundational powerlifting and Olympic lifts. And various card decks with exercises when we need to build a semi-random circuit workout.

Another new addition is the bike trainer. I got a Kinetic Road Machine off of Facebook Marketplace over the summer (someone was selling it for her brother-in-law, so the goal was to clear it out of the hosue)  I added the Inride Power Meter, and now I have a bike trainer that measures power (previously, I used the calories estimated by my HRM to measure power)  Training to power adds a new dimension to training, and a third cardio machine, because power meters measure output, as opposed to the HRM, which effectively measures input (effort), which as any engineer knows, is not what you should be measuring.  I have been using it with the Kinetic.fit app to record power based workouts.  I do this once or twice a week (depending on if I use this for the Streetparking Endurance workout for the week)

Here is the equipment nook.  This area is organized around the power rack and its mats. I have a standard bar (1" diameter weights), with about 250 lbs of weights for use with a barbell, dumbbells, and an adjustable kettlebell that is usually loaded up to 30-40 lbs of weight.  I also have three sand kettlebells (10#, 15#, 20#) that the kids use and I use for warmups.  And there are two sandbags, a 50# and a 65# that I joke are great for when I need to feel particularly badass :-).  I have a suspension trainer on the back upper bar that I will use for warmups.  And a new addition is a cable pully I have on the front upper bar for cable exercises (also using standard plates)

For cardio we have two machines, a magnetic rower and an airdyne.  My son has started using these as well, although he is not quite tall enough.  For longer workouts, he can use the rower, (because I don't like using the Airdyne for workouts > 30 minutes, I usually pull out the bike trainer for these.)

What we do

This was the COVID-19 pandemic year, which meant that schools became virtual, and even after school activities struggled to figure out how to work with the kids.  Some places really did not figure this out, others went all in to remote (video) training, and others basically became video classes (no interaction).  We had an immense advantage that my main fitness programming was Streetpakring (https://streetparking.com/), which is an online CrossFit style programming. So I'm used to this.  My daughter is used to joining me on my workouts (I scale, so she scales too).  And now she discovered the Just Dance series of games, and now dances for hours on end, so she is taken care of.  My son was a little harder. His TKD first stopped completely, and his school did not really get the hang of the virtual teaching, so we have been trying to get a routine.  So now, we have 4 types of workouts over the week.

1. 20 minutes of intervals (0:30/0:30, 0:40/0:20, 1/1, 0:90/0:30) (rower or airdyne)

2. Dryland bodyweight HIIT (usually a 20 minute video aimed at swimmers, but SP Shift is also an option.

3. Resistance band 

4. Long, either ~40 minute run or 40 minutes of intervals (rower)

Streetparking

Streetparking is an online CrossFit style programming (constantly varied across broad modal and time domains) aimed at home gym owners.  It has two mantras:  more than nothing, and consistency is key.  The center piece are the CrossFit style workouts.  5 days a week there are 4 versions, A (dumbbell centered), B (barbell centered) and C (sandbag or other odd object based), and shift (simpler movements for those who have not mastered the movement. They are big on scaling with options for movements to match available equipment and skills that maintain the stimulus. Next, there are accessories workouts, strength focused (power, olympic, and sandbag), skillwork (gymnastics), endurance, and, for those who just can't get away from gym bodybuilding workouts, accessories for that.

They have a very wide range of people doing this, the two largest populations are (1) stay at home moms and (2) active military (and families).  So their mantra is More than nothing, meaning they encourage everyone to do what is intense for them (weight, reps, movements).  (intensity is the another component of CrossFit)   And the generally accepted way of knowing that you got the intensity right, you complete the workout in the goal time and you die (or as DD6 knows, you plop at the end of a workout)

But what makes Streetparking different than other online programs is the amount of interaction between the members.  The focus is on the Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with Streetparking, and members are encouraged to video workouts and post them.  As many people are unwilling to put themselves out in the public (because people on the Internet in general are strange), many people create private accounts or have accounts that are solely for Streetparking, and will only connect to other people who are also in Streetparking (there is a Streetparking account for publicity purposes, and another account that only follows Streetparking members, so we know to look for that to identify each other).  And it very clearly is not meant to be a focused on the strongest, but on those who maintain intensity.  There is the CrossFit vibe of always cheering on those who struggle through (regardless of what that means), and in posts, I think one of the rewards of honesty is reading others reports of workouts, and saying "that is what I was feeling, at the exact same point in the workout".  So social media becomes a lot of "me two" types posts, which builds that sense of shared community, that is missing in places that try to deliver video to people working at home.  And the sheer range of people involved.  I feel that Streetparking has the broadest cross-section of people out of any association I am in, and it encourages using it as a place where people can have conversations about life (with a little bit of moderation to move any antagonistic conversations elsewhere).  For example as COVID-19 made its way to through the U.S. and different states had different experiences, members from the various areas discussed their experiences dealing with life, the shutdowns, and getting (and recovering) from COVID (and occasionally a story that someone did not).  The type of connection that keeps us all sane in a time when we don't get enough face to face interaction, and one way video interaction does not provide.

Fitness in 2020

Yes, this was a strange year for fitness. An infectious disease that spreads through respiratory transmission meant that group fitness centers, like gyms and martial arts studios, had restrictions on operations. And owners and operators of gyms and other group fitness establishments varied considerably in their following general guidelines for operating those types of activities (and the CDC was prohibited from telling Americans what they were, leading to other organizations recreating the standard proceedures the rest of the world had in place.

My primary training program was CrossFit, through Streetparking, which is an online program that was founded by two former CrossFit Games athletes (one of whom was on CrossFit Seminar staff).   So this included metabolic conditioning workouts (combination of strength and stamina), endurance, and power workouts.  Second, was martial arts through the American Taekwondo Association (ATA).  And starting in 2019, I started tracking workouts through Polar (I have a Polar Ignite heart rate monitor), so between my workout logs and my Polar logs, I have a quantified fitness
 

Heart rate zones and training benefit

Calories and heart rate per month

So, these plots show the disruption in April (although part of it was just my loosing my HRM that month), then a steady increase as I got into the swing of things in Summer.  Summer was also when I did the Street Parking Endurance program.  And then got injured.  So Fall was recovery (note a gradual increase in intensity over time) and then December, when I was doing two-a-days during the Christmas and New Year holidays.  We also see that HRM have a bias toward endurance workouts, as it is really hard to get into the Red zone unless you are running or cycling.

Looking at my Streetparking logs, I see the following:

Bassically, I continued to do about 5 workouts a week.  But a lot more endurance (run, row, cycle), in part because of doing the endurance program (many of which did not get counted here).  I increased Buts and Guts.  This is generally bodybuilding type workouts, but focused on core and unilateral lower body, which helps in preventing injury. After I went to physical therapy for IT band syndrome in summer 2019, I did Butts and Guts on a regular basis.  And less use of the sandbag, since I had other things to concentrate on.  (Program A is a kettlebell/dumbbell focused, Program B is a barbell version, Program C is a sandbag version of the same workout)

Other things of note: in 2020 I completed The Vault challenge, which was a weekly test workout (in Crossfit there are normal everyday workouts, then there are tests, which are intended to help measure your progress). So The Vault was 25 weeks of one test workout a week. (and done twice each in 2020)

Goals for the coming year

1. Complete the 2021 version of the Vault.

2. Complete a challenge that involves nutrition.  While there are competition type events in CrossFit, challenges tend to be based on consistency in lifestyle changes, so a challenge is over a month or two and involves nutrition and other lifestyle tracking in addition to workouts.  Consistency in workouts is easy for me. (that is just discipline).  Tracking nutrition is a new anmial.

3.  Do Aerobic Capacity.  Aerobic capacity is a program that focuses on stamina and endurance in CrossFit. While the roots are in endurance sports, this program is done in the context of a CrossFit program, so it recognizes that the endurance and stamina are not ends in themselves, but are as part of a broader fitness goals  (CrossFit Metcons can be anywhere from 2 to 20 minutes in duration)  But the core of Aerobic Capacity is still the endurance sports (running, cycling)\

4.  Do a power meter workout weekly and work through the introductory power meter program.  I got a Kinetic Road Machine off of Facebook Marketplace and added a power meter sensor to it, so I effectively have a metered bike trainer. So the plan here is to do at least one workout a week on the bike trainer and take a one month training program that is based on the power meter)

5. Monitor strain vs tolerance on Polar Flow. This is the measure that correlates to injury risk, and if I had my current heart rate monitor in August, it would have been flagged that I was at a heightened injury risk. (strain is the recent workout load, tolerance is the workout load over the past four weeks, so strain vs tolerance tells if my workout load has been increasing faster than my ability to adapt to it properly)