Here is a fun sequence of three exercises, all with a mountain climbing theme designed to work the thighs, the core muscles, and the arms. A mountain climbing theme is one where you repeat the same body-lifting exercise continuously and endlessly but never get any higher! Kind of like the feeling you get when climbing a mountain and the each peak you were headed for turns out to be only a small rise in a path to a much higher peak.

Since the theme is mountain climbing, start out in a classic yoga 'Mountain Pose'. From a kneeling position with both hands on the floor under the shoulders, let your hips lead in pulling you up into a right-angle posture where you are bent with a 90-degree angle at the hips. Your legs are straight making one line, and your hips, back, head and arms are all aligned making the second line. To make that right angle tilt your pelvis so your sit-bones are pointed to the ceiling. Spend a minute getting the alignment right and paying attention to your breath.

The first mountain climb is the classic 'Mountain Climbers'. This exercise targets the thighs and the core muscles in the pelvis and lower back. From a Mountain Pose, bring one leg forward placing the foot between the arms into a lunge. Lower your chest forward, keeping your back straight, and place your hands on the floor out in front of you, a little more than shoulder-width apart. You should look like you're ready to run a race. Switch the position of each leg repeatedly for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Think of it as running place but with your hands on the ground. Finish with the opposite leg forward than you started with, then let your hips lead in pulling you back into Mountain Pose. Again spend a minute getting the alignment right and paying attention to your breath.

The second mountain climb is a variation on classic Mountain Climbers done with the arms. This exercise targets the upper body pressing muscles - triceps, pectorals and the anterior deltoids. Starting from Mountain Pose rotate forward on the shoulders dropping the hips so you legs come into line with your back. Now the right angle is at the shoulders, with one line formed by the legs, hips, back and head, and the other by the straight arms. In yoga this is often called 'Plank Pose'. Hands are flat on the ground facing forwards. Raise the right hand and drop onto the right elbow. Raise the left hand and drop onto the left elbow. Raise the right elbow and putting your hand down straighten the arm. Raise the left elbow and putting the hand down straighten the arm. Then repeat this sequence also for 30 seconds to a minute. End in plank pose, and then raise the hips to return to Mountain Pose. Spend a minute getting the alignment right and paying attention to your breath.

The last mountain climb is a standing Duck Walk. The Duck Walk develops strength in the upper thigh muscles, develops stretching in the lower back muscles, and coordinates legs and balance in the squat position without the use of the arms. This seemingly harmless exercise gets really hard after a short period of constant fast movement. Starting from Mountain, jump both legs forward landing between the arms in a squat position. Legs a little wider than shoulder width apart. Drop your right leg from the squat onto your right knee. Then drop your left leg from the squat onto your left knee. Then raise your right leg putting the foot back on the ground into a squat, then raise the left leg and put the foot back on the ground into a squat. Then drop the right leg onto the right knee, and the left leg onto the left knee. Continue with this sequence for 30 seconds to a minute. End in the squat position and take a light leap back to Mountain. Drop the knees and pull your hips back into extended child's pose.

The Tabata workout is a modern high-intensity training regimen that produces remarkable results. A Tabata workout is an interval training cycle consisting of 20 seconds of maximum intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest. This cycle is repeated 8 times (for a total of four minutes).

Credit for this simple but powerful training method belongs to its namesake, Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan. Their groundbreaking 1996 study, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise, provided documented evidence concerning the dramatic physiological benefits of high-intensity intermittent training. After just 6 weeks of testing, Dr. Tabata noted a 28% increase in anaerobic capacity in his subjects, along with a 14% increase in V02Max. (Maximum oxygen consumption). These results were witnessed in already physically fit athletes. The conclusion was that just four minutes of Tabata interval training can do more to boost aerobic and anaerobic capacity than an hour of endurance exercise,

Although Dr. Tabata used a mechanically braked cycle ergometer, you can apply this protocol to almost any exercise. For example, a basic Tabata workout can be performed with sit-ups. The more muscles used the better, so use full knees-bent sit-ups. Sit-up non-stop for 20-second intervals, followed by 10 seconds of rest. Repeat for a total of 8 cycles.

Your first reaction might be, "How effective can just 4 minutes of exercise?" The answer is… VERY EFFECTIVE! You will be amazed at how intense four minutes of exercise will feel. These intervals tax both your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems. To be clear, this isn't "eight sets of eight," although the goal of doing eight reps in each of the 20-second clusters is about right. Instead it's "as many reps as I can get in" during the twenty seconds, followed by ten seconds rest.

It helps to be able to see a wall clock with a second hand during your four minutes of fun. Stop at twenty seconds, rest ten seconds, and go again. Watching the clock helps with your focus and also in keeping count of the eight...

Here is a longer Tabata workout example. This workout consists of 4 separate Tabata Intervals, each 4 minutes. The total workout will last 16 minutes. Always begin with a moderate warm-up and cool down session. And if you aren't already in good shape, check with a doctor before trying.

* Jump Rope

* Pushups

* Squats

* Chin-ups or Pull-ups

Note the 10-second rest periods in the Tabata workout are important, both physically and mentally. Not only do they allow partial recovery, they also provide psychological relief. Switching back and forth from work to rest makes the workout go quickly. Plus, it allows you to train at a higher level of intensity, which what intervals are all about.

Another great Tabata exercise is the "squat thruster." The squat thruster is one of the great lifts being made popular by organizations such as CrossFit. Take two dumbbells and hold them at shoulder height. Squat down, pushing your rear-end back, keeping the dumbbells on the shoulders. As you rise up, press the bells to the overhead lockout position. You can either press as you rise or use the momentum to help "kick" the bells overhead. Keep your weight in your heals and go light! A 30 pound dumbbell in each hand is a very difficult thruster workout!

Pretty much any form of cardiovascular exercise that uses a large number of muscles can be tailored to fit Tabata interval workouts, so feel free to be creative. In addition to the exercises mentioned above, use them with sprints, burpees, a jump rope, the heavy bag, treadmill or rowing machine. Lessen the likelihood of injury by choosing a rate of intensity suited to your level of conditioning – be conservative. Incorporate variety into your Tabata workouts. A few sessions per week will offer plenty of intensity.

First, here is a nifty web tool that generates custom grafitti.   Actually it's more of a web application than a mashup.  To get the image here I had to do a screen capture and then crop with photoshop.

 http://www.graffiticreator.net

And more seriously, here is a great real-time display of the blogsphere as tracked by digg labs.  You need to let it run for a while to see it work.  The bogsphere often reports on news events sooner than conventional media.  This is a new application based on data mining of another web-accessed application.   An in-house mashup at digg. 

  http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

This is the second in a series on martial arts striking combinations used as choreography in cardio kickboxing. As said, a key difference between a trained martial artist and a streetfighter is that the martial artist reflexively hits in sequences of three or four moves. The instinctive non-thinking reaction isn't just a one-move event, its a more effective practiced sequence of strikes. One punch or kick is easy to defend against, but three or four thrown in a row can be very difficult to deal with.

This reflexive reaction of hitting in sequences is only learned through lots of repetition and drills, performing sequences over and over until it is an automatic reflex. Cardio kickboxing is an ideal way to do this. In fact many of the patterns in cardio kickboxing are drawn from such drills.

These combinations can be repeated individually or in sequences either on the floor or with a heavy bag. Devote equal time to right and left leg forward positions. Most are oriented around smooth rotation around the spine, swinging the body so that each punch or kick winds up for the next. After you get the progressions down, start inter-mixing the combinations together in different patterns to present something different every class.

The class starts with a standing warm-up to the music, then progresses to classic shadowboxing sequences. I like music that starts in the 135 bpm range and rapidly climbs to 140-160 - moving  to a fast beat creates energy and makes you sweat. After a half-hour or so we break and go to bagwork. Sometimes before the bagwork we do a follow-the-leader walk mixing up a variety of dog-walk, lunge-kick, frogger, etc.

Bagwork is punching and kicking combinations, often building on what was introduced the shadowboxing phase earlier. After bagwork we pair up and do a brief session of focus-mitt training, using our gloves as the focus-mits. The class ends with strengthening exercises and a yoga-flow stretching sequence.

The whole thing runs about 75 minutes, but the time passes quickly since the variety keeps things moving.  There are some pictures from a class in my 'pics' section.

I learned a new word this year - "mashup". A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience (wikipedia definition). Mashups can be created using data culled from RSS feeds, public databases, or any open data source. Here are some cool examples of mashups:

http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/  select a color from the color wheel and the Colr Pickr loads a selection of twelve photos from Flickr that best match your selected color. There's a slider to adjust the black levels in the color wheels. Also, at the bottom of the page, you can load specific sets of photos that match particular themes.

http://www.zillow.com - a mashup using google maps and public records on home sale data

http://www.shadydentist.com/captioner - a mashup that lets you put speech bubbles on pictures. The resulting photos aren't stored on any servers, and your speech balloons don't show up on the original photo. Instead, the balloons are non-destructively held in place using strings contained in the URL.

Writing this after returning from the race. Nursing a fat lip and feeling beat up. I have a Catalina 27 which by Santa Cruz standards is a slow comfortable sailboat which we sail for fun in the informal Wednesday night sailing race. It was pretty windy and well into the race after a long downwind run we rounded a mark to head back to the harbor. A friend, Jay, was forward taking down the whisker pole. Suddenly the forestay, with the roller furling and the jib started flailing wildly. The clevis pin attaching it to the bow had failed and the forestay was no longer attached at the bottom.  The bottom part of the roller furling on the forestay is a 25lb hunk of metal and plastic, the sail under load generates a LOT of force, the wind was tossing it around vigorously, and sum of this was dangerous to be around and seriously shaking the boat. I went forward and tied a line to it, in the process of which I was whacked into the deck splitting my lower lip. The foil by this point had kinked and we couldn't get the sail down. Nor could we lower the roller furling. So we tied it in a column. Then we fastened the spinnaker halyard to the bow to replace the missing forestay (so the mast didn't fall down) and motored home, with the wind in the parts of the sail still exposed making the boat shudder as we went.

When we got back to the dock I had to go up the mast and unfasten the top of the forestay to finally get the sail down.

I like to sail, but you have to be prepared to deal with things like this. It is a real pain when stuff fails out on the ocean.