Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

A pull buoy is designed to keep your legs floating while doing swim drills so that you can work on improving your arm stroke. In this video, I will review the Roka Pro Swim pull buoy.

What can I say? It’s a pull buoy. It is a good size: maybe slightly larger than the typical pull buoy you get at a pool but not so big that it will not fit in your bag. It has good buoyancy and allowed me to get into my stroke on pull drills. It is symmetrical so you cannot adjust the buoyancy based on its orientation but I never actually do that anyway.

Many athletes spend years preparing for a full distance (Ironman) triathlon. But what if you only have 6 weeks? In this video, I’ll give it a go. To be fair, I wasn’t going from a standing start. I spent the first three months of 2020 on my training plan. Then COVID-19 happened, all the races got cancelled, and I spent the next few months running the Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee.

Then, six weeks before the race, Dalesman announced they were going ahead with their full distance race. So, I thought I would give it a go. Is it enough time to get ready? Let’s find out!

Skip to 8:15 for the sexy training montage and 15:57 for some race day footage.

Intake Breathing promises to open the nose of those of us who predominantly breathe through our mouths. Here is my review of it.

Looking for a stand to hold your tablet while turbo training? Probably not. But if you were, you should watch the video below.

This is a 30-minute upper body workout for endurance athletes. It is perfect for triathletes, runners and cyclists. Even though our legs are doing most of the work, having upper body strength is important for maintaining good form and running economy. In this class, we’ll go through some strengthening and flexibility exercises for our arms, shoulders and upper body.

In this video, I will review the Huub safety tow float. It follows on from my video last week about how to inflate the thing.

One of the things that totally flummoxed me was trying to change my Canon DSLR from shooting video at 24 fps to 30 fps. It simply was not on the screen: I only had 24, 25 and 50 as options. And nobody on the internet seemed to have had the same problem.

I suspected it might be a legacy problem of PAL vs NTSC but I could not work out how to change it. In the end, I managed to find the menu option and my suspension was correct: once I changed the setting from PAL to NTSC I was then able to access 30 and 60 fps.

If anyone else is struggling with the same issue, or trying to get 24 fps on a NTSC-configured Canon, here is how to change it:

The third workout in my strength and conditioning series is all about balance. Balance is super important in triathlon. If you think about a race, you spend none of it with both feet on the ground. You’re in the swim, pushing down with each leg in turn on the bike, or running, which by definition means having one foot off the ground at all times.

As such, having good balance means you can maintain good technique and therefore avoid injury, and also significantly contributes you your economy: the less energy you can waste swaying side-to-side, the more energy you will have to drive yourself forward.

A few weeks ago I reviewed the Garmin HRM-Dual and said that it was okay. Since then, I’ve been seeing dropouts in the Bluetooth connection that don’t seem to occur on my other devices, including my Polar H10. Here’s an updated review:

Mountain Fuel is a British endurance nutrition brand making products for runners, cyclists, triathletes and endurance racers at large. In this video, I’ll review their jellies (an alternative to energy gels), Extreme Energy drink, Ultimate Recovery drink and flapjacks to see how they stack up against Science In Sport, Torq, High5 and other brands.