RUNNING:

Run forward for a pool length, then the full length backwards. Pay attention to form – don’t lean too far forward or back, and be careful to land fully on your heels so as not to overstress your calves.

X-COUNTRY SKI:

Simulate the motion of being [...]]]> FORWARD/BACK CARDIO MOVES

RUNNING:

Run forward for a pool length, then the full length backwards. Pay attention to form – don’t lean too far forward or back, and be careful to land fully on your heels so as not to overstress your calves.

X-COUNTRY SKI:

Simulate the motion of being on skis: reach out with opposing arms and legs simultaneously. Squeeze your gluts as you kick back, again being careful to land on the forward heel. Ski the length of the pool, then ski in reverse. (It’s harder than it sounds!) Extending the range of motion increases the difficulty.

WALL RUNNING:

Face the wall of the pool, placing your hands on the edge for balance and support. Alternate running your feet up the wall like the human fly walking up the side of the Empire State Building. Run vertically as fast as you can for two minutes. Deeper water is optimal.

LATERAL CARDIO MOVES

Lateral movement develops balance and joint stability, moving muscles differently from the typical forward and back motions of running, cycling, or swimming.

GRAPEVINE:

Moving sideways to your right, cross the left leg in front of the right, bring the right leg out, then cross the left leg behind the right. Continue to alternate the left leg in front and behind the right for a lane length. Return moving toward your left, crossing right leg in front, then behind.

LEAPS:

Make like the FTD Florist and leap sideways, reaching out with the right leg, and dragging the left leg through the water to meet it. Return leading with the opposite leg.

POWER MOVES

Their purpose is to increase anaerobic training capacity, muscle response and speed, and they require strength to perform. Proper alignment is crucial, as the movement of the water when jumping can throw you off balance. The water works against the jump to create drag and added resistance you don’t get on land. These are great drills for volleyball or basketball where bursts of speed are key, but they can improve performance in other sports. Abdominals are also engaged with these moves.

FROG TUCKS:

Crouched in waist to chest deep water, start with feet apart and knees bent. Jump straight up, pulling your knees toward your shoulders. Press down with your palms against the water between your knees as your legs come up. Keep your torso stable and upright so you land evenly on your feet and heels.

SLALOM TUCKS:

Start with feet together on your right and jump up, tucking knees into chest, then landing your feet to the left side. As you jump and tuck, continue to alternate landing your feet from side to side like Alberto Tomba going through the slalom gates, or Johnny Moseley over the moguls. Jumping too high may cause you to lose your balance.

BASKETBALL DUNKS:

With your feet together, hop like you’re on a pogo stick. Bring your arms up over your head and jump high, going for the dunk.

ARMS

TRICEP PUSH UP/LOWER:

Stand at the edge of the pool, pressed in fairly close, toes to wall. Place your palms on the edge of the pool, elbows in close to your ribs. Push your body up out of the water, and slowly lower yourself back down. Try not to push off with your legs. The buoyancy of the water will aid you as you push up and lower. Decrease the speed for more challenge. Deeper water is optimal.

ABDOMINALS

WALL CRUNCHES:

Stand in the deeper water facing the wall of the pool, hands on the edge for stability. Start with legs together and pull both feet up onto the wall, soles flat, then landing with feet together on the bottom of the pool. Use your abs; don’t push off with your legs. If the pool is deep enough, avoid touching bottom. Try for 24.

SCULLING:

Grab a kickboard and sit on it. (Yup, sit on it.) Balance yourself like you’re sitting in a chair, knees together and bent, and torso straight and tall. Scull with your hands (wave them back and forth in small motions like treading water) and work yourself in this seated position down the length of the pool and back. Your abs are contracted and tight, keeping you stable. For a more advanced version, try and do this same movement without the kickboard.

Increasingly young, fit athletes are taking to the water, cross-training, kick-boxing, and working with trainers and coaches. As See says, “Water benefits everybody. Less gravity plus more resistance makes a great combination for anyone exercising in the water.”

SAMPLE INTERVAL COMBINATIONS

Run forward and back 2-4 pool lengths

12 Frog Tuck Jumps

Grapevine 2-4 pool lengths

12 basketball dunks

X-Country Ski forward and back 2-4 pool lengths

12 Slalom Tucks

Lateral Leaps 2-4 pool lengths

Triceps Push-Up/Lower

Wall Run 2 minutes

24 Wall Crunches or 2-4 pool lengths sculling with kickboard

Many words with the prefix “in-” mean the opposite of the same word without the prefix.

Examples:

Accurate, inaccurate

Audible, inaudible

Capable, incapable

Direct, indirect

Edible, inedible

Such is NOT the case with inflammable. Inflammable means “easily inflamed,” which is basically the same [...]]]> Flammable vs. Inflammable

Many words with the prefix “in-” mean the opposite of the same word without the prefix.

Examples:

Accurate, inaccurate

Audible, inaudible

Capable, incapable

Direct, indirect

Edible, inedible

Such is NOT the case with inflammable. Inflammable means “easily inflamed,” which is basically the same thing as flammable, not the opposite.

Rather than the usual meaning of “not,” the Latin prefix “in-” is used as an intensifier with the word “flammable.”

(I would explain why, but I took French in high school instead of Latin, much to Mr. Borelli’s dismay. Why would I want to learn a language that nobody speaks?)

According to Jack Lynch, author of The English Language: A User’s Guide, the word inflammable long predates flammable (1605 vs. 1813).

The word flammability appeared in the seventeenth century, but it then disappeared until the twentieth century.

In the twentieth century, flammable was increasingly used to mean “able to be set on fire,” while inflammable has been losing ground.

Now, the problem occurs when people think the “in-” prefix means “not” flammable, as in the examples above.

Usually in such situations, they don’t have time to look up the meaning of the word in the dictionary to discover that it really means “flammable.”

As Jack Lynch puts it: “Someone trying to put out a fire who sees a bucket of something labeled INFLAMMABLE has good reason to hope for perfect clarity.”

Therefore, if there’s any chance at all that somebody could misunderstand your written instructions and go up in flames as a result, use “flammable” or “nonflammable” to be perfectly clear.

And if you’re the one trying to put out a fire, whatever you do, don’t use the liquid labeled “inflammable”!

As you certainly know, the right mouse button brings up what is known as the “context menu.” As the name implies, the choices available on the menu differ according to the current situation.

Well, here are 5 tips involving context menus that you may not know.

One thing you [...]]]>

As you certainly know, the right mouse button brings up what is known as the “context menu.” As the name implies, the choices available on the menu differ according to the current situation. Well, here are 5 tips involving context menus that you may not know.

One thing you may not have noticed is that one item in every context menu is usually presented in bold. This is the default action that is taken when the left mouse button is use,

Tip #1: If you are ever in doubt about what will happen when you double-click on something (with the left mouse button), then use the right mouse button to bring up the context menu, and look for the item in bold.

Right-click also works with click and drag operations. Try this the next time you do a click and drag: Instead of clicking with the left mouse button, and then dragging the object, use the right mouse button. When you’ve finished dragging (i.e. when you do the drop), a context menu will appear (a different one, specifically for dragging.) This shows you all of the actions that are available for the combination of the object that you are dragging and the location you have dragged it to. Once again, the default action will be shown in bold. This is the action that normally occurs when you use the left mouse button to do the click-and-drag

Tip #2: If you are ever in doubt about what will happen when you click-and-drag an object (with the left mouse button), then use the right mouse button to perform the dragging, and then look for the action that is in bold.

When might you be in doubt? Well, in the case of dragging files around within the Windows Explorer, two of the possible actions are Move and Copy. These two take turns being the default action, depending on the drop zone. If you are dragging a file to a different location on the same to disk drive, then Move is the default action, but if you drag it to a different to disk drive altogether, then Copy is the default action

Another option available when using drag-and-drop in Windows Explorer is to create a shortcut to the object, rather than copying or moving the object itself.

Tip #3: Use right-click-and-drag to quickly create a shortcut to an object on your desktop. This will leave the actual object in its original (proper) location, yet give you convenient access to it from the desktop.

Tip #4: A corollary to Tip #3 — using right-click-and-drag to create shortcuts is particularly handy when dealing with batch files. When you create a shortcut to a batch file it gives you more control over executing the batch file then simply double-clicking on the batch file itself. This is because the shortcut contains adjustable properties specifically for this purpose. So, after creating a shortcut, right-click on the shortcut, select the Properties option, and then adjust them as necessary.

Tip #5: Have you ever accidentally dragged an object to the wrong location? Just as you let go of the mouse button, your hand twitches, and the cursor ends up in the next file folder over. Depending on how much work it was to select the files being dragged (perhaps with lots of Ctrl+Click and Shift+Clicks), this can be a real nightmare. The solution to this is to use the right mouse button to do the dragging. When you let go of the right mouse button, the context menu pops up and one of the choices there is Cancel. The destination gets “locked in” when you let go of the mouse button, so if the wrong location is locked in, then all you have to do is click on Cancel and try the drag again. Otherwise, go ahead and select the action that you wanted to perform in the first place. (Probably the one in bold.)

Today I’ll explain [...]]]> One of the most irritating things about Windows is the context menu clutter that you have to deal with once you install a bunch of applications. It seems like every application is fighting for a piece of your context menu, and it’s not like you even use half of them.

Today I’ll explain where these menu items are hiding in your registry, how to disable them the geeky way, and an easier cleanup method for non-geeks as well.

Either way, your context menu won’t look like this one anymore…

Cleaning the Context Menu by Hacking the Registry

If you want to clean things up the truly geeky way, you can open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to one of the following keys… sadly the context menu items are not stored in a single location.

Most of the menu items that used for all files and folders can be found by looking at one of these keys:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFileSystemObjects\ShellEx

Items that are specific to folders can usually be found in one of these keys instead:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

The context menu items found at these different locations will need to be handled differently, and we’ll explain how, so keep reading!

Dealing with “shell” Items

Let’s take a look at one item as an example… if you browse down to the shell key under Directory you’ll see the items for Add to VLC media player and Play with VLC. Items under the regular “shell” key are usually really easy to spot, and easy to deal with.

If you want to hide one of these items so that you’ll have to Shift+Right-Click, then you can add a new string value on the right-hand side and name it “Extended” like you can see below:

If you’d like to disable it instead, but don’t want to delete the key, you can add a new string value and call it “LegacyDisable”.

And of course, you could just delete the whole key if you really wanted to… but I’d export a copy just in case.

Dealing with “shellex” Items

You probably noticed the other registry keys above that have “shellex” (Shell Extension) in the name instead of just “shell”. Those types of keys will need to be handled differently… for an example, we’ll head down to one of the keys mentioned above:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

These items will be a little more tough to decipher… but you can usually figure out an item by the key name on the left, and then just modify the (Default) value by putting a few dashes in front of it, which will disable the item without actually deleting anything.

In this example, I’ve clicked on 7-ZIP on the left, and by putting dashes in front of the value data I’ve disabled that menu item.

You’ll want to go through each location in the list at the top of this article until you figure out where exactly the offending items are located. At that point, you can use one of the tricks we mentioned in order to disable that item.

Dealing With Specific File Type Items

Sometimes, although not often, the menu items are located on the registry key for a specific file type. In that case you’ll need to first locate the file extension key by looking under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for that extension, which will tell you the name of the key that you need to look for.

For instance, if I wanted to remove a menu item for Excel documents (.xls) I would look at this registry key, which gives me the name of the actual key to look under…

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xls

As you can see above, the actual type of the file is “Excel.Sheet.8″, so I’ll then browse down to this registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell

And now I can use the same techniques as above to disable items under “shell”… remember LegacyDisable and Extended? Yep, those work here.

Cleaning Up the Context Menu the Easy Way

Instead of hacking the registry, you can use two different NirSoft utilities to clean up the context menu. Sadly, some of the menu items are implemented as Explorer shell extensions (like the “shellex” keys we explained above), and some are implemented as regular context menu items (like the regular “shell” keys we explained above).

The first tool we will check out is ShellMenuView, which allows us to manage all of those “shell” key items with an easy to use interface.

Just browse down until you find the offending item, then click the Disable button… which will actually create a LegacyDisable key just like we explained in the manual section above.

You’ll see that those items are instantly disabled:

Next, we need to disable those “shellex” or Shell Extensions, using another great Nirsoft utility appropriately called ShellExView. This one works the same exact way as the first utility… just click on the Disable button to remove the items.

After using both of these utilities for just a few minutes, I was able to get my context menu back to the pristine “new install” state. 

Go forth, and clean your context menu clutter! And yes, this works the same in all versions of Windows.

Download ShellExView from nirsoft.net

Download ShellMenuView from nirsoft.net