[Sausage linkyloos pictured above. Photo credit: Gastrocast #91]

Since I haven’t managed to produce a post all week, I decided to instead share a bunch of half-digested thoughts with you. Bon appetit!

All A-Twitter
I joined Twitter this week. I’m not sure I really get it yet, but my friend Tyshawn told me it’s the next big thing. Because I told her it’s the next big thing. (I read that somewhere.) If you’d like, you can join me, a pithy 140 characters at a time, at twitter.com/jensinkler.

Treating Ligament Sprains
I sprained my ankle during a rugby tryout last weekend. It’s not terribly severe, but irritating nonetheless. Did you know that the old standby treatment for sprains, RICE (rest, ice, compression and elevation), isn’t necessarily the best plan of (in)action?Or at least you might want to consider loosening up about the “rest” component — some movement and stretching of the injured joint can help you heal faster and lose less strength in the process. Back in April, Matt Fitzgerald wrote a piece called “Back in the Game” for Experience Life; in it he details the best treatments for sprains, strains and contusions.

(You may notice that at the end of the article, we recommend doing squats on a BOSU Balance Trainer. While this may, at first glance, seem at odds with my previous post on why you should avoid BOSU squats, the difference comes down to healthy athletes versus injured athletes. Those rehabbing sprained ankles do benefit from lower-body unstable surface training, while healthy athletes do not. Both groups benefit from single-leg training on stable surfaces.)

Acupuncture can also help sprains. And I recently discovered community acupuncture, which makes treatment cheapity cheap.

The Matt Fitzgerald Club
In another bit from Matt Fitzgerald, he takes on the myth of lactic acid and muscle fatigue. And explains what really causes muscle fatigue: depolorization of cells, and the buildup of potassium. I won’t do his blog entry justice, so just go read it.

OK, one more from Matt — he addresses the role inflammation plays in heart attacks, diabetes and stroke in this blog entry. He’s been killing it lately!

Fast and Strong

Andrew Heffernan of the Male Pattern Fitness blog did a nice job breaking down a recent study on the Interference Effect — that is, on whether doing cardio interferes with strength-training results. And while speculation remains that long bouts of cardio may very well interfere with strength gains, the type of cardio done by the subjects in this study — full-body, sprint-like drills between lifts — may actually increase strength gains.

What Does a Carbon Offset Buy?
With all the traveling I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been thinking about buying offsets for the carbon dioxide produced by my flights. Frequent Experience Life contributor Laurel Kallenbach answers the question about what exactly you get for your money in this post.

What are Parabens and Why are They Bad?

By now, a lot of us know some of the ingredients we’re supposed to avoid in our foods and products — high-fructose corn syrup, sodium laurel sulfate, BPA and parabens, to name a few — but I like to know why, too. Don’t you? Best Health Magazine explains why you might want to go paraben-free when possible. (In a nutshell, parabens mimic estrogen and possibly cause breast cancer. In men and women.)

Reach Out for Rugby

This video, which I first saw on USA Rugby chair Kevin Roberts’ blog, was created as part of rugby’s campaign to get back into the Olympics. Entitled Reaching Out, it’s a nice illustration of how sport brings people together. Or maybe I’m a just a sucker for that kind of thing.

What is “Normal,” Anyway?
When showering after the aforementioned rugby tryout last weekend, in a room also equipped with a refrigerator and a lawnmower, my friend Pam turned to me and asked, “Do you ever look around and say, ‘What is my life?!’ I mean, should we still be doing this kind of thing?” You see, we’d just discovered I was the only one to bring a towel, and there were three of us rinsing off before hitting the airport.

Another teammate, Alison, chimed in with, “Anymore, when people ask me how my weekend was, I just say, ‘It was fine.’ Because what am I going to say instead? That after our game on Saturday, a bunch of us saw how many feet and various body parts we could fit into a tub of Epsom salts? And that afterwards, we decided to see how many rugby players could pile onto the couch in my hotel room? You know, just because.

I know what she means. During a pretty typical weekend, I could answer that question thusly: “During the trip to [insert city name here], I made my travel companions listen to the same four CDs on repeat. We played a game to pass the time that essentially involved pointing at cows and seeing who could yell ‘Moo!’ first. We took ice baths and taped jammed fingers and talked about the minutia of what we should have done with the ball when we had the chance. We commandeered the nearest Italian restaurant for team dinner and hardly recognized each other in eyeliner and street clothes. When I got home, I dressed my dog up as a bee.”

[photographer and animal stylist: Angie Marfisi]

Add to the mix Ellie laughing so hard in the treatment room that she bent her acupuncture needles, or Chobot kicking up (and over) so hard into a would-be yoga headstand that she nearly took out Blaire, or Dana making up rules for the team that involve talking like a pirate, and you’ve got a clearer picture of my version of “normal.”

But the thing is, I suspect everyone has a weird, secret life — especially if you play a sport or work out with pals. Or have a family. Or pets, for that matter.

So with that in mind … how was your weekend, really?