Roborant: entry

You know, I once spent 6 hours on Google trying to find out what that song was. I didn’t find it.

I’d heard the song on The Hawk and could only remember the chorus line “I love you!”. So that was what I googled. Or rather, the term “I love you” and the word lyrics.

From the original search returns, I removed all the obvious red flags, adding -Rihanna, -Mariah, -Timberlake, etc.

6 hours spent looking through the rest.

No dice.

In the end I finally heard it on the Hawk again and went to their site to look it up.

Anyway, onto the meat of this post!

As I mentioned in the comments of the below post, this is going to be a quick one on a topic I thought about posting a few days ago.

I’ve been remiss in my duty as administrator. It’s just total dick behaviour any way that I look at it.

I’m sorry that I haven’t responded to any comments in, like, two months.

Sorry about that.

Specifically, I stifled multiple oportunites for rich debate in the comments of my last post concerning pro-gamers v athletes. So this post is basically just a quick response to those comments and an open invitation to continue the debate in the comments of this post (I have a real post in the works, I swear. Actually, another small one, and then a largeish ’state of the Liam’ type post).

So, let’s get the ball rolling! The first response to my post was from Granite. You might want to read it.

Is DDR even dancing? I wouldn’t say so. But, let’s say that it is. Please refer back to the beginning of the post. Read the Table Tennis article. Then watch some video of a DDR match. Why are the tennis players olympic athletes while the DDR kids are sweaty nerds beneath contempt (ah, lovely hyperbole)?

I think that a major problem here is that there are no perfect analogies between these games. There are lots of examples, but they all diverge at some point. After all, the easiest answer to my own question at the end of the paragraph is that the TT players need to react to their opponents’ moves. DDR players (while certainly working just as hard as the TT players in a head-to-head competition) are simply reacting to the game, not each other.

Starcraft forces you to react to your opponent. But the physical aspect is lacking. This is why I included my second olympic example, the air riflers (watch that video!). Now we have a case of athletes who don’t need to react to oponents (except in the sense of “I need to score better”, just like DDR players). But these guys don’t need to move either. In fact, they don’t want to move (Like WOW players. Zing!). Forgive me if I’m parroting my own post here. So, in terms of physical activity, these guys are on par with SC. Their sport is totally dependant on a mechanical interface, totally analagous to SC’s dependance on mouse and keyboard. I mean, they aren’t even holding the guns up! And they all have small LCD monitors (see seconds 6-10 of the video)! Their purpose is almost certainly to assist the olypians in aiming or calibrating the weapons, or some other function.

The point here is that I don’t need to say that Starcraft is on the same level as college football. We all know that that is not true (and insulting to people on both sides). But if I can win Olympic gold for standing still, firing a wepon mounted on a table, and aided by an LCD monitor, why can’t I win one for playing Starcraft?

I hope you won’t consider it a cop-out Granite, but that’s the extent of my response. It only addresses the first paragraph of your response, but already in responding to that, I’ve reiterated half of my original post. If you aren’t going to address the points that I specifically bring up, that we’re just going to keep trading post-sized comments with each other. If that makes sense…

Following that, we had some hilarious commentary about condensing my posts into Twoots (or Twats, or whatever you’re calling them). No comment here. I’ve come around a bit on Twitter, and I might summarize those thoughts in a small post later.

Then we got another good comment from Danger. A very good comment. It takes a specific point from my post, calls it out, and totally cuts it up. Like a cold blooded OG killer.

It hurt to read it. But I’m man enough to admit that, for the most part,  he has completely nailed me on my ignorance.

I’ve never played organized hockey. I can’t even skate. I did a bit of roader when I was a kid, but I was never very good. So, my point that NHL players stay on the ice no more than 3 minutes was founded on…..

Something I heard Basso say in exercise science back at highschool. It’s possible that I’m not even remembering it properly. So, I’ll retract that. Everything Danger said there is the truth, and I believe him.

Except for that part at the end.

First off, I’ll admit up front that I don’t know what “sprint jogs” are. That’s likely due to my not being an athlete of any stripe.

However, that is of little consequence, as what we are actually talking about is the 45on/45off pattern that Danger establishes as a norm for top line NHL players.

I would say that that pattern is more like an anaerobic workout than an aerobic cardio one. Do 10 or 15 reps. Take a minute to recover. Repeat. When a hockey player takes his 45 seconds on the bench, he is in total recovery mode, getting ready for another maximal effort. This is all the territory of anaerobic exercise, and by reducing the time to 45 seconds, Danger has actually helped me out.

Cardio, by definition is exercise that stresses the heart over long periods of time, forcing it to adapt. By removing the time factor, you allow anaerobic systems (ATP-PC and anaerobic glycolysis) to pick up the slack. Those systems allow more energy to be produced up front, but last 10-30 seconds and 30 seconds to 3 minutes respectively. It’s obviously not possible to recover completely in those 45 seconds off, but the stress to the heart is not nearly as high as it would be.

Another way to look at it is this: Take a top line NHL player. Get him naked [NSFW or 'phobes].

Now take a champion long-distance cardio athlete. Same process. Notice anything?

The hockey player is carrying way more mass. His body is developed in a totally different way from the runner’s. One of them is optomized for muscles that deliver a mid-level ammount of energy for crazy-long periods of time. Another is optomized to deliver maximum force over a short time. One of those is the cardio athlete.

That is not to say that hockey players have no cardio training. Having a well-trained heart is an asset in any situation imagineable, and cardio training is likely a huge component of training outside of actual games. But the 45on/ 45off pattern is not really a cardio exercise pattern.

From there, we get some comments from my ‘friends’ telling me that they they ‘miss me’ and think I’m a dick for ‘never talking to them’ or something.

Whatever.