Recent content on jmablog
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) I turned to my wife in the car the other day and said, out of nowhere: “You know, I love a bit of sax in a song.” She laughed. But I was deadly serious. Coincedentally, while looking through the Tidy Tuesday archives for some data to play around with…
I spent the weekend picking up the basics of Manim , a Python library used for making maths animations - most famously for the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown . In need of something to make, I decided to try and visualise some common SQL joins, as it’s something I’ve been teaching lately. They’ve come out quite nice, so now you get to enjoy them too! Inner join Sorry, your browser…
I had some time on my hands in the last few weeks while I wait to start a new job, so I went back to the tinieR package to fiddle around! New things - petit_plot I’d long wanted to find a way to export plots directly from R into pre-tinified image files, and although I’d found a way to do it for ggplot2 plots, doing it with base R plots and devices eluded me. Finally I found a…
This post was written in collaboration with John ‘Hedge’ Hall of Access Parkour . You can also find a copy of this post on the Access Parkour blog and on Parkour Earth’s article section . There are minor formatting differences to fit the style of each site, but otherwise they are all identical. As sports coaches, we are endlessly bombarded with different sources of information.…
This post was written and shared as part of Time To Talk Day 2022 , an initiative to encourage conversations around mental health. You can check out more on Time To Talk here and start your own conversations using the tag #TimeToTalk on social media. I’ve been hanging out on the Parkour Earth Discord for a little while now. ^[Which you can also join here:…
Quarto is a fantastic scientific and technical document publishing tool that I just discovered - it’s basically Rmarkdown, but expanded beyond R to become a standalone document processor, whether that be just for markdown or including R, Python, and JavaScript code 1 . While looking through the Quarto docs, I realised that it also solves another problem I had when I was lecturing as part of…
Here’s a fun little project I worked on over the weekend. This script can take a .tsv file of quotes/text and their sources, and output pretty Instagram-ready quote images with a splash of random colouring. For example: I’d seen a few people getting onboard the quote-image train on Instagram as a fairly easy way of generating content for the site. And this intrigued me as generating…
This project was my thesis for my MRes Sport and Exercise Science degree. In the spirit of my undergraduate degree , I decided to also post this online to share my research with the wider parkour community. This was a big project, but essentially aimed to talk to parkour coaches to really get a good description and potential model of the kong vault for future use in research. As “any…
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) It’s been a while since I took part in a Tidy Tuesday, but having not played with any R code for a while I got the urge to create some utterly pointless plots this weekend, so here we are. This week’s dataset is looking at world records in Mario Kart…
There’s been a few videos going around the parkour community recently claiming to perform postural and biomechanical analysis on some of the Storror athletes. I have a number of issues with these videos, but mostly, I think the methods used to conduct this kind of ‘analysis’ are deeply flawed. Rather than write a lengthy blog post, I thought it easier to just my thoughts into a…
I got really, really bored this week, so I decided to go back to the R package, tinieR , that I released last year (if you haven’t seen it before, tinieR shrinks image file sizes using the TinyPNG.com API). My idle tinkering ended up with a few cool little additions to the package, so I figured it was time for a new release: v0.4.1! Why 0.4.1? Because I set it all up to be 0.4.0, but then I…
tldr: I wrote a Pandoc Lua filter to correctly format my Bookdown/Rmarkdown documents no matter the output file. You can see the filter as a Github gist here . Apparently I’m never satisfied enough to stop futzing around with Bookdown . I’ve been twiddling and tweaking settings endlessly to see what kind of documents I can produce and, more importantly, how I can get similar results…
In my last post on Bookdown, I mentioned using writing environments other than RStudio to work on non-code text sections. As I recommended in that post, I’ve been using iA Writer as my main text editor. It’s a great plain editor - I’m using it to write this post now. But, as my last big writing project got bigger, and bigger 1 , I found myself missing a lot of the writing project…
Terry Pratchett is my favourite author. It’s not even close. His wit and wisdom shaped about as much of my worldview as my own parents. He died in 2015, and it was awful. In the global trash fire of 2020, I’ve been re-reading a lot of his books for comfort, and it reminded me of this little endeavour. There is a project, GNU Terry Pratchett , to keep his name alive in the internet,…
I first got to grips with the R coding language to do the statistical analysis for my dissertation , but I still did all my actual writing in more traditional word processing apps. 1 This became a pain any time I needed to copy-paste an update into a table or, even worse, change a plot and re-export to an image and re-import it into my writing environment. Going forward, I resolved to find a…
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) This week’s Tidy Tuesday dataset makes use of the friends package put together by Emil Hvitfeldt . It contains a bunch of datasets put together by analysing the transcripts of the TV show ‘Friends’. One of these datasets includes…
While publishing my dissertation online and putting together the Parkour Clinic site over the summer, I got increasingly familiar with the Hugo static site generator. I’d first set myself up with Hugo when I decided to scrap my previous personal training site, and move the few blog posts I had there over to a personal blog instead. 1 At the time I just picked a Hugo theme, dropped it in,…
Developing my first R package, tinieR was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve done this summer (and I’ve been busy ). So much so that I couldn’t stop tinkering with it; and so now here’s tinieR 0.2.0, with added resize ability and more choice in how it returns the newly tinified file path! Resizing You can now use the resize argument to change the image dimensions along…
TLDR: I wrote an R package. You can find it here: tinieR - An R package to shrink image filesizes with TinyPNG.com I learnt R about a year ago to do the statistical testing for my dissertation . While borne of neccessity, it ended up kickstarting a whole coding journey for me. I’d done some dabbling in the past, but R was the first language that I felt like I really “got” and…
In my last blog post , I explored the data that resulted from my undergraduate dissertation a little bit more. As I say in that post, I know it’s a little frowned-upon from a purely scientific point of view to double-dip on your data, but I can’t resist going back to that well. So I got curious; my dissertation focused on movement choice and landing style as factors affecting ground…
After a few long months of planning and preparation, and some not-inconsiderable beauracratic wranglings, I’m happy to finally launch a new project: the Parkour Clinic ! Ever since graduating as a sports therapist earlier this year, I’ve been looking for something to do that used my hard-won therapy skills, but more importantly was also useful . I’m going to continue studying…
I had a lot of ideas for what I wanted to include in my dissertation . Starting out, writing my proposal, I wanted to look at everything I could think of in relation to vaulting in parkour and the landing forces that result. I wanted to include rate of force development , projectile motion of bodies in the air, motion tracking joint angles… Every biomechanical variable you could think of, I…
If you don’t have the time, energy, or stomach to read all 6000+ words of my full dissertation (and frankly, who can blame you), I’ve put up some short summary slides: ⚡ View summary slides These were written in Remark and so should work in the browser, even on mobile. Just click or swipe through.
Around the beginning of March was a strange time at university. The Covid-19 pandemic was rumbling in the distance, but it wasn’t quite real yet. Posters about washing your hands started cropping up in the uni bathrooms. Emergency plans were being discussed, but they weren’t really believed to be necessary. Everyone expected things to carry on as normal. We all left on Friday 6th of…
Update: Since first writing this post, I’ve actually updated the web app in question to look a little nicer and even work on smaller screens, so the video demo in this post won’t match what you’ll see if you follow the links to try it yourself . The basic code running everything remains the same though. So a while ago, I stumbled onto this post on the TensorFlow blog , talking…
This project was my final year dissertation for my Sport Therapy BSc undergraduate degree, the abstract of which was accepted at the BASES Conference 2021 and presented as a poster where it won the Human Kinetics Student Poster Presentation Award . This abstract was then also published in a special edition of the Journal of Sports Sciences . Read Online 📔 Read online in full 📄…
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) This week’s Tidy Tuesday dataset “contains publicly available information about all astronauts who participated in space missions before 15 January 2020 collected from NASA, Roscosmos, and fun-made websites.” Without a clear immediate question…
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) A little late, but I decided to have a go at Tidy Tuesday with the recent Claremont Run dataset, looking at Chris Claremont’s 16 year run writing for the Uncanny X-men comic. Looking at the characters dataset provided, that describe some of the events that…
This research was done as part of our final year biomechanics module. We explored the hypothesis that squatting on a 20° angle decline ramp will result in a more upright trunk at the bottom of the squat, potentially reducing the risk of lumbar spine injury during squatting when ankle dorsiflexion range is limited. The abstract for this research was selected for poster presentation at the BASES…
( Tidy Tuesday is a project to supply weekly data sets for R users to practice their coding skills on. You can find full details here .) The Tidy Tuesday dataset for this week, compiling meteorite strikes across the world , grabbed my interest so I decided to finally dive in and give it a go. I ended up looking at strikes in the UK, noted by mass. I exported the original code image as a PDF and…
I’ve been enjoying doing some (indoor) climbing recently. It tickles the same problem solving/figuring out a challenge part of my brain that parkour satisfies. I enjoyed this article on the strange brain of Alex Honnold, one of the current greats of climbing: The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber One of the things I found really interesting is the way he seems to have just…
I found this article pretty interesting. The idea of developing your passion, rather than waiting for it to strike you like a lightning strike, rung very true to me. I didn’t take up a sport until I was 22 and never thought I’d pursue a career in it until years later. Now I’m at university studying it at 31. If I’d gone to uni straight from school, I’d probably have…
Exploring working from different or weird positions has been something I’ve been enjoying lately. I do a lot of my mobility these days from a full kneeling sit position, for example. As such, I found this article from Juggernaut Strength to be a great read. I switched to split squats a while back over regular squatting because, frankly, I was sick to death of the issues squatting was giving…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of cardio - I don’t really have the attention span for it. I get super bored with long slow distance. I have to find ways to make it interesting, and the best way I’ve found is to try and make it about learning some new skill. To that end, I’ve been trying to learn to skip lately. Skipping is well known as great cardio -…
There’s a unique type of fear about a new gym. It comes storming up out of your gut and can lay low even the toughest of gym-bros; all stemming from one simple, unknowable fear. What if they do something different, that I don’t know about, and I look like an idiot for not knowing it? Gyms can be weird places. They can build cultures and subcultures within them that intimidate and exclude just as…
Short one today, but I found this video really interesting: I love a bit of Numberphile and if you remotely enjoyed this one you should check out every other video on the channel. Anyway what I found interesting is that you can feel this very principle when weight lifting. It’s harder to jump from 10kg to 15kg in an exercise than it is to jump from 100kg to 105kg. It’s something…
I’m not sure where this habit of clapping just behind your head while jumping two inches off the ground during a burpee came from, but I hate it. cough I’m not saying you’re not still breathing hard by the end, but I suspect it’s just to chase numbers, to be able to do more for the sake of doing more. I like to use burpees as a very explosive full body movement, high speed and high power, and that…
A great read on the common questions of healthy eating, without faff or any mention of Gwyneth Paltrow. The bit I like is right at the start; honestly, most people already know what is and isn’t healthy, but instead we’re all looking for shortcuts and super powers. Unfortunately I can’t remember where it was, but I read about a study that found the most common indicator of…
I’ve been struggling a little lately with cardio. I’ve never particularly enjoyed it, but fortunately the sport I do enjoy - parkour - has cardio kind of ‘baked in’. By doing parkour, you’ll work cardio, without really having it be the focus. You won’t be as good as someone who runs, sprints, cycles, etc, as their actual focused training method, but you will at least be able to go up a flight of…
Mobility is such a big topic, and is kind of in vogue at the moment, so it can be hard to figure out the good from the bad when it comes to exercises and routines to follow. To help, the folks at Hero Academy have put together a massive list of 100+ mobility exercises , organised by body part. All you need to do is click the body area you want to work on, and follow the links to find all the…
Sometimes, you just want to get outside, and fall over.
A day in the gym.
Sometimes, things worry you for no reason.