In a partnership between Carved.com and footbagshop.com, we present in slow motion, a side by side comparison of the new iphone 6 vs. GoPro Hero3+ each shooting a at 1080p x 60fps.
Be sure to change the YouTube resolution to the highest setting: 1080p to see the true comparison.
We didn't want to show slo-motion for the sake of slow motion but we wanted to present you with something that can only be understood at 50% of normal speed.
Both cameras exhibit great quality but what are your opinions on what you see here? Be sure to switch to 1080p view for the full effect!
Go to Carved.com and use the coupon code 'Footbags' to get a $2 discount on your next phone case.
One of my clients was telling me this story about a woman who he would see playing tennis every day. When he finally asked her why she plays tennis so much, she said "I play every day because I'm 86 and if I don't play today, I'm not sure Ill be able to play tomorrow."
She has it right! We all need to embrace the mobility we have, and not take it for granted. Someday it might not be there.
"Use it or Lose it!" This has been a theme of the videos I publish and a core part of my message to others. I could let myself go and play a couple of times a week... but if I do, I'll spend two days catching up for every day I take off. So I choose to play every day, and to allow NO EXCUSES to get out of it.
Everyone needs 30 minutes of vigorous exercise daily, but for athletes and especially Footbag freestylers, muscle memory has a short term memory loss problem. If I take a day off I'm afraid I'll lose my edge. That's why I play everyday. Join me!
I love to hear these stories about other people who are also exercising every day... it keeps me motivated.
Here is what the Mayo Clinic says about exercising every day...
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/in-depth/exercise/art-20048389
Today is 2822 days in a row shredding for me. And I know I'm not the only one!
Practice update: Today I hit some unique seamless tricks, like Fairy (phobic) Gyro Miraging Seamless Juggle and Legbeater Seamless Juggle. Also Spinning Symposium Butterfly seamless Juggle both sides too. BSOS. Still getting better every day. Thanks for all your support!
Here is what the Mayo Clinic says about exercising every day...
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/in-depth/exercise/art-20048389
I am now forgoing the would-be ideal grippy surface of concrete, for the less ideal, dirty asphalt or slippery wood for my shredding needs. This is primarily to save my Adidas Rod Laver shoes from wearing out too soon.
Everyone has their own favorite surface for shredding freestyle Footbag, and mine has always been white concrete. My second favorite surface is the standard tennis courts. However, due to the unfortunate demise of the lightweight poly-sole Adidas Rod Laver in 2012 our poly-soled lavers are now unavailable and the pairs that we are lucky enough to possess have become prized possessions! White concrete is ideally grippy so initiating a spin and controlling my spin is more predictable and I feel I perform best on this type if surface.
The problem with concrete is that it eats Rod Laver shoes alive! The very grippy-ness it provides also rips away at the poly soles, eventually wearing them through. It has happened to every pair I've ever had, and it is the primary reason why any of my Lavers are forced into retirement.
Another reason concrete is now a bad surface for me is that recently I've had two instances where I was rotating my upper body and my support leg normally rotates with me to get in position for the catch and the sole was so attached to the grippy concrete that I tweaked my knee by over rotating, and I've been babying it ever since, even though the pain has gone away.
I'm going to take a cue from the Hip Hop Dancers who also treasure the poly-soled Adidas Rod Laver shoes, and I'm going to switch to smooth surfaces whenever possible. Those guys probably don't have the wear-and-tear problem on the soles because they require smooth surfaces to dance on, due to the way they spin by pivoting on an amazingly wide array of body parts. The dancers have found a way to deal with the slipperiness of smooth flooring, and I'll need to make my peace with it too.
But what surfaces are best? Polished wood gymnasium floors? The wood floor in my living room? Tile or marble? The problem with shiny and smooth surfaces when dust is present. Even the best wood floors need regular clearing of dust to stay grippy.
One thing the european Footbag players and dancers have been doing for some time, is to roll out a thin floor over the concrete which modifies whatever surface they are on, into an ideal one. I've tried athletic flooring in the past and my conclusion was that the plastic ones that used tongue and groove were too bulky to transport and the rubber ones sucked the energy from my legs and reduced my leaping ability. I never before saw the wisdom of thin supplemental flooring, but I'm all over it now! I will find the perfect surface that is a single lightweight portable piece, that is the right grippy-ness for freestyle Footbag and I will report back with my results. For now I'm trying to play on wood floors with a damp rag nearby to step on and remove dust from my shoes. Save our soles!
As for my daily shred update... Today is 2806 days in a row. I'm still loving every minute of it! Looking forward to tomorrow's jam session already and I haven't even gotten to werk yet. I've been kayaking a lot lately, but I'm paying the price in the form of back pain. First, lower and now upper. But the pain did not slow me down a bit. Thanks for all your support!
Certainly World Footbag Championships is the father of all Footbag tournaments, and that means many of my old friends are traveling there too. This post is to summarize our Journey to Montreal.
Starting in Oak Park, IL which is a suburb of Chicago, we began packing on Thursday, the day after my wife's moms funeral. It was a tough week. I am traveling with my wife Valeria, my son Alex and my niece Juliana (both 14) and our dog Harley. We each get a bin and packed it into our station wagon with a car topper that has our camping gear, chairs, xootr, etc...
We got our usual late start and didn't get to the Windsor Canada crossing until midnight. We had to reserve a room in Canada to prove we needed our passports expedited, but it took until 4:00am to find the hotel near Toronto. We slept until 10:30 and had to check out at 11.
Another constant challenge is finding Internet and using it wisely. I rely heavily on iPhone maps, but without a data plan here, we have been successfully zenning our way around. We sat in the hotel parking lot and used their wifi to figure out our next moves.
We found the Toronto lakefront, and went to this new park but $10 parking and mostly not dog friendly we backtracked to the old Toronto lakefront parks and found a $1.50 parking spot. Here are some Toronto pictures:
A drive by picture
Met this kid and his sister, taught them some kicks and gave them a dragonfly Footbag from our sponsor www.footbagshop.com
If you look carefully in the background you can see the spire in that last photo.
The weather looked bad at this point, so camping that night was off. We went to Gananoque CA which is billed as the 'Gateway to 1000 Islands' and found a hotel. We watched a heavy rainstorm come thru and got up the next day to go see 1000 Islands.
We zenned our way to the highway and headed for Montreal. We have a condo rented and we needed to dump all our stuff and get checked in for the tournament. Here is our condo...
Pretty sweet! About $100/night. You see Valeria in the kitchen then the dining room and family room space, a bedroom beyond the TV and a sitting room to the right with Juliana on the barkolounger.
We got checked in at the event site... Saw old friends like Tuan Vu and Lisa Monte-Vu, Kenny and Kendall Shults and family, and many others! It was great!
Valeria made a great pasta dinner in our full kitchen and we felt right at home.
On Monday, we skipped the tournament and went to Six Flags LaRonde and used our season passes to get in free. They even let us use the parking for free!
Julie and Alex at the site where I took 4th in the world in 1996. In the back of LaRonde. After Worlds is over, we are going to 4 more six flags along the east coast. Stay tuned.
Back in 1996, a random jam happened on Isle St. Helene at this very location. Peter Irish, Tuan Vu, Eric Wullfe and I shredded epically here. It is where I did my 2413th jam in a row and my last practice before round 1 at worlds.
So at 12:30 today EST Worlds freestyle begins and at 1:20 my pool goes on. So wish me luck. It's breakfast time here. And that is the story of how we got here!
I need your votes! Each day, starting July 10th thru July 24th you can vote once at http://www.drpepper.com/oneofakind/ and a second time by tweeting my custom hash tag #ScottForTheNextOne to your Twitter account.
I know it will be difficult to remember to vote everyday, so I am putting a calendar event that repeats daily for the next two weeks to remind me.
If you could share the link to my Dr. Pepper video on your Facebook and Twitter, I would greatly appreciate it.
The video was submitted over a month ago, and would not have been possible without the help of my son Alex Davidson, my wife Valeria Davidson and my friend Steve Richardson. It is in the style of the Dr Pepper /1 of a Kind as campaign and tells the story of how Over 1 million Footbag's are sold each year, and how hundreds of thousands of college students move on and never play Footbag again. It also talks about how I am a world champion, how I am over 46 years old, and how I play every day, And that's what makes me one-of-a-kind! When we were filming it, at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois, As an afterthought, we got shot in front of the doorway at the college. It turned out that this was the best shot of the day. A rather long string, captured with the iPhone in vertical mode, featured prominently in the second half of the video.
I apologize in advance for being annoying this week. I will be making several Facebook posts a day to garner as many votes as possible.
As of This writing, the video is not yet viewable. I hope there will be a share button for Facebook and Twitter, and even LinkedIn. I hope they publish it at 1080p.
Even if you aren't quite as excited about this as I am, I truly appreciate your support in voting and getting the word out to vote!
If I win, the prize is that they will produce a professional quality video along the same lines of the one I made. And they will Eric on television and on the web. I'll get flown to location, and per diem's. But no cash prize this time.
Just making the finals, feels like winning to me! But it sure would be nice to get some great positive exposure for the sport of Footbag, and Footbag Freestyle specifically.
This is Part 2 of my series of articles on "How to create a 2 minute Footbag Freestyle routine."
The Music Map:
A Music Map expresses the chosen song in relation to where the 'sections' of music start based on their relationship to the beginning of the song. This is necessary for designing a routine, as it allows me to break the song into several pieces so I can create sections of the song in my mind. It will also be necessary for training, as I will break the song down into these sections so I can train the different sections separately.
This years song is a compilation of two tracks from the Monsters, Inc. soundtrack which I spliced together using GarageBand on a mac as referenced in the previous article Part 1 - Picking your music.
For the past few days I've been listening to the music and watching the clock. I have broken it into 6 uneven sections, for the purpose of mapping each group of tricks and the transitions between sections.
From this map, I went back into Garageband on my mac and split the song up along these lines. I had to use multiple tracks, lots of splitting tracks and copying and pasting to get it done. But my goal of creating musical sections of my song selection is complete. Specifically, using the time codes and listening, I made 6 separate songs that each have a bit of the 'before' and 'after' of each section so I can also practice the 'bridges' between the sections.
After exporting each song to iTunes and creating some new playlists, I have my song pieces available. The playlists I will ultimately do my training to will include these specifics...
1) A Playlist that has each section in order, with gaps to create a pause. So I can hit pause after I do a section, and hit play when ready to go again. I could also have itunes 'loop' each individual section.
2) A Playlist that has each section in order, but with 1 minute song segments in between, so I can do my 'endurance training' jams with each segment. Those are so tiring.
3) A Playlist with the first half of the song repeating 5 times with 1 minute 'other songs' interspersed. I start it and keep going until done.
4) A playlist with the second half of the song repeating 5 times with 1 minute 'other songs' interspersed. I start it and keep going until done.
5) A playlist with the entire song repeating 5 times with 1 minute 'other songs' interspersed. I start it and keep going until done. Very tiring.
So join me in this journey. My next article will be about my Trick Hit List. These are the tricks that I would like to incorporate into my routine.
Shred notes from this week:
Published some advanced Eclipse combos to youtube. Broke 100 youtube subscribers this week. Had a blast toying with my routine. Today was day 2298 in a row. Doing at least 2 run-thru's of my routine for worlds every day. Looking forward to actual spring temperatures.
In this series of articles, I plan to publicly create my freestyle routine for World Footbag Championships 2013 in Montreal.
Usually, I train in private and come out of nowhere to surprise my competition. This time, I am publicly sharing my progress through this blog, and occasionally through Vimeo.
Today's lesson:
Picking your Music...
I am always keeping my ears open for good music, but because my library is limited and my taste in music is poor, I rarely come across new music that I like. Whatever I choose, I will have to listen to it thousands of times, practice to it hundreds of times and perform to it at least 3 times (assuming I make it to Finals). It has to be near my Beats per Minute speed of about 110bpm, it should not have any lyrics.
One of my favorite performances was the year I emerged victorious against the great Peter "Executioner" Irish. At East Coast Footbag Championships 2003, Here is that performance...
The other day, I heard a commercial for Monsters, Inc on TV and the music spoke to me. I have always liked shredding to swing and jazz music and this is great. I listened to a few songs and I settled on the beginning of one and the end of another. I used Garageband on a Mac to splice them together the way I need them and I included the track here:
The next thing to do is a Music Map... that will be for tomorrow's lesson.
Shred notes: Day 2260 in a row.
Today, I worked through my routine music a few times to get a feel for it. Wow, what a great time I had. It has been a while. This music really moves me. Let me know what you think.
I have to say, by adding flyers to my warm-up strings, I get sweatier faster than ever before. I'm also more tired than ever before. I no longer believe I need to include fliers in my warm-up regimen. I can get warm using the normal warm-up strings, and expend the additional energy needed for linking fliers into strings later in the session. In other words, because fliers drain energy there is no need to warm them up, it just expends needed energy.
The trick to doing big tricks out of flyers, is controlling their sets. As with any trick. I have been integrating fliers into my strings for a long time, but I've been treating them like something I need to recover from, rather than something that I need to control. For instance, I already do spinning fliers mid-string, but almost always followed by a recovery osis and butterfly to get 'reset' and continue to the next more difficult strings. What is different here is that in order to do a difficult trick directly from a flier, the set needs to be perfectly placed at mid-chest height and straight up and down, and the body has to be ready to land and snap into the next trick. I am out of film, so I can't video this yet, but I will soon.
So far, I have gotten control of spinning flying butterfly, and phairy flying butterfly so that I can go directly to tricks like Whirl, Torque, Blender and DLO, and it looks unexpected and awesome!
In summary, I plan to be able to pull a flier in mid-string and continue seamlessly onto another difficult trick. If you ever see me do an osis out of a flier, it is unplanned and essentially a bail/recovery maneuver. Combine this with my Seamless Juggling and my strings are going to continue to impress. I can't wait to play today!
Shred notes: I have been breaking the new shoes in. The top of my left foot hurts from practicing those Forklift tricks http://youtu.be/Wvg8qPXKwHE that I re-introduced a few weeks ago, the pain is from the movement, not the new shoes. Day 2080 is today. This type of pain feels like a bruise, broken vessels, and causes me to not be able to crank the left ankle. So I'll only work on those in small bursts, see if I can't build up the strength in my feet to be able to do those cool tricks without penalty of pain.
