Recently, there have been reports of a witch escape in my area, leaving the community on edge. It all began when a local witch, who was believed to be a kind and helpful presence in the neighborhood, vanished without a trace. Rumors began to circulate that her disappearance was not voluntary but rather the result of a dangerous encounter. Witnesses claim to have seen strange occurrences in the days leading up to her disappearance. Unexplained phenomena, such as flickering streetlights and mysterious gusts of wind, had become more frequent. Some residents reported strange laughter echoing through the streets, leading them to believe that dark forces were at play.
This Olympic Figure Skater's Workout Video On Instagram Will Have Your Jaw On The Ground
While it looks like magic on the ice, there's a *lot* of hard work going on behind the scenes.
By Emily J. Shiffer Updated: Jan 10, 2024 3:57 PM EST Save ArticleWomen's Health may earn commission from the links on this page, but we only feature products we believe in. Why Trust Us?
- Olympic figure skater Ashley Cain gets in a super hard workout in a new Instagram video posted by the Olympics' official account.
- From box jumps to weight ball slams, the skater crushes the intense circuits.
- Late last year, Ashley shared that she's working with Zero Limits Performance off-ice to prep for her routines.
Olympic figure skater Ashley Cain has definitely mastered her moves on the ice. and at the gym. The athlete, 28, shared one of her intense off-ice workouts via the Olympics' Instagram page, and to put it simply, her strength and endurance are totally mind-blowing. Ashley wasted no time running her fans through one of her strength and cardio sessions, all while rocking a Barbie-pink Free People Righteous Onesie.
"Flexing more than just skates! A figure skater’s off-ice training 🏃♀️," the video's caption reads. And let me be the first to tell you that this skater is definitely *not* messing around. The people watching the video on Instagram got busy cheered Ashley on in the comments.
"That’s WILD," one person wrote. "The box jump with one leg after some hurdles. That alone was impressive," another commented. A third just left tons of fire emojis.
While figure skating is a Winter Olympics sport (with the next games will be taking place in Milan, Italy, in 2026), Ashley is already training super hard. While skaters certainly make their routines look completely effortless on ice, its clear that they put in a ton of work behind the scenes to strengthen their glutes, core, legs. and everything else. Those double axels don't just magically happen!
The Instagram video starts off with Ashley knocking out a series of hurdle jumps (including spins), followed by some seriously fast sprints. Next, she moves into some alternating single-leg box jumps (yes, on just one leg), which works on her lower-body strength and balance.
After the cardio segments, Ashley transitions into weight work, starting with some trap bar weighted squats before moving on to alternating jumping lunges with side twists, with a weighted barbell added in to work her obliques.
Related Story
- 8 Best Ice Skates for Figure Skaters, Blades Down
The video then jumps to Ashley back on a turf floor holding a medicine ball doing twisting wall slams, all while balancing on one leg. (Talk about core, arm and leg strength!).
To top off this wildly challenging workout, Ashley gets back into more cardio and leg work—she is a skater, after all—with *more* box jumps. These aren't your everyday box jumps, though. Each time she lands, Ashley does a full spin on the ground (mimicking her spins on the ice!). For her finisher? Some diagonal jumps out on the turf while holding a weighted ball overhead to challenge her balance. I'm tired just watching this video.
Related Story
- Your Favorite Olympic Figure Skaters, Then And Now
Ashley previously shared that she has teamed up with Zero Limits Performance this winter to help her train for the 2026 Winter Olympics. And from the looks of it, I'd say training is going really well.
Everyone is cheering you on, Ashley!! Crushing it!
Contributing WriterEmily Shiffer has worked as a writer for 10 years, covering everything from health and wellness to entertainment and celebrities. Her work has been featured in Women's Health, Runner's World, PEOPLE, and more. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
Nikki Haley’s pretend slavery ‘gaffe’ told us what this election is about
Voters will decide the unresolved question of the civil war: do we move backwards, or forwards toward true democracy?
Thu 11 Jan 2024 17.00 CET Last modified on Thu 11 Jan 2024 17.03 CETN ikki Haley’s difficulty articulating the cause of the civil war – the war that began in her home state of South Carolina – has put that issue in the headlines just days before the first votes are cast in the Republican nomination contest. While Haley was caught trying to be too clever by half in refusing to name slavery as the cause of the nation’s bloodiest conflict, the controversy has had the unintended effect of framing what is facing the country’s voters in 2024.
This year’s election is, in fact, a continuation of the unresolved question of the civil war era: will the country continue to move towards fostering a multiracial democracy, or will it aggressively reject its growing diversity and attempt to make America white again?
The US election looms. Arab Americans feel stuck between a rock and a hard place | Moustafa Bayoumi Read moreHaley’s entire career has consisted of trying to walk the tightest of tightropes. She is a woman of color operating in a political party whose driving forces are white racial resentment and misogyny (and, increasingly, homophobia and transphobia). On the one hand, she is eagerly embraced as a high-profile party symbol who serves as a strong rebuttal to accusations of racism and sexism (“See, we’re not racist and sexist, we have a woman of color as our governor!”). On the other hand, white racial resentment serves as fuel for the Trump movement to the extent that no presidential candidate can hope to win the nomination without bending a knee to the Confederate cause.
This high-wire act was most prominently on display in 2015, when a white man who had proudly posed with pictures of the Confederate flag walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina, declared, “You rape our women. And you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” and proceeded to murder nine Black people. That tragedy was too much even for most defenders of the Confederate flag, and Haley and the state’s political leadership begrudgingly capitulated to years-long demands to stop flying that flag over the state capitol.
The current conundrum is important not just because of Haley, who is emerging as Trump’s strongest competitor in the Republican field, but because of what it reveals about politics in this country in general and in the Republican party in particular.
Boiled down to its essence, much of the country – and most of the Republican voters – are still fighting the cause of the civil war in ways both literal and figurative. The active and organized resistance to removing Confederate statues led a mob of white nationalists to march through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us”; one Hitler-loving member of the crowd gunned his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman, Heather Heyer, who had come to stand for racial tolerance and peace. That was the protest of which then president Trump observed: “There are good people on both sides.”
While it is fairly widely accepted now that Trump has a stranglehold on the Republican party, many have forgotten what propelled him to his current position of seemingly unshakable dominance. In the month before launching his presidential bid in June of 2015, Trump was largely seen as a joke and languished in the polls with support from just 4% of his party. After he staked out his position as defender of white people and demonizer of Mexican immigrants (“they’re rapists, they’re murderers”), he zoomed to the top of the polls and has never looked back.
For all the talk of the Trump phenomenon being unprecedented, the truth is that he is not the first political leader to ride a wave of white racial resentment to high levels of political influence and power. In the 1960s, when Trump was in his 20s, the nation watched the Alabama governor, George Wallace, proudly proclaim “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his 1963 inauguration speech (delivered from the same spot where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, took office).
Six months later, Wallace physically stood at the door of the University of Alabama auditorium to block the desegregation of Alabama’s colleges and universities. That defiant embrace of white supremacy boosted Wallace’s national standing to the extent that he launched a presidential campaign in 1968 that attracted millions of voters.
George Wallace blocks the entrance to the University of Alabama, turning back a federal officer attempting to enroll two Black students, on 11 June 1963. Photograph: AP
Wallace’s presidential bid was preceded by that of Strom Thurmond, who held the same office that Haley later did – governor of South Carolina. In 1948, after President Harry Truman had the temerity to urge Congress to outlaw lynching Black people, Thurmond joined forces with his fellow southern governors to create the Dixiecrat party and ran for president on a platform unapologetically stating that “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Thurmond’s third-party bid won four states outright: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and, oh look!, South Carolina.
The centrality of white racial resentment to American politics is longstanding and explains the panic that caused Haley to become so tongue-tied. As the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, until Wednesday Haley’s competitor for the anti-Trump mantle, explained in the wake of Haley’s comments: “If she is unwilling to stand up and say that slavery is what caused the civil war … what’s going to happen when she has to stand up against forces in our own party who want to drag this country deeper and deeper into anger and division?”
If the size and power of the constituency that will brook no retreat on the cause of the Confederacy is so large that a leading presidential candidate can’t even state the simple fact that the civil war was about slavery, then the stakes in 2024 should be crystal clear. One party is propelled and dominated by voters who, essentially, want America to be a white country. On the other side is an incumbent president who just last week specifically namechecked and denounced “the poison of white supremacy” in a speech delivered from the pulpit of the same church where parishioners were murdered in 2015.
The good news is that the portion of the population that wants America to be a white nation is not the majority of people. (That’s why the Confederates had to secede in the first place, after failing to win popular support at the polls.) The challenge for those who know why the civil war started and who want to continue the journey towards multiracial democracy is to organize, inspire and galvanize that majority in the upcoming elections.
To do that, we need to do what Nikki Haley can’t or won’t – state clearly why the civil war started, declare our determination to finish the job of reconstructing this nation and do everything we can to ensure massive voter turnout in November.
- Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good
Chris Christie questions Nikki Haley's ability and desire to beat Donald Trump
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie speaks at a town hall campaign event at Mitchell Hill BBQ Grill and Brew, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024, in Rochester, N.H. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
ROCHESTER, N.H. – Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday rejected the idea that ending his presidential bid would help Republican rival Nikki Haley defeat Donald Trump, questioning both her desire and ability to do so.
While other candidates were in Iowa ahead of next week’s caucus, Christie was in a barbecue restaurant in New Hampshire, where he has staked nearly his entire campaign. He warned that If Trump wins the New Hampshire primary for a third time on Jan. 23, he’ll become the GOP nominee, despite the next contest coming in Haley’s home state of South Carolina.
“If he wins here, don’t expect South Carolina to save us, it’s not going to happen,” he said. “So you all are the ones who are going to make the call here.”
While Trump remains the frontrunner, a CNN/UNH poll conducted in New Hampshire this week suggested that Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador, could be approaching Trump’s top spot in the state. About 4 in 10 likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire choose Trump, while about one-third pick Haley. The poll found Christie trailing behind both candidates at 12% and indicated that about two-thirds of Christie supporters would select Haley as their top alternative to Christie.
At Tuesday’s town hall event, Greg Leach, 49, of Dover, told Christie that he wants his vote to count, and asked him about the need to unify around one anti-Trump candidate.
“I would be happy to get out of the way for someone who is actually running against Donald Trump,” Christie answered.
Haley isn’t that someone, he argued, noting her support for pardoning Trump if any of his criminal trials end in conviction and her refusal to rule out becoming his running mate if asked.
“Why do we think she’d beat him? She’s not trying to beat him,” said Christie.
“Let’s say I dropped out of the race right now and I supported Nikki Haley. And then three months from now, four months from now, when you’re ready to go to the convention, she comes out as his vice president. What will I look like? What will all the people who supported her at my behest look like?”
Christie repeated that he will remain in the race as long as he sees a path to the nomination, and that he won’t make an endorsement based on politics like he did when he backed Trump eight years ago.
“I’m not going to make the same mistake again,” he said. “Can’t do it.”
Before the event began, Leach said he was leaning toward Christie but was considering Haley. Afterward, he said he was leaning toward Haley.
“I really want to vote for Christie but strategically, at this point I feel like Nikki Haley is the way to go,” said Leach.
Leach said he voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 general election and will do so again if it's a Trump vs. Biden rematch, though he hopes it won’t come to that. He said he's interested in seeing what happens in Iowa but wonders if Christie should drop out sooner rather than later.
“I don’t want it to be too late and have Trump end up winning because people waited too long,” he said.
A spokesperson for Haley's PAC said Christie claims to talk tough but remains in “the same position today as he was the last time he ran for President.”
“It’s time for voters to tell Christie what we all know, which is that his campaign isn’t stopping anyone and frankly, it’s helping Trump, whom he proudly endorsed in 2016 and supposedly opposes in 2024,” said Brittany Yanick.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Some residents reported strange laughter echoing through the streets, leading them to believe that dark forces were at play. As word spread, fear and curiosity gripped the community, with some people speculating about the possible motives behind the witch's sudden disappearance. Many theories have emerged, ranging from a magical showdown with another powerful being to a nefarious plot by her enemies.
The local authorities have launched an investigation into the witch's disappearance, but no concrete answers have been found so far. Residents have been urged to remain cautious and report any suspicious activities to the police. In response to the situation, some residents have taken precautions of their own. Protective spells, amulets, and other occult practices have gained popularity as people seek solace and security in the face of the unknown. Despite the sense of unease, there are those in the community who remain hopeful for the witch's safe return. They remember her as a gentle soul who used her powers for the betterment of the area. These individuals have organized search parties and prayer circles, hoping to bring her back to the neighborhood safely. In the midst of this witch escape, the atmosphere in our area is tinged with a mix of apprehension, intrigue, and a touch of magic. People are left wondering what truly happened to the witch and whether they will ever feel secure again. Only time will reveal the answers, and until then, we must remain vigilant and support each other in this strange and uncertain time..
Reviews for "Close Encounter: Witness Recounts the Witch's Daring Escape"
1. Emma - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to try out "Witch escape in my area" as I love escape rooms and the theme seemed intriguing. However, I was quite disappointed with the overall experience. The puzzles were extremely difficult and lacked proper hints or guidance. It felt like a constant guessing game rather than a well-designed challenge. Additionally, the staff was not very friendly or helpful, which added to the frustration. I wouldn't recommend this escape room if you're looking for an enjoyable and immersive experience.
2. Jason - 1/5 stars - "Witch escape in my area" was a complete waste of time and money. The room setup was poorly designed, and the props were cheap and unconvincing. The storyline was weak, and it was difficult to stay engaged throughout the entire experience. Moreover, there were technical glitches with some of the puzzles, which made it impossible to progress. Overall, this escape room was a major letdown, and I would suggest looking for other alternatives if you're a fan of escape games.
3. Sarah - 2/5 stars - I had high hopes for "Witch escape in my area," but it turned out to be a subpar escape room experience. The puzzles were overly complicated, with no clear instructions or logical progression. We spent more time being frustrated than actually enjoying the game. The room itself was also quite small and lacked the immersive atmosphere I've come to expect from escape rooms. Overall, I was disappointed with the lack of creativity and thought put into this game.