Me too, me too!

Randomly checking blogspot after I dunno, a few months of not caring about blogging, I see Mai has made a post here again! Not to be outdone, I suppose I'll update my own progress as well.

I dunno what my weight is, and I don't care. So far, stuff is going good. I'm doing wrist rollers, coffin situps, hindu squats, tricep kickbacks, weighted punches, bicep curls, shoulder rolls, and a couple of hand/wrist strengthening exercises I do with my short staff. In other words, a good bit.

It's actually more manageable than it looks. It takes less than 20 minutes to do these, even if I did it all at once, and I don't. I warm up my breathing in the morning and do wrist rollers, shoulder rolls, and bicep curls--as well as these leg lifting things as well, but I don't count the reps. I just lift my legs up and down rapidly like I'm trying to knee someone in the crotch over and over again for as long as I can.

Then in the afternoon a few hours after breakfast I do my coffin situps, hindu squats, weighted punches, and tricep kickbacks.

Then in the evening a few hours after lunch, I do my wrist/grip strengthening exercises outside. After that I go inside and eat dinner.

ANYWAY, the plan is to do it for two solid weeks without missing a day and then I increase reps and/or add more exercises. That's starting tomorrow. Er, well, today. It is 1:58 in the morning, here...

I've just been figuring out what I'm gonna do and how much, and now I think I'm settled on it.

I don't care about my weight, really. I know I'll lose my excess fat doing this stuff, my real focus is how much strength I gain. I want to be fast, strong, fluid, flexible, agile, powerful, and have good endurance. In the future I want to be doing situps where I'm gripping a punching bag with my legs while it hangs from the ceiling on a chain. I want to be doing handstand pushups, hindu pushups, I want to be doing 3 minute back bridges every day. I want to be doing twenty reps of wrist rollers, etc.

I plan on getting VERY fit and VERY strong. And now I think I have the right combination of internal focus and mind set to do it.

BAM!

Mai Random Restart

Starting weigh-in: 193.6
Last weigh-in: 189.4 @ 7:32am
Today's weigh in: 204.2lbs ..... GAINED 14.8lbs

I finally found a loop in my schedule to work out. I gained the freshman 15, which I thought I would never do. But I guess long days of not eating and eating all starchy, greasy foods at the end of the day and not working out DID NOT HELP.

I got tired of feeling sorry for myself, so I finally started going to the gym... that's across my building. Yeah, yeah, I know.

I started speed walking for at least 30 minutes, just to get back in the groove and not over do my body. I started yesterday, I weighed in at 206, so I guess the 2lb difference was poop or whatever.

Anyway, so far my regimen is do at least a mile/day at 3.5mph at 1.5% incline. So far I've done 2 miles/day.

It's late in the year, but better late than never I guess.

Weeee??

Weeee!!

Another long overdo Nick Update #3

Since Mai is in college, and I am still the responsibility-free shmuck I've always been for 90% of my life--it's up to me to keep this thing running!

Well I kinda got rocky in the upkeep of my exercises for a couple of weeks, due to MAJOR magical interference. Basically, I've been working with a lot of things that involve the proper and successful development of my wizardly being, and I've been doing(and am doing) FANTASTIC in that regard. Finally it got to the point where I needed to improve myself physically as well. So two days ago I had this INSANELY powerful urge to work myself out and once and for all, kick all this excess flab off my body.

So I have begun working out three times a day, and so far I feel freaking GREAT! I do 13 exercises in the morning when I wake up, and then five more in the afternoon, and then six more in the early evening. They're not anything that kills me all at once, they're spaced out in terms of reps, like I was talking about in my last post. So right now I'm starting off nice and easy. The exercises that I am doing(and their reps) are:

Hindu squats: 20 for a total of 60
Pushups: 5 for a total of 15
Table makers: 5 for a total of 15
Situps: 10 for a total of 30
Wrist rollers: 2 for a total of 8
Back bridge: 1 minute for 2 minutes total
Front bridge: about 30 seconds for 1 minute total

------ These exercises I do only once in the morning when I wake up, along with the ones above---

Stomach flattener: 1 minute total
Stomach vacuum: 5 seconds each rep, to a total of 50 seconds
Arch bends: 10 total
Side bends: 50 total
Waist turners: 100 reps
Trunk rotations: 5 in each direction, 10 total

And there it is! To strike down preemptive questions: Yeah I'm taking it REALLY slow with pushups, but that's fine. The goal was to start off at an easy pace so I could start by enjoying the movements without having to push myself to the edge from the very beginning. And as for the wrist rollers, if you have not actually done them, you know nothing. That's a good amount for rolling one's wrists.

I've also stopped timing my bridges, I found that when I worked with a timer it generally made the exercises unenjoyable and annoying. So I just do the exercises, and when I feel that I've held them long enough, I get up. So those times are just guesswork.

Anyway! Things are going great. I feel friggan fantastic, REALLY balanced. It's like I'm getting all the elements of my being onto the same level; mentally, emotionally, and physically--and being balanced is awesome.

I vowed not to weigh myself till the end of the month, so I could see an actual difference, so no weight-update yet.

Until...next week? Maybe? We'll see.

Nick---

Nick Update #2

Alright so things have been going well, except my exercises kinda got thrown out of the loop due to some SERIOUSLY SERIOUS stuff that happened in my magical life.

HOWEVER I have successfully made 10:00 pm my bedtime, and I now know a successful way to get up and kick my ass into exercising, AND I'm eating better, too. So now all I have to do is pick up my routine and stick with it.

I think the scale said 229.2 or something, so I almost lost a whole pound, haha! HOORAY FOR ME!! But physically I feel AWESOME. I have loads of energy and I don't struggle with myself to exercise anymore. I just haven't because I've been busy incorporating all this new stuff into my consciousness that exploded onto me without warning. Basically, I'm a wizard, and crazy stuff happens to us wizards. Seriously.

Back to the eating thing; eating has become totally frickin' awesome. I don't need to eat as much anymore, and I enjoy the process a lot more, too. This is a result of that crazy magical explosion I mentioned a paragraph ago. Food has more taste, more flavor and feeling, and I'm able to stop eating right when my body has had enough. It's pretty damned sweet.

Also, I'm sleeping a whole lot better, too. I can lay down and peacefully close my eyes and doze off like a baby. I don't think I've ever enjoyed sleeping so much.

So yes! Things are going wonderful, I'll update in another week with more success. Until then!

Nick---

Long overdo Nick Update #1

ALRIGHT.

So some(all) may have been wondering: where in the name of almighty hell is Nick?

Well I am now here, laying my blessing upon ye with mine magical and mighty words. Basically, I injured a part of my foot while playing with my dog. While running past the metal legs of my desk here, I smashed my little toe into one of the very hard, very metal legs. I either broke a part of my foot, or fractured it. I don't know, I didn't go to a doctor. I just decided to wait till it healed up.

Now you may not think that's a big deal, but 90% of my exercises require my feet to be in vigorous use, and 99% of them require me to be standing. So yeah it pretty much put a hamper on the whole thing.

Now I am back in business, and with an added twist that will make my exercises much more beneficial.

My old routine consisted of me simply doing each of my exercises once per day. So for instance, my hindu squats, my plan was to do 30 of them for a week, then increase it to 40 for a week, then 50 for a week. And if I felt like I needed more time, I could do 40 for two weeks or something.

This is something I've done before, and it didn't work out too well. It was basically like my legs weren't improving in strength enough, or fast enough, to consistently increase my reps. Not knowing a better way though, I decided to try it again and see if I could modify it along the way if some inspiration struck me.

However, I came upon a wonderful tidbit of an exercise tip. And that tip was to do your exercises TWICE per day. To do a set of reps that you can handle, twice a day. The idea of this is to double the amount of reps you can handle, instead of doing it all at once. It tricks your body into improving and strengthening faster and more effectively. So for instance, I would do 30 squats in the morning, then 30 in the afternoon, for a total of 60 squats. Much better than 30! So by the end of the week, my legs will have a much better workout, increasing the speed and quality of their growth. So when I start doing 40 at once, I'll be doing a total of 80, and then 50, for a total of 100. By the time I can do 100 squats in a row I'll really be doing 200! It's pretty awesome. Oh and if you think that's a lot, this one guy named Karl Gotch, who was known as "The God of Wrestling" in Japan, did 9000 squats in a row. It took him four hours.

Anyways, I'll be using this for other exercises as well. My pushups, my bridging, and so on and so forth.

So yes, I'm back in business! Expect more posts from me more often from now on.

Mai Update #1

Starting weigh-in: 193.6
Todays weigh-in: 189.4 @ 7:32am

I've been trying to not forget to update this place. Mostly because I've been working so hard at the different research centers I'm interning at. And plus of the stresses of financing college. Apparently the State of California increased CSU tuition and basically, I fucking freaked out.

ANYWAY. I'll save the details for the "personal" blog.

Well, I really wanted to start on August 1st. But I'm still new to this whole dedication stuff, so I've been having a hard time. I decided to postpone my juice fasts because it's definitely difficult to do while working full-time. There were many times were I felt faint, so I quit Tuesday evening. (Yeah, yeah, Nick's right.)

However, I have been trying to eat sensible. Handful of food in the morning for breakfast (this past week, it has been fruit snacks and juice boxes...terrible w/sugar). But I quit those today. I have also been doing 15minutes of running/jogging in-place every night before bed
(OK OK--every other night). As well as circuit ab exercises for 30 minutes.

My trick is to not count the reps as it makes me dread it quicker, but to instead listen to music and switch up exercises at the end of each track. So I guess I'm doing each exercises for 3 to 5 minutes.

My ab exercises includes Nick's stomach vacuum and whatever else he wrote for me that I can't remember, lol. And a Youtube video I found before the diet. I love this guy and his exercises have me feeling the "burn" in my stomach within 15 reps:



It's really hard to stay motivated when you're doing this alone and everyone around you eats shit and is already at a healthy weight. I really wish I had someone who was physically here to do it with me to push... :(

Anyhow, I wondered about when is a good time to weigh-in

The key point however when it comes to weighing yourself is that you do it at the same time everyday and ideally with the same set of circumstances before hand. This is why most people tend to weigh themeselves first thing in the morning because it’s normally the same time and same set of circumstances (i.e no food/fluid intake has occurred).

If you weigh yourself at any stage later in the day you are likely to get inconsistent readings due to different levels of food and fluids in your body and the amounf of energy you have burnt. However, you should chose a time to always weigh yourself. I always weigh in the morning after going to the bathroom.

During the night the body enters a fasting period where our kidneys filter waste and the digestive system works throughout. Because our bodies are in a state of rest, the heart doesn’t have to pump as fast or any extra and the kidneys can efficiently move unwanted water into the bladder. This means that in the morning we dont have extra water and bulked up blood in your system and it is also why in general most people feel the urge to go to the bathroom as soon as they wake. Hence this is also why weighing yourself in the morning may be the best time to do it.

flatstomachblog.com

*sigh* Motivate me!

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