I have not missed a workout in these last ten days since my last post.
I’ve been sticking with the general format of 30 minutes of rope work and ninja moves, followed by 30 minutes of lifting.
I still have not managed to fully “flip the switch” on my diet. I was back up to about 200lbs in the morning, but I cleaned things up a bit over the past few days and I’m at 194 now. I better call that out in case future me is scanning through my log for data:
AM WEIGHT = 194
I’ve been working on my hand stands, and I can’t believe how much I’ve improved with just a few minutes of practice every day.
Now, instead of using my leg to kick myself up, I can just kind of put my hands on the floor and push myself up. This actually makes it way easier to balance, because I don’t have to manage so much momentum right away.
The other thing I notice is that I’m using the muscles in my forearms to balance now, instead of needing to move my hands or shift my legs around. It’s pretty damn cool to finally be able to hold a nice steady hand stand like this. It’s about f*&%ing time I figured this out, now that I’m 40.
I’ve also been working on my freeze-to-handstand move and have figured out some technical tweaks to make it much easier. Instead of straightening my torso first and then pushing up, I start with the torso a bit more horizontal. This lets me use the momentum of the straightening torso to help boost me up. It’s kind of like doing a dumbbell swing instead of a push press.
Working on this move has taught me even more about autoregulation. When you REALLY want to achieve a physical feat, you problem-solve your way through the best way to get there. For me, I think it really pays off to first build up the work capacity to actually work on these things DAILY. They key here is to limit the attempts each day so you’ll still be able to put in some work tomorrow.
For example, today I was going to skip my freeze-to-handstand work because I put in some extra work yesterday. But I started prying around with it and I felt pretty snappy. It also helped that my high-fiber clean-out day had me dropping about 4 pounds overnight, so I was a bit lighter this morning. I ended up pushing up into a very solid, sustained handstand in just two attempts this morning, and then I quickly pulled to plug on any additional work.
This is how I used to work on my vertical jump when I was in high school. I would go out in the driveway and dunk rocks, tennis balls, softballs, volleyballs. Once I had a few shitty attempts in a row, I knew it wouldn’t get any better, so I just stopped.
I don’t know what kind of “weight lifting” this might apply to, if any, but for stupid human tricks, it’s pretty effective.
Still going to “Just Keep Lifting” right now, it just works. I’m hoping that if I can string together a few days of nailing macros, I’ll catch fire and get the switch flipped again. My jeans are getting a little snug and I don’t like it.
When I seem to be having trouble breaking out of shitty eating patterns, this is how I approach it:
- Set macros and nail them, no matter what the food choices or even total calories look like.
- Repeat the above for at least 3-5 days in a row.
- Start optimizing food choices and eliminating trigger foods or high-reward/low-payoff foods
- Start hitting total calorie goals and adjusting total calories based on results
- Start tweaking macros, cycling macros, or shifting meal timing
Once I hit about step 3 or 4, I’m pretty securely in the zone and really don’t ever need to worry about step 5. I can get super lean and stay there without ever needing to manipulate things at that level.
Calories in/out is still the biggest drive of results, but it works better to focus on the first three steps first, because intake can’t really be brought under control until those things are nailed.
Also notice that cheat meals are not even part of the strategy. That might come at level 6 or something.
The thing with cheat meals is that if I’m not even at level 1 and I have a weekend binge, I need to stop pretending it was a cheat meal, move on, and keep working on progressing through the steps.