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Knee Strength 5: Awesome Progress

Byjack

So I developed a new exercise in the middle of this week, but didn’t have the time to post about it.

To summarize the exercise which I will call the weighted knee spacer:

  • Use ankle weights, weighted shoes, or in this case, bands to pull on foot down
  • Do heel raises with the other foot to elevate the weighted foot
  • Keep the weighted foot as level as possible

I’m thinking this exercise is really useful in any scenario where I feel the knee is getting caught or stuck, which seems to happen a lot when there is any sort of bending exercises.

What I want to work on next is getting a full bend in my right knee without pain.

So it has been a full month now and I have not stopped this challenge yet or restarted jujitsu, but I think that is ok. I want to keep this challenge going until I can actually achieve the goals set in my original goals.

As a reminder, the goals are:

  1. Lift up my knee and bend it feeling stable, comfortable and strong. Getting there for sure!
  2. Stand for 5 minutes while feeling comfortable. Pretty much achieved this one!
  3. Lay on either side feeling comfortable and relaxed. I don’t lay much on either side, just on my back these days, will have to revisit.
  4. Sit on my heels while feeling comfortable and relaxed. Not even close on this one, probably need a full range of motion bend in my knee to be comfortable first.
  5. Be able to jump feeling stable, comfortable, and strong. Part of the way there on this one! I feel pretty stable.
  6. Able to kick a roundhouse while feeling stable, comfortable and strong. Not there yet but an improvement from before.

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Workpost 18: Addicted

Byjack

I’ve been playing pokemon go so much recently. I’ve made a lot of progress in the game, but I really worry that I’m getting addicted because of how stressed out I am right now.

I stressed out about my relationship and about my career path moving forward. I want to make sure that work does not take over my life and that it stays aligned to what I want to do moving forward.

Every time I feel stressed, I reach for the pokemon go. Holy shit, I am addicted.

I feel very tired, but no longer sick. That is a good thing at least.

I’m going to walk around the airport. And this time, instead of catching pokemon, I am going to meditate and think.

On the plane I meditated on some of my issues and I came to a big realization. The first step to feeling or processing any pain is to notice and name the pain that exists. I spend so much time avoiding thinking about painful emotions or experiences, avoiding thinking about how things hurt me it makes it hard to face the pain at all since I’m not taking the first step,

I want to focus on doing that more now as the first step to processing more emotions.

Health Checkup 10/25/2021

Byjack

I feel worried about posting about this topic since it can be kind of gross.

However, I feel that physical health is one of the most important things to understand in life as it controls your energy levels, affects your mental strength, and dramatically affects your physical attractiveness or beauty.

Tracking and problem solving my health issues will not only help me but may provide inspiration for others.

Digestion

Symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, distended belly, sensitivity to cold, stress, and exhaustion

Brainstorm:

  • Raw ginger – seems to add an overall boost to blood flow (yang qi) and stomach circulation
  • Farmhouse Culture Gut Shots – tastes absolutely disgusting, feels like it may actually help
  • Unlocking/moving/stretching hips – ever since my knee injury, my hips are tight and contribute to the blockage in my stomach
  • Stomach massage – helps smooth out the knots and blockage points
  • Increase overall circulation – qi gong, running and cardio all help increase overall circulation and remove blockages overall
  • Activate digestion while eating – eat slower and smell food more
  • Eat less – to 70% fullness

Current Focus:

I need to improve my baseline before going after a specific treatment plan. The baseline will focus on two basic areas: overall circulation, reducing strain. The goals need to be very small so they are easy to maintain.

  • Circulation – eat ginger every morning, run around the block once every morning (minimum 5 min)
  • Reducing strain – focus on eating as little as possible, meditate once in the morning and night (minimum 5 min)
Hair

Symptoms: thin hair (but seems to be thickening), itchy scalp, hair falling out, dandruff

Very strange that my hair is thickening but falling out at the same time. Pretty sure my massage is working but the new hair growing in is so thin it falls out easily.

Brainstorm:

  • Vigorous scalp massage – increase blood flow and already thicken hair a great deal
  • Wash hair – more often, with cold water and apple cider vinegar if possible to reduce inflammation and increase circulation
  • Oil/fatty acids – use huge amounts of conditioner and castor oil to thicken hair and prevent breaking and falling out

Current Focus:

I need to cleanse and increase circulation

  • Wash hair every day with cold water and apple cider vinegar, need to use lots of conditioner to counter the stripping effect of washing your hair too much
Knee (injury)

Symptoms: afraid to put pressure or impact, no feeling at surgery area, pain

Brainstorm:

  • More movement – motion is lotion to the joints
  • Increased muscle mass around the joint – muscle is needed to support the joint
  • Gua sha – need to tear up the scar tissue around the area and increase blood flow
  • Warmup/loosen hips – hips are too tight reducing range of motion

Current focus:

I need more circulation

  • Gua sha (or graston) for at least 5 min per day
Posture and Alignment

Symptoms: jutting forward head, misaligned hips, shoulders rounded forward

Brainstorm:

  • Cobra yoga pose – let the hips relax into better balance
  • Wall posture exercises – strengthen back muscles
  • Foam roller stretch – stretch chest muscles
  • Practice standing/walking – try to establish perfect alignment
  • Move joints more – joints are where everything attaches, moving the joints mean more relaxed and fluid movement

Current focus:

I need to see a chiropractor and also just slightly improve posture while doing things bad for posture (computer, phone):

  • Find a chiropractor within my health insurance
  • Focus on finding a comfortable way to look at the phone with head back (put your phone on your knees)
Vision

Symptoms: dry eyes, headaches (happens not very often), worsening vision

Brainstorm:

  • Relax into looking farther – stretches eye muscles
  • Move vision more – gets the eye muscles to work a little more
  • Do more active sports – forces your eyes to focus on things moving and far away
  • Blink more – resets the eyes

Current Focus:

I want to just relax my eyes more when looking at far away things, rather than trying to move closer.

Knee Mobility Challenge: Zion National Park

Byjack

It is about high time that I create a syllabus around my knee challenge like I did for Valorant and my Sova Art Competition. I want to increase strength and mobility in my right knee that got injured twice (torn ACL, meniscus and reconstructive surgery). Specifically I want to make it so I can hike in Zion National Park on the week of March 20th.

I have the following symptoms in the knee:

  • Feeling of discomfort standing and walking for long periods of time
  • Pain when trying to bend fully
  • Feeling of instability and fear of overextending the knee
  • Pain when sleeping on my side

I did have a lot of initial success in reducing scar tissues using a lot of gua sha, massage and scar gel. I do believe a lot of my pain in my knee is from the sticky scar tissue that is reducing mobility. These initial efforts actually made it easier for me to sleep on my side without lots and lots of pain.

As per usual. I will design this class with one mentality. Make it so its hard for me to fail.

Days until Zion trip: 9

Unit 1: Mobility

  • Day 1 – Surface Tissues
  • Day 2 – Tendons and Ligaments
  • Day 3 – Muscles and Joints

Unit 2: Strength

  • Day 1 – Core
  • Day 2 – Hips and Butt
  • Day 3 – Quads and Calves

Unit 3: Recovery

  • Day 1 – Cooling and antioxidation
  • Day 2 – Cleansing and Fasting
  • Day 3 – Fortifying and Nuition
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Valorant 29: My Valorant Fears and Emotions

Byjack

I wanted to do a bit of a post to understand how I am feeling right now about the Valorant challenge. I know I feel incredibly stressed, angry, and depressed because I feel like I wasted all my time on Valorant. So much time trying so hard to be good, but nothing seems to really come of it. Sometimes looking at my VODs I feel like my gameplay is the same as it was before.

I don’t really know what is going on and why it seems like I’m new to the game every time. I don’t know why I’m overthinking everything. Why is everything so hard?

I wish I could see major mistakes in my old gameplay.

I guess watching more VOD reviews will help me understand. But that takes so damn long. Maybe it means that there are still opportunities to play much much better. I feel that I maybe have gotten much better but it doesn’t seem to translate over to comp. Maybe it’s also something about understanding the maps better. I really get the sense that I got to plat last time by playing more comfortably on agents and on maps. I think I understood just how to play each map better. But I want to be a more complete player. I want to play with better movement and peeking.

Something else that I feel that I missed out on was just having more posts about the emotions I was feeling. It makes me sad that all my Valorant posts were about techniques and none of them were about emotions.

Valorant has a lot of nice emotions for me. I met my girlfriend on Valorant, I had a lot of friends on Valorant. These days I play mostly alone, but I still like the world. Cool agents and fun to get on to all these different teams. I love it when I have some really fun crazy game sense timing lurks. I guess that is one way that I got significantly better than before.

I wish I had VODs from when I was in iron. I feel that jump from iron to silver was the large one. The jump from silver to plat is weirdly small.

Ok. So I just spent a good hour or so just watching my VODs from bronze until plat then back to gold. I actually feel my overall movement is better and more consistent. The only difference in plat is that I was calmer and held an angle for longer. I also did more wide jiggles. I know for gold I held a lot more angles, and made sure to hold them wide because they would often wide swing everything.

Looking forward, I would be so happy if I kept calm and held angles for longer when moving around the map, held for the wide swing more often. Then when fighting an angle, I want to be more aggressive, swinging very fast and hard, but stopping at the edge and fighting, not leaving until I try to kill them, maybe just letting go of movement keys or crouch spraying. I would love to see my fundamentals get really really good, to a level I know they can get to.

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Sova Fanart 7: Class Unit 2 Day 3

Byjack

UNIT TWO: Dynamic Figure Drawing | Day 3 – Animate

Unit 1: Shooting from Vandal

Stick figures
Gesture sketch
Final sketch

Unit 2: Shooting from Bow

Rough sketch
Structural sketch
final sketch

Unit 3: Camera movement (Sova Drone)

Rough gesture
Structural sketch
Final Sketch
  • I noticed in all of my animation attempts that I didn’t really need stick figures.
  • It was nice going back and refining each step before moving onto the next.
  • The structural step was really helpful, I liked marking where the limbs attached to the body with an X.
  • For the structural step I like to make the torso a tapering box and the pelvis a triangular prism.
  • I really didn’t like the final output compared to the structural sketch it looked super awkward.
  • To transform the manikin structural step into the final you need to focus on adding muscles.

I decided to explore the final sketch a little more by doing another drawing:

rough drawing
structural sketch

After getting the basics down, I played with many iterations of the final sketch.

first iteration
final iteration

I realized I don’t really like the linework on the final and it makes the form look very 2d. I decided to really focus on forms instead of lines when drawing. After all, I’m mostly interested in painting not drawing. The forms will help me figure out where the light hits.

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Developing My Own LLM Challenge

Byjack

I want to learn how to build my own large language model leveraging ChatGPT and my own proprietary data. There seems to be a couple of things that I need to learn before I do that:

  1. How ChatGPT fine tuned models work
  2. What a vector database is
  3. What is Langchain

Some helpful videos on each:

ChatGPT

Vector Database

Langchain

Hands on Coding