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Knee Strength 11: More Knee Exercises

Byjack

New video that produced big results. Thinking about signing up for his course.

Similar Posts

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Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path

Byjack

I’ve looked at multiple things recently:

  • My lesson with a CS Go / Valorant coach
  • A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
  • A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player

What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.

Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.

A few different examples:

  • You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
  • You can play only with people you know
  • You can play the game to gain rank
  • You can play the game to try out the different agents
  • You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
  • You can play the game for the strategy required

I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.

  1. I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
  2. I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
  3. I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round

Step 1: Finding people to play with

The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.

Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me

The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:

  • Minimap
    • Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
  • Aiming
    • Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
  • Movement
    • Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
  • Abilities
    • Knowing lineups and ability planning
  • Clearing
    • Knowing how to path through a site properly
  • Switching weapons
    • Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon

Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds

Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:

  • Abilities
  • Killing people and not getting killed

I want to reframe Valorant for me.

Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team. 

As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:

  1. Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
  2. Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
  3. Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out

Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:

Growth: Getting better over time

Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area

Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with

Here is what I think my routine should generally be:

  1. Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
  2. Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
  3. Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
  4. Meditate
  5. Play a game, focus on winning rounds
  6. Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
  7. Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
  8. Meditate, reflect and write blog post

 

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Valorant Challenge 3: High Elo Play

Byjack

I played with my brother and his friend who are in Gold 1 and Plat 1 respectively.

I feel that a huge part of the problems I run into in playing Valorant is self doubt.

When I get worried that I am playing with people better than me, instead of learning and adapting, I freeze up and cannot think properly and play worse than I would normally:

  • I make bad decisions
  • I don’t take time to aim and spray wildly
  • I push too fast

One way I’ve handled this is lowering my expectations for myself and my game but this is still an ongoing challenge for me.

I also played with a girl who wasn’t that good at the game on my slow laggy laptop. It was an interesting experience because at first, I did really bad, but I ended up getting so many kills. She wasn’t very good so I felt the people we were matched with were in iron (who I should easily beat) but I found it hard because it’s hard for me to flick onto their head with my laggy laptop. I always find it tough to play on the little f*cker.

Two ways that I adjusted:

  1. Hold angles, stop pushing so fast
  2. Make sure I isolate as much as possible. Even if I miss, I might not die if I don’t peek out to 3 or 4 enemies.

I feel like these lessons can pass over to my regular gaming PC.

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Valorant 27: Confidence

Byjack

I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.

I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.

The first video was this:

Ideas:

  • Confidence is not about positive or negative thinking
  • There are two ways of thinking
    • Logically and analytically
    • Intuitively
  • Confidence is about trusting the second type of thinking
  • Timing cannot be thought

Ideas:

  • People often rely on outside sources of confidence
    • Success
    • External Validation
    • Comparing ourselves with others
  • These outside sources of validation are not reliable
  • Confidence comes from being able to trust yourself
  • Trustworthiness is from people who follow a code
    • Ex: Warrior code “no man left behind” (inspires confidence in your unit because other people won’t leave you behind)
    • Ex: Courage over success, valuing courage over failure or success validation
  • Code must be specific and have specific actions you take to fulfill it
  • Mantras can be helpful

So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:

  • Success – high KDA, increasing elo
  • Comparison – high KDA compared to others, higher rank
  • Knowledge and practice – learning techniques and practicing them
  • Performance – being able to predict moves, hitting my shots

What I admire in other players:

  • Clarity in thinking
  • Creative plays
  • Fast reactions
  • Precise mechanics
  • Boldness/confidence

I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:

  • I make success mean that I’m smart that I’m special
  • I make comparison mean that I’m special, that I’m a valuable or worthy person
  • I make knowledge and practice mean I’m smart and that I deserve to be heard
  • I make performance mean that I’m special and I’m capable

For the second list:

  • I make clarity mean that someone is smart
  • I make creativity mean intelligence, specialness, worthy of love and admiration
  • I make fast reactions means someone is attractive
  • Precise mechanics I make it mean someone is capable, valuable and worth a lot
  • Boldness and confidence I make it mean someone is valuable and special

To think about it further my code might need to address:

  • Inner value – what is valuable about myself
  • Inner specialness – what do I think is special about myself
  • Inner love and admiration – what do I love and admire about myself
  • Inner capability – what makes myself capable

I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.

Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.

I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.

The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:

  • Check in to how I’m feeling
  • Vocalize my feelings
  • Check in to how others are feeling
  • Let the energy carry action
  • Let the plan form in my mind
  • Create a challenge at the start of every round

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Valorant 11: Getting Back From Being Washed

Byjack

I’m doing REALLY badly with Valorant. Some observations:

Good Things
  • Movement is actually REALLY good
  • Aim is not bad
  • Gamesense OK
What I Need To Work On
  • Stop having the bad habit of moving TOWARDS the enemy. Try to keep strafing. More so in game, but also in deathmatch.
  • Movement is good, but move in the way to isolate angles, don’t try to peek too hard.
  • When aiming, need to have a smoother crosshair, don’t let the movement throw off crosshair
  • Need to work more on “catching the kills” and timing
    • Catching kills is mostly trying to hold angles, need to feel the swing (either wide or close)
    • Need to feel the timing of how soon and quickly to peek back out after missing
    • Use movement to adjust aim
    • Spray through and feel out the preaim (feel out where they are)
  • Can improve movement by using the crouch/crouch peek more often

Overall, I think I’m not doing as badly as I think I am. Just need to slow down the frantic movement to have steadier crosshair movement. I need to hold angles more, and only peak when I feel like I can snap onto a head (catching the aim).

Like in my aiming exercise, I should only hold angles, until the aim comes alive for me.

The biggest downfall I see multiple times is using movement to get closer when I can just hold the angle from far away. My aim is actually really good, just don’t give it any room to shine.

Core Wounds 9

Byjack

I kind of dropped the ball on these because I don’t know if I feel like challenging my core wounds, but I think I need to keep going for the 21 days at least. It is interesting because you are supposed to focus on one core wound. I don’t know which one I would focus on, but maybe if I just keep going there is one that I will want to focus on.

I was talking to a friend about how it is hard to work on yourself sometimes. What I told her is that it is sometimes scary to think about who you might change into, but I think there is another reason. Sometimes it is hard to work on yourself because in order to work on yourself you first need to look at yourself in the mirror and face who you are, and that isn’t easy to do.

I think a big core wound or belief is that there is something wrong with me, that no one will actually like me if they know who I really am, that I’m weak and creepy and unattractive.

She Said I Made Her Day

Walking up to her out of the blue

On the streets of new york city

On the college campus

They both told me

I made their day

The next girl

Will think you are the one

She told me

And when I asked the girl

Lost in her own world

In a song she just found

Whether or not she thought I was attractive

She said yes

I felt she wanted to say more

But was too shy

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Physical Therapy Video Ideas

Byjack

Hanging thoughts:

  • Probably the most transformative exercise, feel lighter, more shoulder mobility, looser neck
  • Pain on the left shoulder when doing a wide hang, seems to be getting better with time
  • Let the shoulders relax enough that the shoulders are close to the ears
  • Slightly tense abbs to pull ribs down

Mewing thoughts:

  • Keep mouth closed when eating
  • Use swallowing food as a way to practice mewing technique
  • Tongue is not behind teeth, its farther back on the upper pallet