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Mewing and Tongue Position

Byjack

I’ve always had trouble finding a relaxed position for my tongue at the roof of the mouth. I always felt that I was forcing it and in the past when I tried to “mew” I got terrible headaches.

However, I noticed I spend a lot of time breathing from my mouth and I wanted to fix things so I used a bit of connection theory to come up with an idea on how to hold my tongue and I came up with this simple technique:

  • Imagine your spine ending at your tailbone and reaching up all the way and ending at your tongue
  • Imagine keeping your spine open at extended

This imagery has a couple of benefits:

  • Most importantly for me, this allows me to move my body and my tongue without feeling like I cannot maintain tongue posture (mewing always felt static and forced to me)
  • Simple and seems quite relaxing to me

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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Jiujitsu Journey Month 1: Exploration

Byjack

Ok, so I just had a revelation.

I’ve been putting off making this post for the longest time because I just didn’t know what I wanted my goal and focus for this challenge to be.

I knew generally a couple of things:

  • I knew I wanted to be more dangerous
  • I wanted to get stronger
  • I wanted to learn technique that could be a basis for MMA and grappling
  • I wanted to feel motivated to work out again

But I had no idea of specifically what I wanted and how I wanted to get there.

But then it hit me. I don’t need to know. This is an experiment. I’m not setting a goal and see how close I get to it. I’m trying jiujitsu for a month and seeing how it will affect me. Along the lines of my goals:

  • I want to see how it affects my fighting ability and mindset
  • I want to see how it affects my body
  • I want to see what concepts and techniques I grasped
  • I want to see how it affects my relationship to exercise

Let’s go on a journey! That is why I renamed it Jiujitsu journey instead of jiujitsu challenge.

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Workpost 11: Mentalities for Happiness

Byjack

Today I woke up feeling pretty awful from going to bed at 4AM last night.

I was feeling super overwhelmed with many many things in my life.

Today, I chose to wake up slowly, get to work slowly, and here are some of the mentalities that helped me:

  1. Cleaning is incredibly healing. Any time of cleaning, cleaning your workspace, your body, your clothes, it all is very therapeutic.
  2. What can I do for future Jack. This is the Matthew McConnehey’s idea of leaving breadcrumbs. Instead of the common idea of letting your future self deal with a problem (let future Jack deal with the dishes, let future Jack deal with talking to this person) think about what you can do now to make your future self happier. This can look like everything from cleaning, to setting up a super nice workspace, cooking yourself a really good meal.
  3. Focus on challenge and growth. I think oftentimes I get overwhelmed because I think about how hard things are. What helps me is thinking about everything in terms of challenge and growth. How can I challenge myself? What can I do to grow?
  4. Live in the hierarchy of being true to oneself. I was talking to a friend the other day about hierarchies and choosing the right one (don’t compete in a hierarchy you don’t believe in such as money). I want to compete and live in a hierarchy of being honest and true to myself.

I still feel a quite a bit of stress of the difficult conversations I’m anticipating, and the difficult tasks I have in front of me.

Unwelcome World

I feel sometimes

I am living in a world

Where every step is heavy

But the gravity only pulls on my heart

And the future feels unknown

Scary and not comfy

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Posture Challenge – Unofficial Made Official

Byjack

I’ve been unofficially focusing on posture for some time now, including mewing, building muscles and strength, and ultimately for more a more aesthetic, healthy, and functional body.

A really helpful video is this:

I always have a lot of tightness in my chest and would like to have more of a wider back and more shoulder mobility.