I’ve done it, started to waver on my sleep challenge. The main issue is that I no longer take a hard stance on when I go to sleep, but the one thing that is holding over, is that I get to my bedroom by 11.
I want to recommit to getting into my bed by 11, even if I continue to stay up after.
However, despite wavering, and getting into bed at 11:30, I have started to innovate and think more carefully on how I spend the rest of the hours of my day:
I stop playing Valorant at 9 (or in the case of yesterday, don’t even play Valorant)
I started writing in my journal every night before bedtime to process any feelings that need to be processed
I started doing cupping before sleep to improve circulation
I also usually work on posture and my knee exercises
Now that I think about it, I actually succeeded pretty good at this challenge because I’m starting to feel like doing all sorts of things before bedtime such as drawing and reading books.
Another thing I like to do at night is listen to videos that are about AI and are interesting to me to keep up with the latest AI news.
I really like where all of this is going, and writing this at 5 AM in the morning makes me feel like it is nighttime and I’m feeling the vibes. I want to spend more time at night creating worlds. Either drawing, writing a novel or learning.
I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.
I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:
Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.
I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.
I want to focus on my health.
I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.
Here are the areas that I care about:
Mood: How positive and happy I feel overall
Passion for life: How motivated I feel about life, relationships and projects
Energy: How energetic and strong I feel
Flow: how in the moment and attuned to my body’s sensations I feel
Attractiveness: how healthy I look
Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:
When I wake up: great for seeing how well I slept
Around 10 AM: good for checking up on my morning routine
Around 3 PM: good for checking on my afternoon routine
Before I go to bed: good to seeing the cumulative effect of the day and how fulfilled I feel
I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.
What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.
I’m back from two weeks of traveling and I finally tried it. Movement-based aiming.
It was quite a challenge let me tell you!
Game 1-3: Competitive Games on My Smurf (Comps)
Comp 1: Horrible, terrible no good very bad game. Practiced clutching since the Cypher was completely being annoying, toxic, and throwing (trying to sabotage our team). Was fuming by the end.
Comp 2: Much better team, still missing everything and being horrible.
Comp 3: Finally got a nice team and was able to focus on movement-based aiming.
Comp 4: Bad aiming. Focused on Sova utility. Hit someone with the ult using pure gamesense.
Main Takeaways
I need to follow my previous concept of feeling out the unknown parts of aiming in a controlled setting (deathmatch or shooting range)
I’m much worse than before break, probably Bronze 1-2 level.
Game 1-3: Deathmatch Practice (DM)
DM 1: After practicing in the range, I realize that moving only the movement keys to aim is too hard. I need to do a little micro-adjusting with my mouse. I feel like I need to be looser about my mouse movement, when I intuitively move it in the opposite of my movement, I get some nasty headshots. Mostly I get destroyed.
DM 2: Still getting destroyed. I start to understand that movement-based aiming is basically what the Miyagi Do method is teaching.
DM 3: I realized that I need to make sure it’s not just about the movement and feeling that out. Aiming is about TIMING. I spend the entire deathmatch feeling out timing and it starts to be more clear. I am successfully about to “feel out” the aiming on a deep intuitive level like art or dance.
Main Takeaways
I need to constantly move. Movement is something I will also need to practice getting a feeling for.
The movement of the crosshair should be with movement, smooth and intuitive.
You need to feel the mouse-hand connection, your posture, and your sensitivity. Shift to what feels good, shift to what feels clear and controlled.
Timing is absolutely key. Dying is not a problem. Waiting for the right moment is much more important. If you are getting killed first, that’s to be expected for good timing. Your timing will naturally tighten and your time to kill will go down without feeling rushed, out of control, or unclear.
I’m soooo happy!!!
I’m starting to “feel out” aiming just like I feel out drawings, dance and sales processes.
Here are the main takeways:
The main goal of practice sound is able to “Feel Out” and play with the mouse to crosshair connection, how to smoothly track, strafe your crosshair while moving, and shooting moving things. Play around with it, feel it out.
The Miyagi Do method is the main method you use to practice. However, you don’t just feel out the movement. You also feel out the timing.This is key.
I tend to rush and even if I get a kill, it doesn’t feel natural, in control, and comfortable. Dying is always preferable to bad timing. Since timing will get tighter, spamming will make sure you never improve.
The next things I need to feel out are:
Gun spray control
Gamesense
watching the minimap
understanding timing
guessing what they will do next
Isolating 1v1s, only peeking as much as needed
Switching between primary and sidearms
Movement
How to jiggle and peek safety
How to get on top of things
When to pull out your knife
Agent movement abilities
Ability usage
Lineups
Timing and combos
I’m extremely confident that this method will NOT ONLY make you a monster after warming up, but every warmup will make you internally better at aiming (to the point that you will need to warm up less and less to have insane aim).
So I’ve fallen off the weight challenge a little bit due to losing my phone and having some serious trouble with routines.
But here are some updates.
In terms of appetite, I realized that stuffing yourself with food simply doesn’t work with me. I tend to feel stressed and bloated, and end up somehow losing weight as my digestion falls apart. A major tip for me that seems to work is eating enzymes. They always seems to help me a lot when breaking down food and I definitely seem to gain weight after that.
In terms of routine, I started implementing daily walks morning walks with a cup of tea and that has been working great. What hasn’t been working great is getting enough sleep and going to bed on time.
The main blocked appears to be Valorant. Today I thought about how I always focus on the problem itself as the issue but I was wondering whether or not the issue actually manifests earlier.
For example, I know in Valorant, I always blame my aim for losing gun fights, but I never think about what led up to the gunfight and how that might have put me in a unwinnable situation, or at least, a very difficult to win situation.
In terms of going to bed on time, I always blame gaming late at night. But thinking about it more deeply, I theorized that the issue actually occurs much earlier in the day, specifically during noon and afternoon. This is when I start to feel discomfort and turn to Valorant to start numbing out the pain.
Fix noon and I fix bedtime.
Today I tried taking a nap at noon and it seems to work. It’s 11 PM and while I feel pretty shitty from playing Valorant, I actually feel like it was easier for me to stop, and I may go to bed around midnight instead of 2 or 3 AM.
Today is actually the end of unit one (Baseline health: strong enough to exercise bulk and be normal health). The next unit starts tomorrow (Bulking and buildup: Gain 3 pounds of muscle).
I’m excited to see how I can start to use the rhythms I’m starting to build up, with the energy exercises and increasing diet to greater effects.
In my Valorant journey right now, I’m very interested in perfecting strafe shooting and proper clearing.
I heard that one of the elements of getting really good is about focusing on fewer things. What I’m really working on right now is getting something out of my warmups.
I usually play deathmatch until I feel like I’m hitting my shots and then jump into a match. But, now I’m thinking I need to let go of trying to push off from the confidence in a good deathmatch and instead working on making the mechanics more intuitive…meaning I need to deathmatch until I can hit shots even if I’m not match mvp, my clears, peeks and jiggles feel COMFORTABLE. Even if that means going into some deathmatches where it is really hard and everyone on taps me. The point of warmup should be when I feel like I’m not having trouble hitting shot anymore.
So I’m most of the way through my second part of my challenge – Week 2: Big appetite (increase hunger throughout day) and I’m having a huge amount of issues.
I try to eat a lot but I don’t seem to be able to find a way to digest the food.
Several things seem to be standing in my way:
Extreme chronic stress
Lack of exercises and energy
Poor sleep
I’m going to do what I always did in these situations of great stress. I’m going to simplify and try to find something very small to focus on. And that thing will be breathing.
Whether or not I feel full, hungry stressed, tired or anxious, I am going to strive to do only one thing. To breathe. I find that breathing has tremendous effects for all the of things I listed above as obstacles standing in my way.
As I look at my jiujitsu challenge, I realize that knee rehabilitation must be an essential component to my strategy because strengthening my knee, healing it, and making it less prone to injury will probably be the most important factor for how successful the challenge is.
In looking into it further, I also realized that I completely forgot about my last post about my knee in which I outlined three goals:
1 month goal – be able to sleep, walk, stand and light exercise with zero discomfort. I will call this goal little freedom.
1 year goal – to get back to preinjury levels
2 year goal – the ability to practice martial arts, parkour gymnastics and skiing. My goal isn’t to go too hard in any of these areas, just to be able to do them safely.
It’s funny because it’s been 5 months since that last post and I pretty much immediately dived into the 2 year goal because I lost motivation for the 1 month goal.
I also realized that my first post with two exercises for massaging the knee are extremely effective, especially the one that lifts and relaxes the knee joint.
I also rediscovered this video about tendon strength:
With these key takeaways:
do concentric-focused movements, a lot of volume with lower weight, do them explosively, fast eccentric
reversing the direction very fast (eccentric to concentric), challenges the tendon
if you lower the weight slowly you will favour the muscle, if you jerk it you will favour the tendon
larger range of motion challenges the tendon, but you can train them with short range and high weight and high speed
progress all of these slowly: weight, range of motion, speed
Bottom line though, I don’t really know what to do next.
My main blocker is just this feeling that in order to achieve the level of strength in my knee that I want. I will have to literally work out every day for a significant period of time and I don’t have the strength and the interest in doing that. It also seems really hard to get that done while also juggling work, jiujitsu and sleep.
However, now that I write that out, maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to work out every day at all. Maybe I just need to work out once a week intensely. I know that even that low frequency over a long period of time will be at least enough to sustain strength in my knee. I might even be able to get away with once every other week!
I also really want my workouts to help with one very important thing for me, stress relief. I have so many mentally rigorous tasks from doing work at my job, thinking about youtube, and playing Valorant that I need an outlet for my stress. I guess I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, how to integrate it into my day that doesn’t feel like it is going to take a huge amount of time.
Perhaps it isn’t about taking a huge amount of time. Maybe it is like my posture challenge. Since I had some very simple exercises for that, maybe I need to simplify my workouts to be much more simple. I tried my warmup playlists, but they feel a little too slow and stagnant. This playlist seems really good to stop and start at any time:
I think what will be most effective is to slowly work through the video, only doing it for as long as I want to, for short periods of time. So always pick up where I left off, but never feel the need to go for a certain period of time. Hell, I could do 10 second intervals throughout the day. I can handle 10 seconds no?
Also, in the meantime, I think I need to find a way to do more of the knee over toes workout every single day, except the weekends.
The months I am not doing jiujitsu, I will need to organize my own conditioning and physical therapy workouts.
I think overall, I work too hard when I’m already exercising and too little when I’m not. For instance, right now I’m doing jiujitsu at least 3 times per week so I don’t need so many conditioning exercises, probably just more soothing massage, warmth, meditation etc.
When I take time off of jiujitsu though, I would like to go a bit harder.
Finally, I want to remind myself of a couple of truths when it comes to my knee:
Allowing tissues to slide and glide will remove pain, its not the scar that is the issue, it is when it sticks
Building up strength in muscles help protect against injury even with weak tendons and ligaments by absorbing shock
Building up tendons and ligaments will protect cartilage and bones by absorbing shock
Increasing range of motion help make muscles and tendons more efficient