Strength seems to be half pressure/work and half recovery and growth. And today is a recovery day.
I’m quite pleased that I have a recovery day because I really need to comfort and soothe my knee a lot and I like exploring ways to do that.
It’s also interesting that my exercises are completely different from the knees over toes guy. Maybe at some point, they will converge when my knees get stronger.
Recovery Exercises:
Gentle knee spacer
One leg is straight and extended
The other leg is lifted up gently to the side and slowly relaxed so there is space created in the joint
Foot scrape
One leg straight, the other leg lifted up
Relax and let the lifted leg gently fall and scrape on the ground
I’ve had knee problems for my half of my life. I wanted to get the motivation to heal the knee. It started with the Knee Mobility Challenge, which by the way wasn’t even my first knee challenge. Then I started to work on my overall fitness and knee motivation with the JiuJitsu challenge.
This is sort of a continuation of that.
My current goals:
Lift up my knee and bend it feeling stable, comfortable and strong
Stand for 5 minutes while feeling comfortable
Lay on either side feeling comfortable and relaxed
Sit on my heels while feeling comfortable and relaxed
Be able to jump feeling stable, comfortable, and strong
Able to kick a roundhouse while feel stable, comfortable and strong
I started this challenge on October 8th. Now it is November 21st. And I can say with honesty that I really followed the challenge very very well.
A couple of notes:
I was forced to go to bed later on two separate occasions, once for work, when I finished a production deployment at 11:30 and went to bed at maybe 12:30
Another time when I was helping my girlfriend with her project and I was up until 12, I cheated by “sleeping” on the coach by the computer at 11 but since I didn’t actually go to bed until much later, it wasn’t that good
After these cheat days it got really hard to stick to my schedule for a few days, but now it is easy again. There were a few times that I went to bed at 1 or 3 am because I didn’t go to sleep and I often go to sleep at 12 or 1, but I get to my bedroom by 11:30 usually and almost always start washing up by 11:10.
Overall this is a smashing success. I have genuinely changed for the better and I think this time the change might actually last.
I do want to still apply some of my earlier ideas and focus on different needs and try to meet them better every day.
I can also work on turning off screens earlier and stopping eating so close to bedtime. But the eating has definitely gotten better and the screens are just hard since I like to play Valorant with my friends at night.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Today I had a couple observations after feeling very depleted and inflamed with allergies:
Breathing fully and deeply while feeling the sensations helped move the chi
Clockwise massage on my stomach really helped the chi flow a lot
Same direction with palms facing back on the lower spine to tailbone also very helpful
Clockwise rubbing of the solar plexus also really helpful
Hanging was a nice resting position
Eating slow wasn’t the best method
Prefer to eat moderate speed for a small amount at a time, chewing in a bigger motion and smelling and tasting the food with small breaks in between bites and some stomach massage
I want to continue to push myself and work on finding good resting positions and strategies to recover.
I also need to work on setting a baseline and measurements to track progress.
Get a scale to weigh myself
Get a heart rate monitor, smartwatch or fitness band to monitor vitals
Need to come up with a standard lighting to take a photo
UNIT ONE, Week 1: Regen from tiring out (no matter how tired, wired or drained) lasts 7 days