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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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Profit in Peace 22: Feeling Like Shit

Byjack

I feel like total shit. I didn’t sleep well and the back of my eyes hurt and I’m tired and bleary and a little cold. It is taking everything to not play games all day. I feel what gives me anxiety in this house isn’t just the expectations from my parents…but also the amount of stuff. There is too much stuff to feel comfortable around here. To feel calm.

I have been thinking about this idea a lot. The idea of “Whatever you feel the world is withholding from you is what you withhold from the world.”

I feel that this can help with a lot of the turmoil in my mind.

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Knee Strength 3: Recovery and Mobility Exercises

Byjack

Today is all about recovery.

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:

  1. Gentle knee spacer
    1. One leg is straight and extended
    2. The other leg is lifted up gently to the side and slowly relaxed so there is space created in the joint
  2. Foot scrape
    1. One leg straight, the other leg lifted up
    2. Relax and let the lifted leg gently fall and scrape on the ground
    3. Repeat with both legs in all directions
  3. Bonus lying down comfort
    1. Crossing legs
    2. Bending legs
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Profit In Peace 19: Taking Charge

Byjack

I’m angry. I feel trapped at home, at work, and in my relationship. I am tired and uncomfortable like I have no personal space. I am taking charge today.

I don’t know what that means, but right now it means, that for the first time since I came back to my parent’s house, I am doing my daily routine.

Nowhere To Go

My parents

Hovering

Watching

Judging

Like glue stuck to my arms

My girlfriend

A ball of frustration and negativity

That I feel anxiety in my core

Every time she pulls at me

My work a clash between

Two fighting parents

With me stuck in the middle

Where is the space for me?

I feel several realizations come to me when I write about these emotions. First, the technique of taking space. I feel all my oxygen, happiness, room, and sanity is taken away by others. I feel like I’m making myself smaller to give room to others. The first thing I want to do is to start taking up space, making demands, and making myself big.

The second thing that I feel is important (and might give me a clue as to how I can make myself big, and not huddle real small), is remembering my boundaries and needs:

  1. Time – I want to be in control of my time
  2. Honesty – I want to be honest with myself and others
  3. Empathy – I want to empathize and others to empathize with me
  4. Possibility – I want to believe anything is possible
  5. Respect – I want others to show respect for me and my abilities

This already gives me a clearer idea of what is happening here.

I definitely feel a lack of honesty, time, and sometimes respect and empathy at home. In fact, maybe possibility sometimes too. In my relationship I feel lack of honesty, empathy, possibility, and time (and sometimes respect). And at work, I feel a lack of respect, honesty, empathy, and time as well.

I also feel that in every scenario, the key is wanting everyone to like me to not feel uncomfortable.

I caused most of these boundary violations to happen, and that is empowering because I have the ability to change them,

One of the things I want to do instead of wanting everyone to be happy and wanting everyone to like me, is approach people with my same values.

For example, if I want to be honest with someone, empathize with them, show respect, but let go of trying to control how they feel. If I want to be respected more, I can do that with empathy and honesty and respect as well.

This is far more empowering and less stressful because I am in control of myself. I can change how I approach situations, but I cannot control others.

The Project Management Crash Challenge

Byjack

It is time for a crash course in project management!

Objectives:

  1. Understand and be able to apply major project management methodologies (PMP school, waterfall, agile project management)
  2. Review other methodologies that I already know (design thinking, OKRs, SRE, DevOps, UI/UX)
  3. Formulate resources and learning into distinct repositories of knowledge and simple shortcuts and worksheets that I can use as shorthand reminders and ways to kick off processes

Total time: 4 hours

PART ONE: Master project management (2 hrs)

  • Section one: Learn, research, and gather (1 hr)
    • Subsection one: Warm up via listening to videos and gathering resource lists (20 minutes)
    • Subsection two: Create own practice scenarios and find questions in them (20 minutes)
    • Subsection three: Consume and build resource repos off of resource lists and answer my own questions (20 minutes)
  • Section two: Create practice scenarios (30 min)
  • Section three: Question and answer (30 min)

PART TWO: Review other methodologies (1 hr)

  • Section one: write down everything from memory basic searching (20 minutes)
  • Section two: watch videos (20 minutes)
  • Section three: search for resources and worksheets (20 minutes)

PART THREE: Create and organize resources (1 hr)

  • Section one: create a structure for folders and docs (20 minutes)
  • Section two: create resources for project management (20 minutes)
  • Section three: create resources for other methodologies (20 minutes)

Here is a video that I started out with:

Project Life Cycle
Project Management Process

Links to the worksheets

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Artistic Life Challenge

Byjack

I don’t really know much about what I want from this challenge yet just so as to say that there was a part of my life when I felt really connected to visual art. I used to draw all the time, I used to think about ideas for paintings and dream of illustrating children’s books and graphic novels.

A part of me is still excited by those things but for whatever reason, maybe it was going to a school without passionate artists, maybe it was pushing myself to be more logical and working in logical STEM fields for years, or maybe it was just a part of growing up – I lost touch with art somewhere along the way.

The challenge is simple but difficult to define. I will have succeeded if I feel that I am meeting my need to be creative and finding that joy, wonder, and creativity in my life again like I did when I was younger.

I will try to express the feelings through a poem:

Anything Was Possible

Anything was possible back then

And by anything I don’t mean that I ever dreamed of anything as boring as a seven-figure salery

I felt the worlds of magic at my fingertips

The rush and pull of sorcery

A great clash between good and evil

And a bond between friends, unwavering

Of great courage and great sacrifice

I think now

In what my younger self could have only described

As old age

30 years old is practically ancient

I know that the only way I can do this challenge

Is not through an arbitrary goal or metric

But rather it has to be a portal to another world

A graphic novel

Like I always wanted

Or an illustrated book

It doesn’t matter

Because it is the world that matters

The world that I can escape to

Like the little mouse hole my six year old self would crawl into

To read frog and toad books at the library

Perhaps this has all come full circle after all

Because 30 years old is precisely the age

My younger self would expect to be the time

When people stopped being readers

And started being writers

The creators of the worlds

Like the ones I used to like to escape to

When I was young

It’s actually both fantastic and sad that it took a poem for me to understand what my focus will be for my art challenge. I think I will rename this challenge. I wanted to find myself reinspired by art, and I forget how art inspired me in the first place – by entering and creating other worlds.

This will now be known as the “The Other World” challenge and I will dedicate a year to it.

One year to develop another world that I can dive into, be comforted by, and be lost in.

That means by October 9th, 2024 I will endeavor to have created a miracle. Shaped and molded a whole new universe out of words, images, and maybe even music.

I’m excited because I thought this challenge was going to be like the rest of them, so difficult and challenging. I thought it was going to be about doing Inktober and drawing for an art competition. I realize now that those goals are meaningless to me, and using them as goals, made me feel directionless in art.

This feels more true to my love for art. I remember crying to my girlfriend today about a beautiful book I read when I was young, called the Power of Un. It was a world that I fell into, just like all the others. It was all these worlds that made me feel excited for life. And it is the absence of these worlds that have left me feeling like some part of me was lost and never quite found.

French Challenge 1: A Head Scratcher

Byjack

This is definitely one of the most difficult challenges I’ve undergone in a while.

I’ve tried a couple of things and I feel frustrated.

The Reaching for the Untouchable

The frustration

The reaching in my heart

Is getting to me

Reaching for the untouchable

I wonder if I will ever know

The doubt creeps

I seek to know

And when I rush there

There is still nothing

Frustration in my chest

Like a roar that wants to escape

But is trapped behind bars

I have created multiple messages to my girlfriend in French, multiple times I’ve tried to imitate. I feel like imitation is the key, but I grow tired of seeing no results. I feel tired and frustrated.

I feel angry and unhappy.

I suspect failure is such a hard thing for me to grasp. It is such a tough pill to swallow.

I saw a video with a lot of potential:

It is about learning jiujitsu really fast. But really it is about learning. He talks about many ideas in the video, ideas that I’ve myself considered. Ideas that I think are pretty profound and helpful:

  1. Performance vs. growth
    1. Train in the gym to fail – growth
    2. Compete to win – performance
  2. Form to leave form
    1. Repetition until it is second nature
    2. Turn something thought into something intuitive
  3. Smaller circles
    1. Reduce something from intuition to a conscious idea
    2. Look for different ways to apply it

He mentions some really interesting sounding books:

  1. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
  2. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara
  3. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard

Anyway, I feel if I were to embrace my fear of failure, I need to meditate on it, but also come up with a plan.

I first want to come up with the plan to train From to Leave Form…and be repetitive about the most common words in French, say them until they are second nature.

So what are the top most common 10 words in French:

  • Oui: Yes
  • Non: No
  • Merci: Thank you
  • Je: I
  • Tu/vous: You
  • Le/la/les: The
  • Un, une des: A, an, and some
  • Le/la/les: It, them
  • Et: And
  • Mais: But
  • Bonjour: A general greeting meaning “hello” or “good morning”
  • Au revoir: Goodbye
  • Salut: Hello
  • Amour: Love
  • Bonheur: Happiness
  • Chat: Cat
  • Chien: Dog

But these words are too basic. What about the top 10 most common phrases?

  • Bonjour: Means “hello” or “good morning”.
  • Merci: Means “thank you”.
  • S’il vous plaît: Means “please”.
  • Ça va?: Means “how are you?” .
  • Je ne sais pas: Means “I don’t know”.
  • Parlez-vous anglais?: Means “Do you speak English?” .
  • Bienvenue: Means “welcome”.
  • Madame/Monsieur/Mademoiselle: Means “Mrs.”, “Mr.”, or “Miss”.
  • Anchante enchante: Means “nice to meet you”.
  • Sava: Means “how are you”.
  • C’est simple comme bonjour: Means “it’s simple as hello”.
  • Et patati et patata: Means “and so on”.
  • En avoir ras-le-bol: Means “to have had enough”.
  • Tu m’étonnes: Means “tell me something I don’t know”.

Ok that is a little better, but what about the most common French verbs?

Aller
Means “to go” and is also used to describe the near future tense.
Avoir
Means “to have” and is used to express possession, relationships, physical and mental states, and many other contexts.
Être
Means “to be” and indicates the action or state of being.
Pouvoir
Means “can” or “to be able to”. It’s an irregular verb like prendre or faire, belonging to the third group.
Savoir
Used to indicate knowledge or understanding. It can also be used in many idiomatic expressions, such as “savoir-faire” (know-how).
Mettre
Means “to put” but can also be used for dropping someone off somewhere, laying the table, taking time to do something, laying a carpet.
Prendre
Means “to take”, including “to travel” on particular forms of transport. It is also used for having meals.
Venir
Means “to come”, and it can be easily used to conjugate the recent past or convey the idea that you have just done something recently.
Vouloir
Often translated as to want and to wish in English, as its main usage is to express desires and wishes.

I want to read more about verbs in French but it is too late and I need to go to bed.