I just came back from standup paddleboarding and I feel really really good. Everything is clear and easy to see. I need to find a way to go and play on the water more.
I also was thinking about how if the eye is constantly in a state of contraction, we might need to do some sort of massage in order to help loosen and relax the ligaments and the muscles. I don’t know yet what kind of massage will work. All the current massages only target the areas around the eyes.
I wasn’t able to test my vision on my phone because it is out of battery but I tested on very small text on a book an the results are mindblowing.
I’ve been at a loss as to how to get more stretch in my knees, but I got some inspiration recently from this video:
Lots of cool ideas in this video. Specifically with rolling the knees back and forth.
I feel that this might require something more in terms of exercise, some knee strength somehow to stabilize the knees more, but I feel this is a big part of the puzzle.
I wanted to do a bit of a post to understand how I am feeling right now about the Valorant challenge. I know I feel incredibly stressed, angry, and depressed because I feel like I wasted all my time on Valorant. So much time trying so hard to be good, but nothing seems to really come of it. Sometimes looking at my VODs I feel like my gameplay is the same as it was before.
I don’t really know what is going on and why it seems like I’m new to the game every time. I don’t know why I’m overthinking everything. Why is everything so hard?
I wish I could see major mistakes in my old gameplay.
I guess watching more VOD reviews will help me understand. But that takes so damn long. Maybe it means that there are still opportunities to play much much better. I feel that I maybe have gotten much better but it doesn’t seem to translate over to comp. Maybe it’s also something about understanding the maps better. I really get the sense that I got to plat last time by playing more comfortably on agents and on maps. I think I understood just how to play each map better. But I want to be a more complete player. I want to play with better movement and peeking.
Something else that I feel that I missed out on was just having more posts about the emotions I was feeling. It makes me sad that all my Valorant posts were about techniques and none of them were about emotions.
Valorant has a lot of nice emotions for me. I met my girlfriend on Valorant, I had a lot of friends on Valorant. These days I play mostly alone, but I still like the world. Cool agents and fun to get on to all these different teams. I love it when I have some really fun crazy game sense timing lurks. I guess that is one way that I got significantly better than before.
I wish I had VODs from when I was in iron. I feel that jump from iron to silver was the large one. The jump from silver to plat is weirdly small.
Ok. So I just spent a good hour or so just watching my VODs from bronze until plat then back to gold. I actually feel my overall movement is better and more consistent. The only difference in plat is that I was calmer and held an angle for longer. I also did more wide jiggles. I know for gold I held a lot more angles, and made sure to hold them wide because they would often wide swing everything.
Looking forward, I would be so happy if I kept calm and held angles for longer when moving around the map, held for the wide swing more often. Then when fighting an angle, I want to be more aggressive, swinging very fast and hard, but stopping at the edge and fighting, not leaving until I try to kill them, maybe just letting go of movement keys or crouch spraying. I would love to see my fundamentals get really really good, to a level I know they can get to.
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)
Today in looking into how to increase strength and mobility into the tendons and ligaments, I made an exciting discovery and change in direction.
I’ve heard of the Knees Over Toes Guy ever since I went to Thai Massage and the massage therapist told me that he helped a lot with his knee injuries from doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
I know this challenge was to make my knee stronger just for going to Zion National Park, but this changes things completely.
The Knees Over Toes Guy has a program that costs about $50 per month. I decided to try it out as part of this challenge…but also as part of a bigger effort to regain my life. For the longest time, I have been searching for something that would let me be active again in life. Specifically, I want to get back into martial arts and work on Jiu Jitsu, wrestling and striking. I know that is completely impossible right now since I can’t even sleep on my side without pain in my knee.
This guy has renewed hope in me because apparently he was struggling with knee pain for 10 years and has had 6 surgeries and now is able to play basketball with zero pain even though he is pushing his body farther than ever (now dunks the ball).
This of course, changes my approach to the challenge and I need to rewrite my syllabus. I didn’t want to get rid of the syllabus because that is what has created such happiness and progress in all my challenges, but this is an excellent opportunity to improve the process. I have always felt that rigidly following something even when it isn’t the best path anymore is inefficient and wastes time. Being able to adapt the syllabus when you feel a major shift (not just all the time for no reason) makes a lot of sense.
There is a major shift that needs to happen because I realized that the current syllabus is not perfect due to the fact that even day 1 I realized that all exercises involve muscles, fascia and ligaments and tendons, yet they are all spread out over days in the syllabus and that makes no sense.
So here is my revised syllabus:
Days until Zion: 8
UNIT 2: Testing Knees Over Toes
Day 1 – Surface Tissues
UNIT 2: Testing Knees Over Toes
Day 1 – Day 5 – ATG workouts (Zero Program)
UNIT 3: Recovery
Day 1 – Cooling and antioxidation Day 2 – Cleansing and Fasting Day 3 – Fortifying and Nutrition
I had quite a stressful workday as I expected but I wanted to jot down a couple of reflections today:
Reminding myself of my boundaries (time, respect, honesty, empathy, and possibility) really helped
It also helped to note down what I cannot control before every major meeting (usually something related to how someone felt about me)
I noticed that keeping pace with my todo list was helpful:
Keep all tasks that come to mind in my todo list (use it as a mental trashcan to throw all my worries)
Reorder todo list to whatever I am working on right now (move something to the top if I am currently working on it)
Do tasks immediately if they are low-effort
Do sweeps (try to do everything on the todo list)
Focus also helped
Close as many tabs as possible
Focus on one thing at a time
I was thinking about how to transition from work to Valorant more effectively since I usually start to feel dead and I end up watching youtube and ordering food and that kind of makes it hard for me to stay sharp when gaming and I end up feeling even more stressed and awful.
I think cleaning is a really good transition point. Cleaning reduces stress and is a great way to transition slowly…if I’m worried that there will still be a call coming in and I might have to go back to work, cleaning makes it easy to go back to work without feeling like I am not ready to transition to the next thing. In fact, if I clean, even if I go back to work, I will still be more ready to game after the work is done because my space is now clean.
I also like the idea of a mental dump to write down everything you are thinking about at the end of the day so that you can pick it up at any point today or tomorrow or the day after.
Finally, I like to look at the schedule for the next day and mentally prepare for it to know what you can do today to give you a lot of spaciousness tomorrow.
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.