Week 2: Muscle Memory

I started playing DotA back in high school.  That was an ancient time - an time when Skeleton King's first ability was Storm Bolt, clinching him the title of Least Imaginative Hero with four cloned abilities.  When Keeper's ult was Furion-in-a-box.  When Razor had chain lightning.  When legacy keys were the only keys, and the only thing you had to threaten a leaver with was your shitty local banlist.  Despite all this, the barrier to entry for DotA was still lower than WC3, so I stuck with it.

I sucked. Hard.  Most of my games were spent flailing about mindlessly.  I'd never understood denies, last hitting, clash control, or warding.  I would spend every 5 games crying to the Internet about how much I sucked and how hard it was to get better at it.  Obviously the Internet was not usually receptive to a bawling crybaby teenager.  Eventually I heard what would be both the worst and the best advice I'd get: "Stop playing."

So I stopped.

Just like I did with soccer, football, basketball, baseball, piano, tae kwon do, and judo, I stopped playing DotA before I ever got good.  I would continue to start things up and shut them down within a short bit of training all the way through college.  This continued to feed into a loop of self-deprecation.  I would identify as a man incapable of finishing things I started.

It became my opinion that games that didn't have a smooth learning curve were poorly designed.  Games needed to have seamless tutorials and snappy interfaces: if the game did not present you a step-by-step route to victory, it was "unintuitive" and "unwelcoming."  My champion game for this time was Team Fortress 2: a well-designed breath of fresh air in first person shooters, designed to allow smart planning to defeat twitch junkies, but still gave them their competitive edge.  It was easy to pick up and play.  It coached you through defeat with its kill-cam system, allowing you to know exactly how you died.  Perhaps best of all, it was anything but Call of Duty.  It was the Anti-CoD.

I began using TF2 as my australium-standard for self-aware game design.  I raged at fighting games that rewarded drilling complex combos over mind-games.  I accused them of lacking true depth.  I raged at games that didn't properly align style and gameplay - games like Super Smash Bros. Melee, where walking was replaced with this surreal technique known as "wave-dashing" that was better than walking in almost every way, and looked clearly like a bug.  Any competitive complexity introduced by the game was irrelevant; it looked silly and did not properly put me in the shoes of the character I was playing.

Eventually I heard about Heroes of Newerth, S2 games' attempt to revive the original DotA.  I was, strangely enough, ecstatic.  Despite my disdain for "competitive" level games, I had been meaning to get better at one eventually - perhaps to see what awaited me on the other side of the barrier to entry of games of this caliber.  Perhaps bringing back an old game would keep me engaged in a way that Street Fighter could never do.  Well, it succeeded, in the biggest way possible.

I wasn't a professional by any means, but I could at least tread water in higher skill games.  Team composition began to matter to me.  I understood clash control and lane pulling.  All those skills I failed to pick up when I was younger came back to me, despite my complaints and pessimism, and I didn't stop to think too much about how remarkable it was.

Fast forward to 2013, at the Sensei Memorial Judo Tournament.

Every year, I would accompany my father, a long-time sensei at our judo club, to this large tournament.  A massive mat covered the open auditorium floor, providing 8 fighting spaces for the hundreds of judoka that would attend the tournament.  I was always fascinated by the logistics involved, and enjoyed score keeping, so every year I volunteered to help run a few tables at the tournament.  I would sit behind a ladder bracket or a scoreboard each time and watch as competitor after competitor fought for that victory, despite how many times they had fallen before.  This year, I began to really appreciate the nuances of judo: the importance of timing, balance, prediction, and taking a good fall.  Perhaps, I thought, I could give this sport another shot.  Where every previous activity had failed me in its seeming simplicity, judo might be just the thing I need.

I went to the lunch room and sat down with a pile of home-made sushi and other treats, distributed free to the volunteers.  Almost ritualistically, the sensei would tease me a little bit about when I was coming back to judo.  This time, when they did, I suggested that I might actually want to begin practicing again. I got a long pep-talk from Sensei Albert, who told me that it was worth a shot.  He asserted that, now being a mature twenty-something instead of a developing child, it would be easier to appreciate judo and properly learn all the techniques available.  I would have the patience required to drill the moves.  I would have the self respect to get up when I fell down.  He claimed that he knew many people enjoyed judo much more as an adult than they did as a child for these very reasons, and stressed that it would be worthwhile. 

It all echoed my experience with DotA.  When I was a kid, I lost every match and cried about it afterward.  Now, I'm playing Dota 2, and my favorite heroes are Meepo, Pudge, and Invoker - easily some of the hardest heroes in the game to pick up.  My short-term memory might still be lacking, but I had managed to train my fingers to memorize Invoker's Cyclone -> Sunstrike -> Chaos Meteor -> Everything Else combo, and even feel confident taking blink dagger on Meepo.  Things that appeared unreachable when I was a child were mystically resting in the palm of my hand.

The following Monday, my dad found my old grade school gym bag, and packed it with my brother's old gi and a well worn white belt - more accurately, a beige belt.  I took the bag in hand, and took my first step back into the dojo.  With a bow, I understood that this time, things would be different.

Better.

Weight: 195.4 lbs
Squat: 150 lbs
Press: 85 lbs
Bench Press: 95 lbs
Deadlift: 220lbs

Power Clean: Starting Tuesday!

PROJECT BATTLE FURY: Week 1

A lot can happen in a week, evidently.

I'm pretty pleased with the responses to posting the plans for Project Battle Fury on reddit. /r/dota2 had nothing but love and wit - easily my favorite subreddit. The quality of fan submissions are always top notch, and its sense of humor is often subtle and classy. It even sounds like a couple other redditors were excited by the idea and are jumping on the bandwagon too.

/r/fitness, unsurprisingly, was a bit more critical. Don't worry guys, I got your message loud and clear: <b>cardio is for ignorant suckers.</b>

I didn't actually take that at face value, obviously.&nbsp; Training your heart is pretty important.&nbsp; And, over the course of the past week, I found that the judo I had started up a few weeks ago, combined with the extra lifting and ellipticalling I did, have made noticeable improvements to my endurance.

Admittedly, I did take some of your sometimes contradictory advice. I replaced my 3 cardio sessions a week with Starting Strength, and plan to use a more advanced plan for Phase 2. Some of you that actually paid attention to my article recommended I consult bodybuilding guides specifically. More than likely, I will, especially in Phase 2. For now however, I'm setting the personally important goal of losing weight for these first few weeks.

Knowing the StrongLifts community, and those of similar minds, I understand how great and healthy it is to just concentrate all your effort on lifting hard and eating enough for those muscle gainz. I realize that these "power lifters" have great practical strength, but also that they tend to look like generally overweight dudes. I think the people that are very much convinced that my realizations are "unrealistic" are, in part, assuming that I should be doing their program, and then, assuming I use their program, complaining that the results I want are unrealistic.  Which is why I've laid out my plan as such.

Now, I'm not saying that my goals are <i>guaranteed, </i>either. Allow me to digress for a moment:

Enthusiasm is a very tricky thing. In my experience, to get somebody to believe in something controversial, you have to overshoot a little bit to compensate. For example: when Fox News tells us that video games make our children violent sociopaths, how do we respond?

Like this?
"Well, it's difficult to pin direct causal relationships on this sort of thing. Playing violent video games and having real violent tendencies may merely have a common cause. But, it's fair to consider this from the perspective that violent media, in general, has a reciprocative dialogue with our culture that may propagate a culture of violence, and it's also fair to consider that interactive media might, read <i>might</i> have different effects on us, especially in our early developmental stages. I would, however, note that no study has conclusively proved this."

No, that will get you called a spineless apologist that's trying to hide behind fancy words. Instead, we respond with this:
"Absolutely not, you ignorant cudger. Violent video games have absolutely no effect on who we are as people, it's just media. You could say the exact same thing about violent movies, but nobody ever blames <i>them</i> for our mass shootings. When will you accept the overwhelming data that proves that video games are strictly entertainment?"

In judo, if someone attempts to throw you, but you keep dodging their attacks, you will get penalized for passivity. (<i>Shido!</i>). Likewise, in arguments of this nature, if your response is a defense, rather than a counter-attack, you will appear weaker to the opponent, despite having defended yourself successfully. So, we always respond, almost instinctively, with an overreaction. When we respond with an overreaction, people begin to take both sides seriously, and then some of these people realize that the truth lies <i>right in the middle</i> of these two radical statements.

This is very much my approach to getting my enthusiasm up and sustained for the duration of Project Battle Fury. Will I actually get that Bruce Lee body that I'm targeting by the end of this venture? Honestly? Probably not. But the idea of the one-in-a-million shot that this might give me perfect results is enough to persevere and try, even if realistically it will be somewhere partway there.  Your inspiration should always be an <i>ideal</i>, a perfect representation of an ultimate possibility. We will naturally only make it part of the way there, as humans are known to do, but if you set your goals high enough, you'll find you've still made a huge difference in the end.

Anyway, my plan is looking like this now:
SS: Tuesday Friday Sunday
Judo: Monday Thursday
Extra cardio: Saturday, or days I miss judo

This week went mostly as planned. I hit up judo on Monday, and did my weights Tuesday and Friday (if you're interested, I started at squatting 95 lbs, pressing 65, deadlifting 145, and benching 85.) Thursday, a lot of hard shit came up at work, and I missed judo because of it. My great lady friend I mentioned earlier offered to come work out with me after I got home to make up for the lack of exercise though, so I came out of that doing pretty well. Fitness dudebros will sometimes brag about how, in the face of adversity, they still found the time to make it to the gym. One guy went so far as to brag about how despite running late after crashing his car, he still went to the gym before sorting out all other manners of important shit in the day.

Well, when my apartment flooded Saturday while I was out on Saint Patrick's Eve downing whiskey, my schedule got a little bit whacked up. I sadly didn't make it to the gym to do SS today, but that was more than compensated for by the amount of shit I had to lug around to move into the new apartment. I figure the gods of stronk will forgive me for this one.

If you were wondering at any point why this blog post is a massive wall of text, without the luxuries of right-aligned images and heading formats, it's because I'm in the living room of a <i>new</i> apartment that isn't soaked in water, on my dinky android tablet keyboard, punching out an already-pretty-late status update.

I was going to talk about my Dota game and myself a bit more, but I'll save that for next week. For now, some stats:

Weight: 196.5 (Down from 200.3 last week)
Squat: 130 lbs
Deadlift: 165 lbs
Number of LoL'ers wearing Team Solomid t-shirts at 24 hour fitness: 1
Sobriety: 100%
New Apartment: 85% bitchin' by volume

PROJECT BATTLE FURY

PAX Prime 2013 is in less than 6 months.  Last year, I cosplayed The Kid from Bastion with the help of my lady friend (who went as the Scythian from S:S&S EP).  This was my second big cosplay undertaking - the first being an old FFXI Red Mage costume.  This year, I plan to dress up as Yurnero, the Juggernaut from Dota 2.  

There's just one problem:

FAT.

As a generally out-of-shape motherfucker that spends all day programming and all night playing Dota 2, staying in shape doesn't come naturally. Obviously, being overweight is problematic in more ways than one. So this year, to get two birds stoned at once, I'm starting PROJECT BATTLE FURY.   PROJECT BATTLE FURY is a plan to motivate both my fitness life and my creative life by getting in respectable shape for the concrete goal of putting together a totally slammin' Juggernaut costume for PAX Prime.

The Game Plan (A Draft)

PROJECT BATTLE FURY is to be executed in three phases.

Phase 1: GET DOWN 

Right now I'm 200 pounds at 5'9.  This BMI is unnaceptable.  So, to hit an aggressive target of 175 pounds by the end of May, I'll be making diet changes and ramping up my exercise.  This includes:

• Judo, twice a week (Monday/Thursday) for two hours each day to keep myself mentally stimulated while burning some fat.  My body weight makes the Judo warmups insanely intense.
• Cardio, 2-3 times a week (Tuesday/Friday/Sunday?).  There's a local gym near my apartment, but regardless the idea is to run for upwards of 20 minutes to burn fat and get my heart in shape for judo.
• An as-yet-undetermined weight lifting routine at the gym, once a week (Saturday mornings).  Moderate on the intensity for this phase.  Bench presses and other upper body exercises will be emphasized, thanks to my unusually weak upper body strength  Ab strength could also use some work.  Again, the exercises at judo also include some strength training, so I don't feel too guilty about planning weights for just once a week for Phase 1.  (My friend has informed me that if lifting weights on Saturday seems difficult, I should try doing a second day to stay in shape.  I'll have to test this.)
• Slashing sugar intake.  This is going to be tricky, but the idea is to drink water at every meal instead of whatever fancy drink I might lean towards first, and to snack exclusively on fruits, veggies, or nuts.  Or maybe jerky, if it ever comes back to the company snack shelf.
• Skipping rice/bread/etc as "necessary meal components."  We have catered lunches at my work, and often times they are delivered with a big tray of rice.  For these meals, any rice I would normally grab will be replaced with more meat.  If sandwiches or burritos get catered, if practical, I'll remove the carbs.  I figure this way I'll get enough carbs in my system with the "unavoidable" meals.  I'm still not particularly sure this is a great idea, so feedback would be more appreciated.
• Shrinking portions and chewing thoroughly.  I eat crazy fast.  I intend to pay more attention to chewing meals thoroughly from here on out, to give my body more time to react to being full.

So, to reiterate, this is all with the goal of hitting 175 pounds at the end of May.  That's about a rate of 2 pounds per week, but I'm hoping that after I burn off the water in the first couple weeks, the burn rate will be less stressful near the end of this phase.

Phase 2: GET HYPE

Hopefully, by the start of June, I'll have hit this goal.  At this point, costume design and construction begins.  My lady and I will start scoping out the types of materials we'll be using (likely lots of plastic, again, maybe even wood for the mask).  Designs will be forged.  Materials will be gathered.  Focus will be tested.

In addition, my exercise routine will shift from a focus on rapid weight loss to a replacing fat mass with muscle mass.  The cardio routines will be replaced with more heavy lifting.  Ideally, by this time, my judo's body weight exercises will not be as painful, and I will need to push myself with real strength training workout routines.  I'm currently looking at this Breaking Muscle article on judo-related strength training, but after feedback from Phase 1, I may come up with another plan.

Phase 2 "ends" one week into July, at which point, at the very least, I should be able to do a good set of pull ups, and all plans for the costume should be finished.

Phase 3: GET RIPPED

This is where the fun really begins.  For the next six weeks leading up to PAX, the costume will be assembled.  The most important part of this is getting my upper body to dudebro levels of "beach muscle".  I don't have to make it to Schwarzenegger-tier, but I should at least look good with a shirt off.  Which means:

• An incredibly cliche strength training routine, with the following goals:
• 0% Manboob.  Those should actually be pecs, at this point.
• Legit arm muscle.  I may have to resort to the dudebroiest of dudebro exercises for this: the dreaded curl.  Among other things.
• No belly fat.  I've been told 6-pack abs are not necessarily genetically possible, but at the very least I should be able to see where my pants begin.  Muscly things are a plus.
• A tan.  Preferably a natural one.  I do have Filipino blood, so I do tan, if I actually bother to go outside.  That's going to have to happen to get the part down right.

All of this might come at the expense of judo-related optimizations (unnecessary muscle mass will muck with your competitive viability), but for Phase 3 and PAX, it's all about the character.  And the character demands a shirtless dude.

What's the gold medal for this phase? To walk into a 24 Hour Fitness in costume the day before PAX and geek it the fuck up.

A Leviathan Task

Obviously PROJECT BATTLE FURY is not going to be easy.  This is where I need your help.  Since this plan is kind of a rough sketch at this point, any input you guys have on relevant fitness, costume making, scheduling, or motivation are super welcome at this point.  Specifically, any knowledge on dieting, exercise, and staying motivated would be a great boon to this guy.  Any positive thoughts or encouragement to keep me on track would be awesome, too.  And hey, if it inspires other lazy-ass geeks like me to get in shape for a thing they love, then that's some bonus points right there.