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. Training your heart is pretty important. 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
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