With Exercise and Diet, Less is More

I lived a fairly athletic life growing up. I swam competitively from the age of four and didn't stop competing until graduating High School. Aside from developing a freakishly strong cardio endurance and some very sore shoulders, swimming didn't prepare me very well for being a gym bro with plates and bars.

When I started hitting the gym I'd always go too hard too soon. By this I mean I'd go every day for a couple hours and get so obsessed with pushing heavier weights that I'd routinely compromise my form and not give myself adequate rest. After months and even years of plateauing, overtraining, and overtraining related injuries, I've finally started to break through into new territory by simply doing less.

My overtraining injuries were usually in the vein of tennis elbow, hyper extension, and the occasional sprain during fairly boring movements. The tennis elbow was due to not enough exercise diversity and having poor form. The hyper extensions would occur due to swinging through the motion rather than remaining slow and controlled. And the occasional sprains were a result of not providing the body enough rest between workouts. It was also extremely inconvenient to hit my calorie targets, which was around 3000 calories a day (220 pounds, 6'2", ~12% bf). When I was hitting my calorie targets it was a full time job and I looked and felt like an ox. I always felt stuffed and had to eat even when I had absolutely no desire, it was gross.

At a certain point I decided I'd get down under 200 pounds and maintain a leaner build, since it'd be easier on my joints and stomach.

Nowadays I perform a medium to heavy full body workout three times a week, and my aesthetics are the best they've ever been. I experiment with a simple calisthenics routine that has an adequate warm up, and I perform a simple yoga routine every morning to stay limber. I'll have to link the yoga video once I find it again, I memorized it long ago when I had an extremely tight and painful lower back (now I'm pain free). In my workouts I opt for lighter weights and slower, more deliberate motions. And as many body builders tell us to do, I give myself 48 hours to recover before working out again, thus the M-W-F cadence.

My workouts are always balanced between chest, back, abs, and legs. While resting one muscle group I'll be warming up another, and as I finish sets for one exercise I'll already be on the second set of the fresh muscles. I stick to four to eight sets of four to eight reps, graduating myself to a harder progression once I'm hitting multiple sets of eight reps without much trouble.

Diet is obviously essential to a good physique, and after experimenting for a few years I've found that cyclical keto works the best for me. Rather than couting carbs and assuring I'm in dietary ketosis, I'll simply eat meat and veggies for all of my meals except for those immediately before or after a workout. For those meals surrounding a workout I'll add a small helping of rice and raisins or other fruit to have adequate glycogen replenishment. The keto snobs will likely say my diet is closer to low carb than cyclical keto, but imo that's splitting hairs. I've developed a good gauge for when I should have some carbs and the craving is always satisfied with an extremely small amount, like a cup of rice or less. In a given week I may consume three cups of rice total. I also don't consume any oils, I cook everything in boiling water with very light seasoning.

I'm hovering around 195 pounds and can probably drop more, but feel quite healthy at my current weight. I've recently become curious about fasting, as the couple times in my life I've tried it I felt very light on my feet and clearheaded.

As always, the key has been to remain consistent and patient with myself. The takeaways here are that it's easy to do too much. For exercise, your muscles make their gains during rest. If that rest isn't facilitated constantly, you're setting yourself up for injury since you'll be causing a net positive number of micro-fractures and micro-tears, aka overtraining. It's worth it to even have a week break every three months or so, just to make sure you're completely healed and not overtraining.

For diet, it's easy to consume way more carbs than your body needs. Carbs are extremely cheap to cook up and they provide a bloated feeling, so every restaurant is happy to shove them in your face. If you stick to meat and veggies, you'll be surprised at how much food you can put away; this is mostly because you're not spiking your insulin nearly as much as you would with carbs. Once you've weened off carbs you'll realize how few of them you actually need.

So for both exercise and  diet, less has been more. Hopefully these nuggets give you some inspiration to experiment and find your sweet spot as well.

The Best Mouse Option

As mentioned in a previous post (about Dvorak), I enjoy experimenting with comfortable computer peripherals and efficient input layouts. Today my setup includes:

• A ZSA Moonlander keyboard running four layouts
• A wireless Kensington 'expert mouse' trackball

Although my setup doesn't include a pedal or a power glove, it's probably weirder than most, but today I want to commend the trackball. After using a standard mouse for my entire life I noticed that my right shoulder felt incredibly loose after a long gaming/computer session (through my late teens and 20s). Out of an abundance of caution, I branched out to experiment with other mouse options.

Today I'm hear to spread the message of giant trackballs. 

I've been using the trackball for over a year now and can't praise it enough. While my shoulder sensitivity may be due to a brutal swimming career as a child/teen, I haven't had to deal with any shoulder discomfort while on the computer since switching to the trackball, since my shoulder no longer has to move!

There's something incredibly satisfying about the dimensions of the 2 inch diameter trackball itself, and I almost wish it was larger. But the feature I love most is the scroll ring going around the trackball. To scroll down a giant webpage I can give it a nice flick. Since the scroll ring is larger than a standard mouse wheel, it has tons of momentum for effective scroll flicking. And with the four customizable buttons I can position the track ball in the middle of the split keyboard or to either side without issue.

Not only is it ambidextrous, but you have flexibility with just one hand. If certain fingers are tired of pushing the trackball you can easily use others. Hate fingers? Move the mouse with your palm. Scroll with the back of your pinky, or your thumb, it's amazing. 

Apparently the original trackball from Kensington could use a pool cue ball, too bad the units are hard to find!

"Why are my downloads so much slower than my speed tests?"

Aha but speed tests and downloads are measured differently!

I've seen a bunch of bologna online where people say that speed tests at sites like speedtest.net aren't accurate because your evil ISP will allow uncapped access to that specific site, but otherwise cap your speeds. I work for a small ISP, and that is absolutely not a thing ISPs care about (at least not this one). 

When you perform a speed test, it'll be measured in megabits per second, where as when you're downloading a file your browser or downloading client program will typically measure the speed in megabytes per second. Before I explain why this makes sense let's break down the verbiage so everyone's on the same page.

Downloads 101

As many of you know, computers communicate in 1s and 0s, aka binary! Each one or zero is a bit. Traditional computers have no smaller measurement of data. There's a tiny switch, and it's either on, or off. One for on, zero for off.

Eight bits is equal to one byte. In an IP there are four numbers separated by periods(or decimal points), such as 192.168.1.1. Each number can be anywhere from 0 to 255, and the reason is because each number in this context is an octet, meaning it's eight bits long, or one byte. All the networking protocols on all the networking devices expect eight bits in each octet, so if you try something weird, it just won't work.

I know this seems like a tangent but bear with me. Let's have eight zeros, 00000000. < That's an octet! The value for that octet is 0! Let's have eight 1s, 11111111. < That's also an octet! The value for this octet is 255! So the highest value IP you can have is 255.255.255.255.

Since we can't add another digit, or a larger number(because it's binary, 1s and 0s only) 255 is the highest number you can make with eight bits. Sprinkling zeros in this octet will get you any number between 0 and 255 (We don't talk about 256). Making more sense now?

'So what? What are you getting at V?'

Well these eight bits can also make letters! ASCII is a standard used by computer for this very thing! 128 characters including numbers, letters, and punctuation are all made with only eight bits! So the letter A is one byte, the letter B is another byte. Other standards like Unicode can use more bytes per character.

Now that we know what a bit and a byte is, let's get back to the matter at hand.

A is a byte, B is a byte, CAT is 3 bytes, SWEET is 4 bytes, you're getting this right?

Alright well 1024 bytes is equal to 1 kilobyte(KB).

1024 kilobytes makes 1 megabyte(MB).

1024 megabytes makes 1 gigabyte(GB).

1024 gigabytes makes 1 terabyte(TB).

1024 terabytes makes 1 petabyte(PB).

It just keeps going, after petabyte comes exabyte, then zettabyte, then yottabyte. There are some great 'orders of magnitude' illustrations on the web to give some perspective on how much a petabyte really is. I remember hearing that every word ever spoken in all of history could be stored in less than four exabytes.

We use similar wording for bits! 10 bits is a decabit, 100 is a hectobit, 1000 is a kilobit, and 1,000,000 is a megabit.

A megabyte is roughly 1,000,000 bytes! To get the number of bits, you'd multiply that number by eight, which would give you 8,000,000 bits!

Now the difference between speed tests and downloads should make sense.

50 megabits per second on a speed test, is really about 6 megabytes per second.

It makes sense to have a speed test be in bits, because it would be much more accurate than a test in bytes, unless you were provided some extra decimal places on a byte reading. What would give you a more accurate reading for measuring distance, centimeters or kilometers? If you couldn't measure past two decimal places, you would surely say centimeters! The same goes for megabits!

On the other hand it makes sense that a download is measured in megabytes, because the files we download and upload are usually huge if measured in bits. A 100 KB file would be 100,000,000 bits! But if the reading is in KB, then there's no crazy math to do, and you could easily approximate how long a download would take. You could definitely perform a speed test in megabytes and there are downloads that are measured in bits, but this is rarely convenient.

Before we finish let's also point out the abbreviations. If the names weren't similar and confusing enough, the abbreviation for megabyte is MB, while the abbreviation for megabit is Mb. Just one B changed from lower to upper case changes the actual value referenced dramatically!

Luckily there's typically enough context around what you're doing to discern between bits and bytes.

So there you go! Now you can calm your frustrated friends with this newfound wisdom.

Hackers, Credit Cards, and Commercials

I watched this episode of American Greed recently, and I thought it was worth sharing. Rather than insert the video, I'll just link to it.

A quick summary for those that'd rather read; a group of hackers would find open wifi hotspots provided by department stores, then sniff the traffic until they were able to pick up customer credit card info and/or the means to access the point of sales system to get card info. Then they'd write that credit card info onto a blank card(with a cheap card writer) and go 'cash out' the victim's account at an ATM. They were so successful that rather than writing the numbers to cards and cashing them out, it was more profitable for them to just sell the card numbers in bulk to mobsters and kingpins for $100-$200 each. They were getting millions of card numbers. Watch the video when you have time, it's fascinating.

Nothing too thought out for this Tuesday. I started rambling below, then decided to come back up here and warn you that it's midnight and I'm writing like a 5th grader the night before a paper is due. It's probably best if you just wait for a better post, where I show you the world on a magic carpet. Here I throw thoughts at the screen like a caveman.

---

The next time you see a commercial for a laptop, a tablet, or a phone, ask yourself why the ad isn't describing the speed of the processor, the amount of RAM or storage space available, the inputs, or other component details during the sales pitch. These things determine how well the phone is going to function and how compatible it's going to be with the rest of your life, so why aren't specs mentioned? It would seem the focus of these ads shows that the main demographic doesn't know or care about jigglybytes.

So what are people really interested in?

The ads say you care about how it looks, how that guy looks with it, how this girl can take a picture with it, and how happy they are. Don't you want to look cool and be happy with your phone? That's really as far as ads go. A wider lens for your selfies, a better photo editor for your selfies. Forget that there's virtually no advantage this phone has over last year's model besides these small tweaks.

Consumerism is interesting. It creates all sorts of markets. Some markets benefit from educating you, while others benefit from doing the exact opposite in what can only be described as short-sighted exploitation.

Despite what seems like misinformation or a dumbing down of people, humans on average are becoming more intelligent every year by something like two IQ points. IQ tests are constantly adjusted for this grind upwards. 

It might seem gloomy, but the collective spirit is resilient and collective mind constantly growing and deepening.

Through Flu and Poo

After getting sick with what felt like the flu I had to give up the push-up regimen as per a doctor's recommendation(I was crazy exhausted 24/7 x.x). And as of yesterday I discovered two leaking capacitors on my desktop motherboard(I'll be putting together a new machine in a few months, this build is going on eight years ha). I've de-soldered the popped caps and ordered new ones, so until the 25th I'm on my work laptop. It's a shame because I just installed fedora 20 on the desktop and spent an hour just playing around with the mandelbrot wallpaper generator.

The good news is I found some nice guides for body weight fitness. See here. The idea is to use your body weight for strength training instead of weights(although weights can't hurt). It's a great idea, and a lot of the exercises are progressive, which makes things more interesting(at least for me). It makes great sense, rather than doing 30 elevated push-ups eight times a day like I did before, I'm pushing myself towards one-handed push-ups through harder and harder exercises with less sets at lower reps.

A push-up progression goes something like this;

Let's say you want to learn how to do one-handed push-ups. Jumping right into one-handed push-ups would be crazy, you probably wouldn't be able to do one, and when you finally learn how, your form would probably be terrible.

Instead you focus on regular push-ups until you can comfortably do 25 or 30 reps. You don't have to do eight sets a day, but obviously the more sets you perform the faster you'll progress ;)

After a couple weeks of focusing on proper technique(flexed butt and abs, straight back) with a set or two every day or every other day you'll feel that it's less of a challenge, so you progress to diamond push-ups, again focusing on proper technique to that you're not straining your shoulders.Your rep count will drop, and you'll work on getting it back up to 25-30.

Once you're comfortably doing 25-30 diamond push-ups you can progress to elevated diamond push-ups. These are the same, but with your feet up on a chair or even a desk, off the ground by at least several feet. Every new progression will lower your rep count, challenging you to bring it back up.

Once your bring the rep count back up, you can progress to where I'm at now, which is archer push-ups(This was kind of a big leap). These are pretty challenging for me, and I'm currently at eight reps on each arm. There are lots of variations to all these progression exercises, but in my mind these archer push-ups are the last step before one-handed push-ups with proper form. It's super important to stop if your form breaks at all. Technique, technique, technique!

There's tons of great progression exercises, they're all about crazy core stability and give a crazy pump. I'll be focusing on the progressing to the full planche, handstands, eventually 90 degree push-ups, the L-sit, and eventually the V-sit, as seen below.

The beauty of all of this is how creative I can get with absolutely no gym equipment. If you're at all interested, the first link I have in this post is a good starting point.

I'm also going to give leangains a shot to help lower my body fat% and stay lean. This is just a neat intermittent fasting routine. The guide explains that for males, ideally you want to fast for 16 hours a day, and limit eating to those eight remaining hours. I'll experiment with my timeline, but I'm going to start with eating from 10am to 6pm, then not eating again until 10am the next day.

There's going to be tons of calorie counting and constant adaptation, but hey that's what life's about! May the gods of consistency and accountability be upon me ha.

The Form, It's All in the Form

Well I've been sticking to 240 push-ups a day and I've been neglecting a post about stretching like crazy. The good news is I found a slight variation to my push-ups that puts less strain on my traps. If I keep my eyes forward during my set, it almost feels easier on my traps. I'll have to do this continuously for a week or two to see if it makes a huge difference.

So far I've been doing tons of head rolls to keep my neck and traps loose. Desk work really doesn't help but hey could be worse!

I've noticed that my triceps are starting to look a little developed, making my biceps look small by comparison. I looked around for a stand alone pull up bar I could buy, but the cheapest ones are over $300. I figured for that kind of money I could take some welding classes and just bring in some pipes to open shop and make my own power tower; a custom pull-up bar with the added bonus of a new skill under my belt.

It's late and I'm feeling energized for no reason. The hardest part about these push-ups is remembering to do them. Yeah eight sets throughout the whole day isn't that much but I've gotten into the habit of leaving four sets until the last couple hours of the day. No bueno.

From 30 to 30

I've stayed at 30 push-ups a day but there's definitely some tightening in my traps. I had to have a break day where I did only three sets, and I had another cheat day this week where I only did five sets.

I did pick up the little 'perfect push-up' rotational platforms from my buddy who never used, they should help ease the constant strain on my wrists. I was surprised to discover that these little puppies make push-ups a lot more challenging, even without rotating the hands. It might have something to do with how much lower I can get my body with them. Or it may be the additional dexterity required to stabilize on them since they're basically bars on wheel bearings.

Anyway, I won't be increasing my rep count to 35 just yet as I feel 30 is still a challenge. I'm sure I could do it but I'd rather get my stretches down first to keep the tense traps under control. My arms definitely feel and look bigger, and I'm noticing some tiny gains on my chest. If I keep it up I'm guessing it'll be more noticeable after say, 16 weeks. Every now and then I feel some soreness in my pecs but that's a good sign! My posture is definitely improving and my shoulder cuffs feel much more secure. Years of desk work and competitive swimming wore them down and made them pretty loose (lol).

The main issue I'm having is the tight muscles. They feel extra tight after each set, which leads me to believe the push-ups are the main cause. I'll have to focus more on stretches, and I'll share a post probably tomorrow detailing the stretches I'm trying to focus on(mainly trap stretches). Although my yoga friend explained that if I stretch all the muscles around the traps, they'll naturally relax as well. I should really take the time to stretch in the mornings and evenings... maybe I'll start tonight.

So far I can't complain. I still look healthy, I'm making small gains, and haven't even thrown in sit-ups or pull-ups yet. Who knew that simplifying down to one compound exercise could be enough to get in shape. I'm sure if I committed to two hour gym trips and supplements I'd get pretty beefy, but my aim is efficiency and economy. So far I've spent nothing monetarily on my workout and I get to split up the sets throughout the day. Each set takes less than a minute, and I enjoy a little pump every now and then.

That's all for the push-up update.