Yesterday
- Morning routine (pranayama, neck mobility)
- 7 minutes of swinging. I might have gone 1 or 2 more minutes but I didn’t need to. I notice the first few minutes are getting easier.
Another 7 minutes in the evening. That makes 280 swings with a 24k bell in 2 sets. Not too shabby. - Did today’s Kassandra:
15 min Wednesday Morning Yoga Twists - DAY 3 - YouTube
I really like the affirmation: I am at peace with the flow of life. - Did my IQ test earlier in the evening, when the
Forcecoffee was still strong in me. It’ll allow me to do some more traditional exercises and puzzles later.
I do notice a gradual improvement. And sometimes even though I lose track of the sequence my intuition tells me when there’s a match.
The tutorial is interesting today:
Tutorial 9: Decision Making 1 | HighIQPro - Ate my nuts and for the main course some rice with beans and vegetables. I don’t miss meat as much as I thought I would. Some ice tea and yogurt drinks mixed in and I once again end around 2000 cals by the time the eating window closes. I suppose this means I should theoretically slowly lose weight.
A nice early start. Got my routine in, followed by a lot of productivity at work. Then came the meetings, which took up most of the day. Got my first set of swings in 2 hours late.
A couple of days back I didn’t want to cook so I took a bunch of stir fry vegetables and steamed them. I actually put them in a small electric 6-egg egg cooker and let it steam for a few minutes.
I’ve been thinking how I could get the maximum amount of nutrients with the least amount of effort. Between whey protein shakes and the mixed nuts, combined with a quality vitamin supplement or fruit juice I come a long way. The only thing missing were the vegetables. This method might actually work. Every evening take a cup of nuts, a whey shake with milk, a fruit juice and steamed vegetables. Quick and easy.
Went to bed at a decent time to sleep for about 7 hours.
Today
Slept in a little, but was able to do the breathing and neck mobility between the morning meetings.
My phone is once again having fun at my expense, waking me up with a picture of salmon and just now showing me chocolate chip cookies.
My younger half-brother called me. I re-established contact with him when my father died late 2019.
He is pretty much my opposite. Super extrovert, prefers working with his hands over working with his mind, believes that if you don’t pay a bill long enough they’ll eventually forget about you, and women can’t get enough of him. I still remember when he was not even 15 I think, a 17 year old blonde, stunningly beautiful, wanted to spend time with him. So she showed up at the door and he told her he was busy playing computer games and to go away. She then climbed up the garbage container, the awning above the door and through his bedroom window just to be with him. If I ever experienced envy, that would have been the moment. That’s my younger brother for you. When he was a few years older his friends told him it was not fashionable to stay with his girlfriend for too long, so he gave her to one of his friends and she went along with it to make him happy.
Anyway, unlike me he doesn’t overthink things. Up to last November he was working in construction, when he figured he wanted to do something else. So he quit and tried something else. Just like that.
Turns out he didn’t like it after all, so now he wants to start his own construction company. He just said he would and got started, while I’ve been considering the pro’s and cons for years. Now he knows I want to do some renovating and he offered to help out if I created a website for him. Why is it that when people hear you’re in IT they always assume you know how to make professional websites?
I really wish I could help, also because he’d do free work for me (I’d help him either way though, he’s family after all). But although I do come up with genius ideas for logos or design every once in a while, I have not yet been able to summon the inspiration at will.
I might look at some WordPress courses, but at the speed he’s going he’ll need that site before I can say HTTPS.
It does make me feel a bit bad though. Partly because I probably can’t help him, mostly because he’s very social so he’ll keep calling and I don’t do small talk. Makes me very uncomfortable not knowing what to say in a phone call.
One thing he and I have in common is that we have very resilient bodies. He spent a day in a room with COVID infectees and tested clean. It’s probably the main reason I want my own children. This bloodline deserves to be propagated for the good of the species. 
Q&A
A long time ago, the Russians discovered how using vibration plates on their astronauts could assist in maintaining their bone density. They love experimenting on their athletes and astronauts to get maximum performance (they also made EMS/TENS mainstream after using it on their Olympic athletes).
Then it became a bit of a hype, the lose-weight-without-exercise kind and gyms started stocking up on Powerplates. Then the TV home shopping networks latched on.
Basically it’s a surface you stand on (or do pushups on or many other stuff) while it shakes at a very high frequency.
This causes a constant unstable surface resulting in a massive amount of muscle contractions in a minimum amount of time. The body is constantly busy stabilizing. This will not grow muscles, but it will tone them.
There are some gotchas. First, quality matters. No need to get one of those Powerplates, I have a mid-range model for a few hundred bucks with resistance bands attached which works fine. I keep a bend at the knees to about where my knees are over my toes. Then I do alternating straight arm shoulder raises (front and lateral raises) with the resistance bands. Have not trying pushups, lunges or any other stuff on it yet.
Second, and this is very important, NEVER straighten the limbs resting on the plate. That causes the vibration to hit the joints instead of the muscles, which in 10 minutes is like running a barefoot marathon while landing on your heels with every step. Very very bad for you.
I do this on my recovery days for 10 minutes (not recommended to do it too often). It’s a bit of light exercise since it does indeed stimulate muscle contractions. But at the same time it also shakes a lot loose and stimulates blood flow and lymph drainage. Afterwards I follow up with a percussion massager on the quads, especially around the knee area.
It works for me, I don’t regret the purchase.
It reminds me of the Shakeweight which everybody loved to make masturbation jokes about. Which is unfortunate because it uses the same principle and does indeed help tone the arm muscles.
I joined in on a crowdfunding product which did something similar for the arms and upper body, but it was abandoned during COVID unfortunately. Too bad, really, it had an app and everythang.
So, exercise at home with a low resistance threshold (a term I use to indicate the point where my mind starts making up convincing excuses to not exercise).
On the kettlebell front, kettlebell swings are a bit much, since they hit the cardiovascular within minutes.
Turkish Getups would work nice, with no or little weight. Deadlifts or squats at your own pace would also work. Or farmer’s walks (walking around with something heavy, usually on one side).
Yoga is an option of course, depending on style. I like the 15 minute stuff from Abi Carver. I despise subscriptions but she still has courses on Udemy:
https://www.udemy.com/user/abicarver/
Or just the free stuff on Youtube. Kassandra is my regular go-to, but I have a few others.
15-20 minutes is doable and there’s not enough time to wear you out. Plus, yoga does hit every part of the body, which is good for mobility. Mobility is great and important if you haven’t exercised in a while. Keeps you from getting injured while exercising.
What I’ve often done to get back into it is to do one of those 100 pushups a day challenges. Having 24 hours allows me to do a few whenever I need a short break from the computer.
Or I do a few pullups every time I walk under the door opening. Never to exhaustion.
Not optimal results wise, but it’s very low key and I do definitely improve over time.
No need to remove it, unless you don’t want to share. I’m not above touching the topic myself. Should people get out their soap boxes I can find the delete button. My hope is that people here can display enough maturity to let sleeping COVID stories lie. If not, it’s a reflection on them.
What you can do in this case (since it’s going for this long) is to have one of those lung photo’s taken to see if there’s any indication of COVID damage. My neighbor still doesn’t believe it’s more than a flu, but he is still getting those photo’s made next week.
The pranayama I do also helps me breathe easier. Probably the Wim Hof breathing I do (don’t remember the Sanskrit name for it). A bit uncomfortable in the beginning though.
A variation on this principle:
The water first goes through a ceramic (think terracotta) barrier, then layers like in the picture, the last layer changes the pH to be more alkaline. The it drops into a reservoir with mineral stones impregnated with colloidal silver. Finally, when tapping it goes past a bunch of magnets to cause it to vortex/swirl.
And I added a bunch of energy stuff as well, like crystals, a copper pyramid and some other stuff. If they have an effect, great. If not, they’re not in the way.
On top of that, I got a large 0.1 micron filter, water softener and another one of those vortex pipes hooked into the water main. Got those in 2019 as a present to myself.
So, pretty much everything which I can do to have pure healthy water has been done. It’s quite beautiful when frozen. Now if only I actually liked the absence of taste in water…
Who does! But we got to do it for FREEDOM!
