SymphonicDan

It is so frustrating to have injuries like that that interfere so much with your daily life and sports Hope that heals itself very soon! The Antarctica expedition looks amazing! A friend and I almost booked to go on another one (Santiago -> Buenos Aires, via the Antarctic) but that one didn't stop in the Antarctic, just sail past for a day or so (also a cool experience) (actually now he's going to Bali and I'm going to Ecuador so this isn't happening). I did actually check whether you were taking that cruise, as that would have been an insane location for an inadvertent NF meet-up! But you're on the National Geographic one that looks much cooler Hopefully you'll also have a respite from the stressful stuff when you're on the cruise and you can't be contacted anyway. Having this immovable block of time when you won't be able to deal with stuff might be stressful now but you can look forward to the peace when you're there!

You're an elite athlete because you have spent a lot of time taking it seriously, studying it, teaching, preparing for competitions. In my opinion the medals and world rankings etc. are of secondary importance, but you've had success here too, so yes as far as I'm concerned you should think of yourself as an elite athlete Interesting what you say about hypoxia training in general, thanks. A couple of things I'm not sure about though: Do you know what else changes in the body (aside from extra red blood cells) as the body acclimatizes to higher altitudes? I ask partly because I'm surprised, and partly because I'm going to Ecuador in a week's time and want to climb a mountain to over 5000 metres, and extra understanding around this will help me survive this From my understanding (and I just checked Wikipedia for a second opinion) the most common limiting factor affecting VO2 max is the supply of Oxygen to the mitochondria, which is boosted by EPO, and the secondary possible factor is the performance of the mitochondria, which is also shown to be improved by hypoxic stress.

Wow, I had no idea of the scale of the scale of the scavenger hunt until I actually read it in all its glory Nice work! Now I'm tempted to do the same for my 30th birthday next year - problem is that lots of my friends are in different places around the world so it takes away the social aspect of it. And the viability that they'd turn up for my party wherever it was... Excited for the idea of the NF scavenger hunt though! Will probably work best with a dual focus on pushing your comfort zone, and on fitness. I dislike the housing interview situation but I guess it's inevitable. A Dutch friend was starting to study at Leiden University and they have such a shortage of accommodation in the city that some people will spend the summer going to interviews and might end up living somewhere pathetic like a caravan into the beginning of term... Glad to see gymnastics is going well Flipping vicariously through you since I don't have a gymnastics facility when I'm travelling, and I could never flip much anyway :p

Haha as a software engineer I feel your frustration at them tying themselves in knots with the flexy site! The same happened when I got a group together for the 2016 Urban Ninja... I had to QA-report 2-3 bugs on their site that were preventing me from making the purchase... Anyway, you were looking for a job, you could maybe take over their dev team :p Maybe this is a game that exists everywhere - for us it was "What's the Time Mr Wolf?" where the people creeping up would keep asking that question... and each time the wolf would answer e.g. 3 o'clock and turn round to check no-one was moving. Occasionally the answer would be "DINNERTIME!!!!" and they'd chase the rest of us for the wolf's food. In retrospect, not sure why no-one just sprinted to the wolf in the 2 seconds it took everyone to inquire about the time...! Maybe that's why no-one above the age of 7 played it. Really cool to see all the parkour fun you're having! I was really into it as a teenager (on the screwgravity forums all the time) but didn't really have any opportunity to practise, except for once when I went to Warwick University campus with a couple of friends and got kicked out by security because they thought we were base jumping hahah. We were doing wall runs on some single-storey building. Base jumping is when you parachute off buildings and try not to die too frequently. Excited also for your hip hop class. Maybe I'll pick up some style vicariously from you? Even an awkward dorkface style would be better than my current offering. It's why I like salsa / bachata / merengue - you can fall back onto a drop-down menu of moves at any point you're not feeling so creative.

Spanish as well is completely gendered but it's mainly for making the language flow/rhyme than because they genuinely think that tables are female etc. Usually for people if there's any doubt the default is to just use the masculine term for everyone ("e.g. Do you have [un amigo] who can help?" "yes, [mi amiga] Ana can help") - notice the difference is just o/a - which sounds weird to me. Recently I've seen a rather ugly but neat solution to this problem in more sensitive situations like job adverts where they don't want to subconsciously give out the impression that they are hoping to employ specifically males or females: they use '@' in place of the o/a! So for "We are looking for waiters and waitresses for our restaurant" is "Buscamos camarer@s..." In Brazil they usually use "kkkk" which can sound uncomfortably like they're invoking white supremacist groups into your conversation... I can't remember this ever not being natural in English? "Is it okay if my friend joins us?" "Sure, what time are they arriving?" Happy birthday (like a week late, sorry! ) and great work on the circus skills! I haven't seen you for a while so it stands out what cool stuff you're able to do!

I wonder the same - I asked KB Girl partly as a suggestion and partly to see the perspective on this as an elite athlete. Some elite athletes do WHM - clearly they see some benefit, but why don't they all do it? Because the effect is small? Because it's not well-known yet? Because they have other parts of their training that cover everything the breathing would cover? Just doing KB training itself (or football training, or daily HIIT or whatever) won't cover one relevant aspect, which is getting your body to produce HIF-alpha1 and EPO, which produce more red blood cells, and therefore improving endurance. It's possible that normal training would do this to a degree anyway, but I''m skeptical because very fit people get altitude sickness as readily as quite unfit people, and the way to prevent altitude sickness is to boost red blood cells. Normally this boost of red blood cells happens from staying a few days in a mildly hypoxic environment (high altitude) but it can also be achieved with more acute hypoxic stress, the easiest method being WHM. Free-diving O2 tables, hypobaric chambers and other artificial environments are also possible.

True that it could help with promoting the sport if you could choreograph some sort of performance out of it, but except for a quick competition it seems difficult to highlight the endurance aspect. Have you ever looked into the Wim Hof breathing btw? One of the benefits is improved endurance for the "several minutes" range, which is basically what you're working on in KB sport. Essentially it is like high-altitude training, without being at a high altitude.

Recent updates: Ever tried doing handstands on the beach? Looks great in the photos but the reality is that the ground is usually at an awkward angle. Well I went to a deserted beach with some locals last week and there was a whole area almost perfectly flat neat the shore, so I did a fair amount of handstand training there It's also nice to know that the skill doesn't disappear too much over time - "it's like riding a bike" seems to apply here too! I was quite stressed the last days because I really didn't have a plan for my travel or anything that motivated me and was actually accessible. Natal is a long way from anywhere - all international flights from round here are 5+ hours. I was feeling quite bad, but that might have been dehydration or maybe some hidden illness (I drank the tap water last week because "it was safe" and about 24 hours later got symptoms of having drank or maybe eaten something that was not to safe) so that didn't help. Anyway, my mind is free again because I've just booked flights to Ecuador It's the country here I'm most excited about visiting, and then I'll go head up to Colombia afterwards mainly to enjoy the parts I like, and because I'll have some friends around Medellín in March. Ecuador should also involve lots of mountain hiking, high altitude, and cold water exposure. For my online course project, I've done lots of planning hahaha but I checked the challenge goals yesterday and it's clear that I need to start making some videos for the course - even if just for practice. Then it might be that I can make some meaningful progress in downtime while travelling in Ecuador and Colombia. I went on a tour to the beaches and sand dunes at Genipabú with a Canadian guy, and that was pretty fun. We went in buggies over the sand dunes (not as fun as Huacachina in Peru but still fun) and down water slides and dunes on little wooden boards The water slide was particularly awesome. They were charging $4 per ride and it just started raining, so we weren't going to bother, but we had a look at a couple of people go down and decided we had to try it anyway! The slide must be over 30 meters tall and anyone who listened to the guides' instructions was skimming about 30 meters more across the surface of the lake! Afterwards I had the thought to do a WHM-related experiment. Freedivers train their tolerance with apnea walks where you basically hold your breath and walk as far as you can. I was surprised how far I could go actually: 85m (normal walking - no preparation) 115m (normal walking - 5 WHM breaths to reduce CO2 first) 145m (jogging - no preparation) 160m (jogging - 6 WHM breaths) I couldn't compare with freedivers online because they always quote in seconds (seems naïve - you can last longer if you shuffle along slowly than if you march like your military rank depended on it) but it was longer than I had expected anyway. Has anyone else ever tried this experiment? Safety note: if you do too many WHM breaths beforehand then you can faint without warning in this exercise, so please don't do that Maybe when I get to Colombia I should go do a free-diving course. It's about $180 / €160 for a 3-day course, so expensive and uncomfortable but I think interesting too! I met some freedivers on the cruise who like to dress up as mermaids and appear unannounced amongst scuba divers!!

Haha, well I'm glad it's not just me that has such an issue with AC. I had the same problem in my old office to the extent that at some times I'd wear an outdoor coat, hat and gloves in the office (and I wasn't the only one) and we used to have an informal rota system of who was going to send the next complaint to the London office who managed our AC (!?!) When I quit I joked to some people that this was the main reason I was leaving. So anyway, if everyone I know hates overuse of AC, and it's expensive, why is it such a problem in so many places? I genuinely don't understand what I'm missing here... That's true, but from what I saw, it was probably more for absolving people from explanations for their poor navigation or for sneaking some fun private time... and not for hiding murders and sexual assault. A typical story would be "I was in the jungle and my friend appeared and I followed him along the wrong route and he disappeared... then I realized I was lost and it hadn't been my friend but the monster in disguise!" While I'm rambling about the Amazon, I'll give an idea of how think the jungle is there. One of the tourist sights was across the river in Peru, this absolutely gigantic tree... the trunk must be 4 metres diameter and I won't guess the height but it was in the emergent layer. No plants can grow with 10 metres from the trunk because it sucks up so much nutrients from the soil. The tree is less than an hour's walk from the local village, that's been there since before the 1970s (they told stories about the drug smugglers arriving then - in fact their village has been relocated to drier land on the site of the abandoned and bombed light aircraft runway that the smugglers built) yet they only realized this tree was there in August 2017! Not much - but there are lots of jobs in software and Education that I would find interesting, so I'm relaxed about that I kinda didn't appreciate it, but it's true, thanks She's nice, we're trying to arrange another date yep, but I'll be leaving here soon. I was actually invited to the beach by some Brazilians a few days ago and were mostly speaking Portuguese again. I couldn't be bothered to follow their conversation most of the time, but I was speaking well enough with any of them individually. It's messed up my Spanish a bit though... I'm using some Portuguese grammar and words by accident even when I know they're Portuguese... "Ah, tengo medo que vou esquecer mi español" for example. Here they actually have a word for that - as it's an issue for locals speaking Spanish and Spanish-speaking foreigners trying to speak Portuguese - the language/dialect is called "Portunhol" :p

I was getting a bit lonely here about a week ago so I decided to move to a hostel for a few days hoping to meet some people... Actually for various reasons I've had a very socially-active week, so that's been nice I went with a French friend in a group of 6 on a short hike in the massive dune park in the middle of the city. They're very paranoid about the park, so you have to go on a guided tour with a guide and two armed military police?! To be fair, if the dunes get damaged by people too much then they'll creep inland and cover the city, which would be less than ideal... Then I met some Argentinians and a Canadian in the hostel so we've been hanging out... last night I had dinner with some Brazilians (and we'll go today to the beach too)... and on Friday I went on a date with a local girl who only speaks Portuguese The date was nice, walking along the beach promenade, but I was super happy that my Portuguese (that two months ago I didn't speak) is now good enough for using socially for 2 hours and only using a dictionary once. Although yes she was clearly speaking slowly and simply for me to understand her better haha. For fitness, I did a workout with my French friend, mainly just jumping onto stuff in the skate park. He was doing it all barefoot without problem, so I also tried going barefoot for a while, and it was surprisingly okay Then I needed the ATM so I went running there but I was feeling pretty tired so I stopped half-way like a weakling. One thing I don't get about hot countries is air conditioning. I mean, I get the point that you want a relief from the baking heat, but I hate how dry it makes the air and my eyes hurt (in Natal the air is already dry - the city is practically built upon sand dunes) and how it's always too cold. In the hostel there were no blankets (it's a hot country) and still a couple of local guests would put the air conditioning on very strong, and then cover themselves up somehow. One older woman woke me up at 4am fussing about the air conditioning, and when I woke up she was using my towel as a blanket?! Surely the easiest solution is just to not use the air conditioning at these times?! Save it for when you've just been walking around at 3pm and you're about to melt, or in shopping malls... For my Mathematics course, I've pretty much finished the syllabus, and next need to work on actually shooting the video. I've tried getting hold of a lapel microphone here but without success... Maybe I can borrow one from some nomad who does videography or podcasting...

I see its true what many of you have said - that working an 8-hour workday in an office probably doesn't involve anything like 8 hours of solid work. Still, I feel that I should be able to do 5 hours if I have some discipline! I'm basically doing Pomodoro blocks of up to 30 minutes (then I get up and stretch or do push-ups or something because of my challenge goal for that ) and during those blocks I cant fuss around with Facebook or WhatsApp or random internet browsing. What probably cuts down the time a lot is the time spent deciding random life things. Right now I'm wondering whether to go to an event in Colombia or to get myself down to the rural parts of Argentina. So I'll spend some non-work time thinking about that and then it's already time to eat or sleep. If only I could make decisions better hahaha then my life would be much simpler. I went last year to the Amazon in Colombia, volunteering as a translator and it was such a cool place! We really would see the animals there, including the pink dolphins from your picture. They have a slightly different legend there where the pink dolphins become humanoid and seduce girls at parties... so if a girl disappears then it's because of a pink dolphin, and nobody asks any further questions! Similarly they have some monster that lives in the forest and sometimes becomes humanoid and leads people astray. So Luís got lost in the forest? It must be the monster's fault, no discussion needed. Kind of! But the reality is that I'm not an infinite fountain of wealth. Yes I have my savings, but my plan isn't to simply travel until I'm skint and then go back to whatever I was doing before. I want to pick up new skills, and I want to be attractive for job prospects if/when I re-enter the traditional labour market, and I want to continue getting some money so that maybe I can continue this freedom for much longer if I choose

Interesting point about having at least a small amount of carbs being important for serotonin... this surely is a factor why people who go on any calorie-restrictive diet find it intensely difficult.

Ahh awesome! Just to let you know, this post currently has 12 likes - this is how much support liftage has here haha. I think you'd get a lot out of playing with squats - set up the rack safely and make sure you can bail with just the 20kg bar (if you can't then the rack isn't set up properly) and then put the weight up to 30kg and experiment with feet positions and feet width (I prefer pointing outwards about 25 degrees each, shoulder width apart) and getting the correct core engagement so your spine is nicely-stacked and it feels completely comfortable to stand up. Then when you're happy with the technique try pushing the weight up - heavy back squats are a different feeling to other fitness things I've tried - very satisfying once you stand up and after a heavy set (e.g. 10 reps at a weight that's difficult) your thighs will feel gigantic (because of the blood flow it induces). So I've been doing it wrong all this time? I'll try it without the catheters next session... Grip strength comes and goes quickly, maybe because the muscles are smaller? I'm having the same problem now when I'm doing pull-ups. I still have plenty of height on them, but my fingers are fried after about 5...

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Following If you do find a way to eliminate mindless activity then please tell us haha. The world has been waiting a long time for a solution to that!

Here for the hair braiding tips! Also for the playtime, obviously

Oops, forgot to reply to this one! I've been to Recife / Porto de Galinhas / Pipa / Natal (Ponta Negra)... so all in the northeast corner so far... might also visit Rio, Iguassu or some of the beautiful canyons in the middle of the country. The problem is the country is just so big! it's the size of Europe and a bus journey hardly takes you anywhere in the grand scale of space here. Challenge update: My plan of tracking working time and getting up to move every 30 minutes has been pretty successful I feel better and reasonably productive. I also got two workouts in at the park like 200m from my AirBnB here. On Wednesday I did a bit of running and some pull-ups, but spent most of the time at the skate park training different jumps onto the 100 cm wall: run-up and jump onto it from my left foot (weak side) two-footed jump onto the wall various jumps but standing up forcefully as soon as I got onto the wall tried to jump clean over the 90 cm wall too, but was too weak or scared Then today I ran at least 5 loops of the park, which I think is about 3 kilometers total. I was trying to calculate the length of my run as I did it (part of it had meters marked out) but apparently I can't count higher than 20 when running. And did some pull-ups and core exercises to finish up. Work update: I've been talking more about the marketing side of setting up a Udemy course, and it seems that it's pretty important if you want the course to be successful... so I was a bit demotivated last night wondering whether it was even worth doing at all. Today I've had another think at some of the ideas I have for marketing (mainly: making more free resources) and regained enthusiasm and confidence for it, but it might mean I add some extra items to the list of tasks that would give me points. I'm also disappointed that during the day I'm only managing 2-5 hours of tracked work each day, despite "working" most of the day... so I need to find out where this time is going... Am I this disorganized? Or I spend more time than I expect on life things like eating and showering? Or I'm actually doing lots of useful things but not tracking it?

At least they accept that Quechua and Aymara are not the same as Spanish :p In Chile they still call their language Spanish. But I'll have to go there to find out whether it's comprehensible! Occasionally - mainly when I come home and my younger sister is married and is wandering around doing normal life things, and I meet my schoolfriends who are doing normal life things, and I see the good side of that. And then I go travelling and do acro-yoga and ecstatic dance in the middle of the ocean or go fishing for piranhas while "working" or trail-run my way to my own private waterfall, or whatever and remember why I went travelling I saved up a fair amount yep, but I'm spending about €40 per day during normal travelling (including everything) but sometimes more, and sometimes about €10/day when I'm volunteering, or ~€0 when I'm visiting home for a few weeks. But shockingly I don't have bottomless savings, which is why I'm trying to get some remote income now Hey Asa Haha I had to try out lots of scoring systems (with some bad failures) in order to make it work. I also like logic and rules, and I've done quite a bit of studying into the Psychology of gamification... so I have ideas now on what makes a system more likely to work: points should always increase (decreases are demotivating) unless you are up for a very stressful challenge the actual values of the points are less relevant (the fact that you know that you're getting points is the important thing) you should have both easy and difficult targets (you want the challenge to feel difficult although manageable) you should get points regularly (otherwise when you're far away from recognizing your own success then you're not benefiting from the gamification) you should have a balance for process goals and success goals For example, if you wanted to quit drinking soda, subtracting 5 points for every soda you drink is demotivating, but awarding 5 points for every day you don't have a soda is motivating. Mathematically these are equivalent unless you're having multiple cokes per day (Daniel who has a Coke today has 5 points less than Daniel who didn't, under either system) but the mindset is completely different. You could also have points for example "10 bonus points for every streak of 3 soda-free days" or "10 points for every weekday that you never have a soda during the challenge" (e.g. never on any Tuesday) because these are also positive goals.

I'm blown away by your challenge, mainly by the South wind For gymnastics season are you working more on new moves or improving the ones you already have?

Thanks for the welcome everyone Well speak for yourself WhiteGhost but actually most of us don't even own chairs... zenLara carries her tablet with her when she goes running up the hills (and still never got a picture of that deer, or that bison, or that unicorn...) Mad Hatter keeps her laptop on the other side of the room from her so she can only write messages near the end of her stretching workout when she can actually reach the other side of the room. Don't tell her she could set up the microphone for dictation Voice-to-text is usually quite rear libel these daze and doesn't make men in mistakes. @mu types with her nose while doing handstand push-ups on parallettes. It's really hard to get that "@" these days Mike Wazowski has to train with his dance partner over Skype when she's away, carrying his phone in a beautiful waltz hold, so during the easy parts he's also commenting on your posts raptron actually types her posts stationary, but after crafting another masterpiece she clicks "Submit Reply" with nothing less than a round-off backflip straight onto the keyboard. She buys a lot of replacement keyboards Aha I'll be having to market mainly online. I'll try running a FB ad campaign (although the ones I see these days are so over-the-top BS that I just don't want to compete! And see what else I can do to get an audience who is actually interested. Ahh thanks People ask me how long I've been travelling, and the answer used to be "3-and-a-half months!" or "nearly a year"... Now it's "oh holy crap... like 2... um okay like I started in 2016, has it really been that long?!" Well my total earnings since I started travelling in 2016 have been about $5000, so I wouldn't say I really "run a business yet", more sometimes I get a random project to entertain me! But hopefully soon I can start getting money somewhat faster Maybe Paraguay? No-one goes to Paraguay and I bet it feels really left out. So I'm going to go there and tell it that its okay they're not forgotten, they're still on all the maps and stuff And maybe Chile, because apparently they don't speak Spanish there but instead some sort of gibberish. And I can go tell them how technically the Antarctica is drier than the Atacama desert and they can tell me how much they care. In gibberish, of course. And perhaps Bolivia, because it's really high up and I will have an excellent view of the rest of South America from there. Maybe?

Interesting how a lot of people I follow on NF (and myself) are in the same kind of general plateau/acceptance zone when it comes to fitness. I still have goals to do backflips and insane strength feats and hopak dancing etc., but have to manage the realization that these have all slid very much into long-term goals or merely fantasies. You're intelligent and looks like you have quite an established set of goals to keep yourself where you want to be, so I'll be taking inspiration from you Happy new year and hopefully you'll have lots of good memories to look back on in 52 weeks' time

Good to see you're still here @mu and keeping the circus game strong Where is the future end of this international move?

Jan 01 - Jan 27: 34 points Number of different types of workout: 3 Number of productive points achieved: 6 Total until Jan 27: 43 points

I'm hopefully back! And nice to see everything has continued pretty nicely here since June Some of you know me - introduction in the spoiler: Currently I'm in Brazil - the land of açai sorbet shops on every street corner - and trying to earn some money while travelling by making an online course in Mathematics. This is quite outside my comfort zone for a few reasons: I haven't done a freelance project like this before I have no idea about marketing I'm very self-conscious about speaking on camera (although I've made a few tutorials on YouTube where I had to do this) This is the first time I've had to focus so much on work while travelling so combining it with travel is difficult I have no idea whether it will be very successful or a complete failure Furthermore, during my month so far in Brazil I've been pretty sedentary. I'm literally sitting right now. And when I sit all day I feel pretty pathetic. So my two main goals for January (starting January 1st) are to be productive with my online business and to get more active throughout the day. Out of all my challenges, positive points systems have worked best, so I'll be doing the same again. Basically there are points available for certain activities, and I just have to collect as many as possible Be active: here I have two issues: I'm often changing locations and don't know where to workout I'm working for long stretches and forget to move To fight this as simply as possible: To encourage workouts: 1-3 points representing the biggest workout I did each day To encourage finding more options: 1 point for every new fitness activity I do To encourage not sitting for too long: 1 point per day when every 30 minutes I get up for a quick stretch / bodyweight set / yoga / etc. (allowed to "forget" max once per day) Be productive: here I want to make as much progress as possible with the online course. I've done lots of planning (and some doing!) so I'm going to fight two forms of procrastination: wasting time rather than working working on easy peripheral activities rather than the serious important stuff To fight this as simply as possible: To encourage focused work: 1 point per day that I track my time spent doing actual work. All this time must be spent doing work that I have on my to-do list Work must be without distractions e.g. Facebook although I can quickly read messages from notifications Time spend working must be 1+ hour per day for this to qualify To encourage serious work: there are points available for certain milestones: [3+ points] provide trial lessons to test material (1 point per lesson + 1 point per new student [max 5 lessons]) send a trial video to Udemy to approve video quality (4 points + 1 when approved) run an experimental set of Facebook ads (2 points) create marketing list of 40 / 60 / 100 / 200 / 500 people (1 point per threshold reached - I already have ~25) create full syllabus (1 point) create promo video (5 points) create course videos (1 point per video - probably will need about 25 in total) bonus for creating first screencast video (1 point) bonus for creating first live video (2 points) + points tbc. for creating extra resources + points tbc. for other tasks bonus for submitting entire course (3 points) Scoring system inside spoiler: Good luck everyone as we hopefully start 2019 in a positive and proactive manner [P.S. if you know someone (or yourself) who might be interested in an online course in improving at everyday Mathematics then you can help me by sharing with them this survey!]

Following properly this time I'm in the same place as you for a few things (fitness goals, different country, freelancing, etc.) so it will be good inspiration.