SymphonicDan

Ooh, exciting - have you done any Spartan races before (or from similar franchises)?

Argh that is a mess - but surely your boyfriend shouldn't have to pay any fine as it's not his fault?! Surely the blame falls completely on his employer? Or does he have to pay the fine now and ask for it to be reimbursed later?

Smart idea to approach the dancing like that - done well that can convert a lot of value in almost any skill...

Argh, injuries are so pointless Hope yours recovers soon! It's not even like you were doing some outrageous move to aggravate it...

Achievement unlocked! Spoiler alert: I did a muscle-up So this afternoon I went over to Margitsziget again to do a 5km run - it went well but I was getting very hot in the last 1500m and even walked a couple of short sections #shame but still got a respectable time of 22:53 (my second-fastest ever, after the 22:30 in Barcelona last year when I specifically trained to get 22:30). Once I cooled down I figured I'd go by the calisthenics park again to play around a little more with the more useful exercises I'd tried yesterday. I did mainly the following: explosive pull-ups with knee raises pull-ups with an L-sit during the elbow phase only slow inverts with bent legs and arms Well, if I'd answered yesterday, I'd say from dead hang, same as normal pull-ups. Today I had the revelation that if I pulled myself out of the hole first I might have more success, and indeed I like it more if I bring my legs up in the middle of the pull-up rather than before I start. I nearly gave up and went home after a while because my skin was sore on my hand callouses (despite my callous care last week) but some Hungarian fighter jets were practising so I was watching those for long enough that my skin was fine again. I then tried #7 from yesterday: ...and like magic I was suddenly almost over the bar! So I gave my muscles a minute to get back to 95% and tried again, and again... I think it was the 5th attempt, and after taking off my shoes (less weight, less moment) that I finally got up there Then I tried twice more immediately after and completely failed pahah. When I got home the hot water wasn't working in the shower, which for me is usually nice now, but after strength training for sure cold exposure decreases strength gains, so it's important to schedule your workouts and WH components so that you don't have a cold shower for at least an hour after strength training. But oh well, I forewent some strength benefits for WH benefits - worse things have happened. I hope I'll get good enough at muscle-ups that this won't be the only one I ever do haha... maybe I'll go run a mile and practise again on Friday.

Nice - always reassuring when some random skill you have transfers to something else, like upper back flexy work -> bouldering We had a baby in the last wedding I saw: "If anyone here knows of any reason why this couple may not be lawfully married, please speak now". *room is silent* *baby suddenly starts gurgling* So I wonder what that little baby knew that everyone else kept quiet

The challenge is still happening? I nearly forgot... So since my update I've been travelling in Hungary, to Siófok and Szentendre, but mainly in Budapest, which is an awesome city Hungarian food is great, and it's not all about langós and goulash, there's much more interesting things to eat... A Hungarian friend took me to eat brains on toast at Balatonfüred (yes you read that correctly, and yes it was delicious), and there's a lot of interesting sour things to eat, lots of salads, etc. I took a 50km cycle ride with a friend and found lots of sour cherry trees full of fruit, and an apricot tree that we could harvest if I carried her, so we ate well Mostly though I have been tired and not really focusing on the challenge, except for looking for remote work - just I doubt whether I'll randomly have something by the end of this challenge. Today though I went to the calisthenics park at Margitsziget with a sheet of 12 exercises and movements to try that I found on the internet for muscle-up progressions and a couple of @@mu's suggestions for leg raises/inverts work: Pull-ups (knees-to-bar) - not so helpful Slow leg raises - actually I can do these to about 80 degrees for a few seconds, much better than I said in @mu's post! And this is with perfectly straight legs L-sit pull-ups - why are these so hard? But good for adding more pecs into my pull-ups Explosive knee raises - basically the same as #1 Arch-dish swings (arch-dishops?)- tried these a couple of weeks ago - will continue with these as they may or not end up being useful Negative muscle-ups - I'm skeptical that this helps training. I don't have the strength to do the drop with control. Something like the gymnastics kip but with leg raise to horizontal rather than toes-to-bar - awkward but maybe helpful Pull-up and rotate wrists at the top - easier than before, and probably good cue to use. However can be dangerous for the wrists to end up in an unintentional false grip Arch-dishop to explosive pull-up - no better than a normal explosive pull-up Chicken-wing muscle-up - I thought this might actually be helpful, despite what the muscle-up purists say, but I broke down the components and it doesn't seem to have much cross-over with any legit way of doing the skill Inverts with bent/straight/straddled legs/arms - looks like it's hard to do these slowly even with bent arms and bent legs, so that's maybe a good starting progression. I mean, I can do them fine but it feels like work. Normally I just throw myself upside-down fast and it's easy. Straddle L-sit - about the same difficulty as a parallel-legs L-sit... I know why it should be easier (by a factor of cosine(leg_angle/2)) but I have very poor active flexibility for things like pancakes (with legs 90 degrees apart I fall backwards in my pancake) so I should work on pancakes rather than using straddles as variants at this point.

You've been doing an impressive amount of work despite all the dentistry!

Haha I wish - I can't get past about 30 degrees away from the downwards vertical without bending my knees. To invert on the rings I bend my knees and elbows and it's super easy. Cheating in this context would be bending elbows or knees or using momentum. Or on the moon. Or in a free-falling elevator. Or with networks of helium balloons for shoes. Actually that's a good point - I'm 1m85 with heavy legs, so Physics is working against me here (moment : strength ratio is unfavourable) but I'd rather train to improve, than just ask Newton to make up excuses for me

Haha, I can relate to the no-filter job interviewing... "Why do you want this job?" "I was hoping you'd tell me - besides for the money obvs"... "Do you have experience in X?" "I have experience in Y and Z, so I'm confident about X, but not going to pretend that Y was actually X"... I hope that many interviewers appreciate that kind of honesty rather than the vanilla hard-to-believe "I have a strong passion for Excel spreadsheet administration and a keen desire for management-focused methodologies, and very much looking forward to further honing my faffing skills at Plaintech Inc." Hope you're enjoying Ingerlund! We've got a football match on today at (7pm UK time) so you should get drunk on cheap beer at a pub while cheering on Rooney (he's not even playing) and swearing at the referee regardless of what's happening.

Congrats to Iran for their match! I'm impressed by your training - in fact you've inspired me to add something like a leg lifts progression to my next challenge (1st July start) because I know that's a big weak point for me. I can only do hanging leg lifts to about 30 degrees from the vertical unless I cheat... any progressions you recommend? Straight legs-to-bar would be a great end result. And so true what you say about how demotivating it is working on skills that you used to have but have regressed... it's always tempting for me to just brute-force something that feels correct rather than doing the mundane work that solidifies the skill, even though that only fixes the ego, not the body.

I won't tell you what you feel, because you know and I don't, but you're doing more activity and beneficial activities even on a bad week than most people do on a good week, so you're still doing objectively well. Good luck for the upcoming week

Cooool Lâches are something I've always wanted to give a good go at! Although isn't it awkward to do them with the bars so low, so your legs don't have free reign to swing wherever they need?

Lol yes exactly, you'd have discarded cans and a bit of broken glass at minimum Still I wonder what stories that park has seen....!

Good to see you back tei_ Haha yes - I quite like the all-rounder and goal-chasing aspects of Crossfit, but whenever I see a WoD program it has thing like 200 bodyweight squats and 50 kipping pull-ups, and I wonder what exactly that is supposed to achieve, except for the feeling of having worked out?

Challenge - end of Part I update: So the days I set aside for Goal 1: productive routine are now over, and I'm happy with my score of 5.25/6.00 (88%) However there are still 17 days left of my trip, where I'll be splitting my time between at least 5 locations and won't attempt to stick to any routine... Nevertheless I'm going to be working on the other items that remain from my challenge, which is most of it: finally do a muscle-up (I've been trying for years!) (1.00 points) run a mile in 05:50 / 05:42 / 05:35 / 05:30 (previous record 05:56) (0.25 / 0.50 / 0.75 / 1.00 points) do a set of 40 push-ups (not during Wim Hof retention) (0.50 points) find more paid remote software work (0.50 points) submit a solution with a score of 0.700 / 0.780 / 0.790 / 0.800 in the Kaggle competition (0.25 / 0.50 / 0.75 / 1.00 points) half-write / completely write a Coding course for my summer school (0.25 / 0.50 points) In recent news, I have been experimenting more with the bar muscle-up and have a couple of breakthroughs: I can now do pull-ups to stomach height My current high pull-up is putting me too much underneath the bar, and therefore is mostly useless for the purpose of surmounting the bar, so I need a technique modification If I do a hollow + dish + pull-up with straight arms, I get quite high before even starting the pull-up, and it puts me behind the bar, so this is one promising option If I extend my legs concentrating at the hip during the kind of legs-bent kip that people often do for high pull-ups then I also end up behind the bar, so here is another option fresh callouses are troublesome And yes, my requirement all these years since learning the strict strength-based ring muscle-up has been to do any symmetric bar muscle-up, so any crazy kipping variations are fair game, although a later goal would be to tame any craziness

You should incorporate workout elements into everyday activities all the time Burpees - I did a set of 15 while stuck at a red light... Plank - 50 seconds while on hold to my utilities supplier...

Ahh I know the feeling well... Too many decisions (e.g. travel planning) => hide from everything that feels like a decision. The trick I've found is to pick random things that make sense to do regardless of what you end up doing later, but that only helps like 20%... Enjoy England! Sorry I'm not there to hang and eat surf 'n' turf with you! Also, who keeps bringing up topics at your office like the ethics of homosexuality? Or does this guy just like digging holes for himself?

This is the exact stuff I'm terrible at... leg raises to the bar etc... so it's interesting reading what workouts you do for consistent progress with it

Thanks, but I have bad news! I was just checking something on Google Maps, and noticed that the road map view was shorter than the (more up-to--date) satellite view! So unfortunately I was measuring the wrong distance, and it was 87 metres shorter (so 1522m < 1609m = 1 mile)... It's a good job I checked, as this is actually equivalent to about a 5:50 mile, not a 5:30 mile As it was a genuine error I'll award the 0.25 points for the 5:50 but obviously not for the 5:42, 5:35 or 5:30. They have limits on team sizes (5 or 6 people), and you can merge teams mid-competition up until 1 week before the final closing deadline. The other restriction is that you can't submit more than 5 solutions per day, and if two teams have more than that combined then they can't team up (to prevent people from coordinating teams to get 10, 15 or more per day between them. And you can only share code between teams if you post it publicly there for everyone to see and benefit from equally. Obviously it would be impossible to police idea sharing, and I don't know how much they do plagiarism detection to find undeclared shared code, but the principle is that all your work is for either your team's benefit, or everyone's equally. Good idea I don't really have a long-term goal to be fair... just something else to work on, and I did get up to 40 push-ups in a set when I was 16 and when I was... 21?

Ahhaha you scared me there with casually introducing the situation like that Glad to read the real reason!

I knew I was forgetting to follow someone else! Your basil seedling must be the most famous in the whole world right now!

Raptron you're a machine! Meanwhile it took me like a week to remember to follow you Your lifting numbers are super solid - shows us the sort of progress any of us can aim for with dedication and smart programming.

I've always wondered why some people think that exposure to homosexuality will "turn them gay". I mean, back some decades ago they tried turning gay people straight with various conversion methods (e.g. electric shocks), which I believe had very limited success (and caused a bunch of mental health side-effects), and inadvertently demonstrated that it's difficult and unreliable (or perhaps fundamentally impossible) to change someone's sexual orientation. So how watching a cartoon of homosexual behaviour will change anyone is something I don't understand?! Likewise when people think that homosexual people just choose to be like that, and could just stop these "sinful" thoughts and become heterosexual, if only they were persuaded heavily enough... Do they also think that they (as presumably a straight person) could just decide to be gay for a week? It clearly doesn't work like that :| Also I feel your frustration with those dynosoars. When I try I don't exactly...soar... ! It must be something to do with the technique/timing, because I'm sure I have the power but when I try I'm usually disappointingly low...

And we've solved the mystery of the deer the locals keep seeing!