CheshireCrab

I've always admired heroes, but felt the traits that make one is rather ambiguous. So I ask you, what do you feel makes a hero? What traits must a hero possess and actions they should perform to become one?

Gotta give credit to The Simpsons for that. Fell in love the second Lenny requested it.

Week 2 Summary This wraps up one of my most memorable weeks of the year. This week I have finished up the last of my classes, put in an intense last weight lifting session for the year, and completed new Quests from both Fitocracy and NF Academy. Strength and Cardio - After 7 days of light intensity workouts I was stoked to finally come back to the gym to do some weight lifting. On Thursday I wanted to put in a Powerlifting session and test my max for Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift. Last month I did this and had a comfortable Squat and Bench Press Lift, but absolutely bombed the Deadlift. Since then I focused more on including Deadlifts into my workout, fixed my technique, and manged to lift over 30lbs more on my Deadlift than a month ago. I also unlocked a Fito Quest as well! On Friday, I was pretty dang sore from lifting so I took it easy so I can move on to doing another intense workout the next day. In the meantime, I wrote up a list of all the Quests I wanted to get done before the end of this year. I had a lot of weight lifting Quests I've neglected in favor of focusing on increasing workouts to build my strength in other areas(I.e. PowerLifting, Gymnastics, Running, and Swimming), so I figured I'll spend as much time at the gym on Saturday and knock them out. Out of the 39 Quests and Achievements I aimed to complete I managed to knock out a total of 16 Quests and Achievements(2 Fito Quests, 2 Fito Achievements, and 12 NF Academy Quests). I guess I was a little too ambitious for thinking I could finish some of the heavier weighted Quests for exercises I never really trained, but that is just motivation to train harder and get them done in the future. University - This last week went off without a hitch. I had been putting my best foot forward all semester and that has benefited me in the end. I did my Android Application presentation for my Capstone class and was highly complimented by the instructor. I was apparently one of the few in the class whose project really came together in the end, and I am pretty dang proud my efforts paid off and built an App I've been wanting to build for over a year. The rest of my classes finished off smoothly as well, and now, after several years of classes, I am able to graduate with my B.S. in Computer Science. I appreciate all the support I have received from my friends and family over my College Career, they really gave me the push to make it to the end. I am excited to move on to the next phase in my life. Everything Else - I dropped the ball on my reading habit this week. I had to return a book to the library and wanted to do a re-read of each chapter to write down the information it had listed. But... I kept putting it off in favor of focusing on my school work and didn't make it by the return date. Just glad one of the benefits of being an Alumni would mean I can at least check out that book in the future. Guitar and Piano are going well. I started to practice Classical Gas and am incredibly surprised by how difficult the song is. Managed to get down the first 20 seconds of the song, and hoping to eventually complete the rest in due time.

Thanks for putting on such a fun challenge! Feels like a constant neck-to-neck race on who becomes this month's daredevil

To be fair, the knee jumps aren't encouraging you to do a hard land, just to jump a few feet in the air than come back down to the ground. It doesn't really cause stress on the knees. I feel that such a drop would only be problematic if you are jumping down from a height a few feet higher than waist level and landing on hard ground.

Week 1 Summary This week has been going pretty dang swell! To really start off this list I wanted to go over my physical portion of the challenge. Strength and Cardio - This week has been busy, I've been polishing off my capstone project for my final presentation next Monday(Have gotten a lot of compliments from testers so far!), but still managed to fill in some time for working out. Last Thursday, however, I went to the gym to work on my normal routine of legs, shoulders, and grip. After getting done with my barbell squat warm-ups I found myself feeling incredibly weak. I was feeling fatigue all week, but thought it wouldn't be a problem working out. However, after doing 75% of my max intensity, I found myself struggling to get the full reps in. I talked to my body building friend who started asking me more about my routine and everything. He told me that it sounds like I should be taking a week off of weight lifting and calisthenics to recover (Bummer!). He said lighter workouts would still be good, but I really should not focus on doing more than 50% intensity. Luckily, the PVP Queen @Xena had a Daily Dare Challenge going on. These were manageable so I started alternating these and walks/hikes for my usual strength and cardio days. Want to be in tip top shape for Thursday when I plan to do a heavy weight lifting day. School and Work - With 2-3 hours cleared from my day from not exercising, I had more time to work on school work... So I invested a lot of this weekend on school work. I polished off my 2 Term Papers, 6,000 word essay, and did about 10+ hours of coding revisions on my app for my capstone project most of last week. I just have to give my application's final presentation and I'll be set on finishing up my homework for the rest of the semester. Everything Else - I took that work flow and brought it into Guitar and Piano. I felt really focused and started hitting the notes really well in Piano, and managed to finish off my Guitar Basics book. I am moving on to now learning how to play more advanced songs(Like Classical Gas) to improve my speed.

Little late to the game, but I'll join in! Squats Hops done with EC

Thank you @Rhovaniel! Rooting for you to do the same!

Well this is it. Since joining this awesome community back in January I have finally reached my final challenge of the year, and my final challenge before going on a medical hiatus. Since I will need to be taking a break next month I am going to give it my all to complete the remainder of my year-end goals in the next 4-weeks. So without further ado... Quest Challenges Wim Hof Meditation(10 Minutes a day for 30 days) Attend a Yoga Class Attend an Akido Class No drinkable calories Quest Master* Quests Non-Quest Challenges Keep up weekly habits(Spread sheet for tracking) Finish up Coursera Photography Course Finish Fall Semester Post School(Dec 9th) Study for Google's Android Certification Exam(5 hours a week) Work on FreeCodeCamp's Back-End Certification(5 hours a week) Work on launching blog (5 hours a week) Contribute to Habitica's Open Source Project(5 Hours a week) Learn the JS React Framework(5 hours a week) _______ There is going to be a heck of a lot more on my plate for this challenge, but that just means that much more of a challenge! Once school is finished up I am going to utilize that free time to work on project building and prepping up my programming skills. *Quest Master - This is a special item on my list. Once the semester ends I am no longer going to be able to access the University's gym. Since I'll be breaking from weight lifting for a while I am going to start targeting as many Warrior Quests from Nerd Fitness Academy's list, as many Quests from Fitocracy, and as many Achievements from Fitocracy as I can in one day to knock as many of them off as possible.

A meet-up sounds sweet! Bike is still broken, would love to ride in the winter otherwise! My fiancee and I have been making it a weekly thing to go hiking and found some awesome mountain biking trails around the Twin Cities that would be awesome to take a ride on.

Looks like it's time to wrap up another 4 week challenge! Week 4 Round-Up This last week was a bit hectic. On Sunday my car overheated and died on the way home. My fiancee and I had to get it towed home then eventually taken to a mechanic. It ended up being without my car for most of the week. I was able to get it back at the end of the week, but without a car I was not able to make it to my Akido or Yoga class for this challenge. Going to be pushing it to next week. In addition to my car being repaired I also spent a lot of my leisure banging out a large chunk of my code so I can push my Captsone Application to the Google Play Store and get it set for Alpha testing. Won't be too long now until it's all done and ready for my final presentation. Although, during the weekend I got got so caught up in programming I ran out of time to put in some Guitar practice. Final Thoughts: Was pretty bummed out I wasn't able to complete enough habits due to the rough patch I had in my last week of this challenge, but I did expect to hit some sort of snag this month due to it getting close to the end of the semester. Fortunately, I only have a few more weeks until the semester is over, so here's hoping for a successful 4-weeks next challenge! Nerd Fitness Academy Stats: Fitocracy Stats Body Shots Measurements Moving Forward: Next 4 -week challenge will be my last challenge before I need to take a brief hiatus from everything. With 4 weeks left I want to wrap up some stuff left on my list for the year, specifically some Academy Quests. Will be shooting for hitting a rather large list of things next challenge!

Anything that pumps me up. Very much into EDM, but I also really dig Rock music which lyrics are about getting stronger, conquering, or exploring new lands.

Congrats, Doctor Cat!

Hey Sloth! I do not live in South Minneapolis, but I would be up for making the drive to meet-up.

This week has been a week of yay! Week 3 Summary Skillin' Like a Warrior Strength and Cardio - This was a rough week! I've had my third capstone presentation on Monday and had to take some time away from my usual workouts in favor of getting my project presentable. Still got workout and cardio in, but man it was rough! On the bright side, I ended getting so much work done on my presentation I am officially 2 weeks ahead of my planned deadline. Cardio was interesting. I am doing a tournament for Fitocracy and am on round 2. This round was a cycling challenge to see who can do the most distance. My bike has a a flat for a while, but found a quick fix to get myself some miles and have a chance at my opponent! Skillin' Like a Wizard FreeCodeCamp - Since I managed to get ahead in my capstone I dedicated most of Saturday to working on my final project for Free Code Camp. I finished off the last technical requirements for the assignment, fixed up some bugs, and submitted my assignment. After several hundred hours of work I was able to get...*Drum roll please* *Censored for privacy reasons My Front-End Web Certificate! Next up is my back-end certificate! Photography - I finished off my 4th and final week of my photography class at Coursera. This week I was suppose to play around with vantage points and utilizing image framing to give more meaning to the image. I found this week to be a bit difficult because I narrowed it down to 2 images and had a difficult time choosing between the two. I opted to pick the image below because I felt the distance of my fiancee was at made her appear smaller and mad the tree itself look much more massive Reading -I am one more chapter away until I finish off What Doesn't Kill Us. Since reading this book I started to spend more time practicing the Wim Hof Method by going out and doing jogs in minimal clothing in the cold Minnesota weather then taking ice cold showers afterwards. After the 3rd day of doing this I found myself much more loving the cold! Skillin' Like a Monk Yoga and Stretching - Planned to do Akido and Yoga this week, but plans fell through. My fiancee and I went to a Yoga studio about an hour away to try out a trial class but found that the free classes are for locals only. We opted to instead go to one closer by and just pay to attend. For Akido, I had trouble finding a class that offered non-membership classes but located one and plan on going to their dojo on next Tuesday! Skillin' Like a Bard Guitar - Well, won't be unlocking the reward for this one. I missed Sunday due to a day-long hike then Monday I missed it due to working on my capstone project. Fortunately, I have been practicing it enough that I am in the habit of doing it despite knowing I am not getting that reward. Plus I have found that in the past three months of practicing guitar and piano I am seeing my memory improved. I haven't forgotten items when leaving the house for several weeks now, and just recently I did a first and successfully bought every item I needed for shopping despite losing my grocery list during my bike ride to the store. Seems like the passage from the book Deep Work was right that music does seem to help improve memory. _____ Week 3 may not have been solid as I was expecting, but I am glad to have managed to see 2 rewards unlocked. Here's to week 4! *Typo in the Photography reward. Meant to say Course 2. Moving on to the 2nd photography course for Coursera

You guys ever hear about the November Project? I was reading about it's history going from two college students wanting to work out in the cold and expanding to this global movement. I was interested in showing up to one of their meet-ups in my area. Has anyone gone to a November Project workout? What were your thoughts on it?

Sure, hit me up any time you have questions! Your Quests and Achievements can be found by going to your profile and looking towards the left-pane where your About, Feed, and Activities are located. The Quests require you to do specific activities described under the Quest list. Completing a Quest will give you Bonus XP for leveling up. The Quests have a link for each activity to show what exercise qualifies towards that Quest(e.g. Heroic Half Marathon can be achieved by logging either Running, Treadmill Running, or Trail Running). The Achievements are basically milestones and do not grant XP. They are only unlocked by reaching certain exercise goals(i.e. Running X amount of miles, Bench Press X-amount of your body weight, Doing X-Amount of pull-ups). There are certain Quests and Achievements that differ by gender. It's mostly the ones that involve weight lifting. They also have groups available if you go to the top-menu and click on "Connect". The WTF - Welcome to Fitocracy, Ask A Fitocracy Coach, and Fitocracy Knowledge base are great groups to help with questions about general exercising and about the Fito App itself.

Week 2 Summary Skillin' Like a Warrior Strength and Cardio - The Powerlifting workout I did last Saturday ended up being such a tremendous benefit! This week was a weightlifting week and I managed to see some drastic improvements in my Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlifts. It feels like that goal of hitting a 305lb Deadlift before the end of this year is looking more realistic. For cardio I started alternating running with cycling and rowing. With the seasons getting colder it's been hard getting my headphones to stay in my ears, and running without music has not really been that fun... Skillin' Like a Wizard FreeCodeCamp - I didn't get any progress done for this challenge. I had a Quiz in my Thursday's class and have my 3rd Capstone presentation happening this upcoming Monday. I wanted to get the back-end portion of my project done for my presentation and opted to work on that this weekend instead of my final FreeCodeCamp Project. I am hoping to work on the last of my FreeCodeCamp project this Saturday so I can submit it and get that sweet certificate all in one go! Photography - I ended up getting ahead in this class and finished weeks 2 and 3 all in one week. I have one more week left until I move onto the next course. For week 2's assignment we were suppose to do a photography experiment. We start out by taking an image as we normally would then play around with different camera angles and surrounding environment to take a series of images. We then give a brief description about what drew us to taking out our camera and snapping the first image then what led us to taking what we considered the best image in the series. First Image I took this first image after my fiancee commented how the snow on the trees made it look like it was something out of a comic book. After playing around with the landscape around us I noticed the pathway ahead had trees to the left without any leaves and trees to the right with its leaves still on. The two opposing sides ended up giving a very contrasting look and prompted me to take a picture of that. Best Image in Series Reading - So far I am halfway through a book I picked up called What Doesn't Kill Us by Scott Carney. This is a book that dives into meditation guru, Wim Hof, and his renowned method used to achieve seemingly superhuman feats: Scaling mountains with nothing but shorts, meditating under the waterfalls in the dead of winter, and running a desert marathon with no water. He also has been able to teach various other people how to perform these same stunts as well as to use his method to prevent themselves from getting ill after being directly injected with a viral disease. This book has been very interesting and goes into a lot of scientific analysis on Wim Hof's Method. What I found most fascinating from his book was his study on Brown Fat. Scott mentions that humans have two kinds of fat: White Fat, the fat that stores caloric energy and is most commonly linked to obesity, and Brown Fat, a much leaner fat that uses white fat to help insulate the body. He talks about how humans have this brown fat when they are younger but lose it as they get older and adapt to an "Eternal Summer", described as living in houses with cranked up heaters and minimizing going outside in the winter as much as possible. Scott mentions that this Brown Fat was much more commonly found in our ancestors. The people who have practiced Wim Hof Method has found themselves losing several pounds of pure fat and having a larger than normal brown fat. As a result they are able to stay lean while enduring extreme weather conditions. Scott mentions that one of the ways to build this brown fat is to endure the cold while doing some form of physical exertion. This has inspired me to start training my body by going outside as much as possible during my workouts. Likely going to implement it in my next 4-week challenge! Skillin' Like a Monk Yoga and Stretching - So far so good! Planning on doing both my Yoga and Akido classes on week 3 Skillin' Like a Bard Guitar - I started to hit my stride again and started to enjoy playing guitar once more. It was a bit tedious last week but I got over that hump and am finding myself improving a little faster than usual. I also ordered a new power cable for my keyboard so I can start practicing piano again. Although it's likely not coming in until next week. _____ Week 2 has been pretty solid so far. If everything goes according to plan I should be seeing a few rewards unlocked by the end of week 3!

If I have to guess... You're a bear optometrist!

Thanks! I am getting pretty excited to see what my reward at the end of this challenge will be! The Yoga classes I looked for around my area seems to have a 1-week free trial to their classes. I am thinking of taking advantage of that offer to fit in two classes on both of my yoga days. The Akido one I need to look into. Hoping there's a free drop-in!

Glad to hear you're liking it! If you're down, send me a link to your Fito profile. Would love to see your progress! Also, keep up the great work! You have been producing awesome numbers, that gargoyle is cheering you on!

Programmer

What about leveling up each challenge and linking stats based on @Anim07734's suggestion? Like similar to the deprecated leveling up system NF used for challenges. Just need a way to get Pokeballs so I can start trying to capture other Rebels, haha!

Hey Vendetta, First off, congrats on staying strong and taking up the proactive mindset again to better yourself! Myself and the rest of the rebellion here would love to offer you any help you need. Was there any specific things you wanted tips on?

It's going really well! Went hiking this weekend and ended up not finding time to do my summary this weekend. Week 1 Summary Skillin' Like a Warrior Strength and Cardio - Was a bit difficult for this skill. This week I was caught up with a lot of school work, so I had to cut back my strength training a little bit a few days of the week. I was proud I at least got an hour of strength training and cardio in each day of the week. On Monday I tackled a Fitocracy Quest called When I Dip, You Dip, We Dip. The goal was to do 100 Dips in a day, but I decided to just do them all at once. Man my shoulders and triceps were beat the following day! Saturday I wanted to get a better idea of my strength for Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlifts. I did a Powerlifting style workout and found I was able to push myself further than I thought I could in all three exercises. I managed to also unlock the Quest River Gorilla Mode during my workout. I found out that I need to work on my Deadlifts a bit more. The Deadlift is the one exercise out of the three I do very little of and it showed during my workout. I ended up Outsquatting my Deadlifts by a good 30 lb more. In the end I was able to meet the Squat and Bench Press requirements for the next Quest up, Mountain Gorilla Mode, but I was just short of meeting the Deadlift Requirement. I am going to start doing Deadlifts more regular to get a stronger lift next time and unlock that Quest! Skillin' Like a Monk Yoga and Stretching - This skill is going by so far so good! Stretching every day and doing Yoga on my non-strength training days was definitely the wisest decision I made for my workout regime. I looked up some free Yoga classes offered around my area and found a school right up my alley! Skillin' Like a Wizard Have been really enjoying this skill! FreeCodeCamp - I ended up getting a good chunk of my project done for Free Code Camp the day I started this challenge and feel if all goes well I can get it done before my 4 weeks are up. Photography - My photography class has been so much fun! I have been learning a lot from it and have found it to be a lovely excuse to get out and go hiking every week to take some shots. I realize I need to start saving up for a better camera so I can start playing around more with the techniques I'm learning in my class. Reading - Finished off 2 Productivity books so far: The Power of Habit by Charles Durhigg and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Both books have enlightening. Since reading them I started to change my habits gradually to make myself more proactive so I can more efficiently work towards my goals. Skillin' Like a Bard Guitar - I'll be honest here, I've been having the most difficult with this skill than any of the other ones listed here. Previous challenges I switched each day between Guitar and Piano, but since my Keyboard died and I lost the cable it's been purely Guitar all week. Even though there are days I enjoy it, I get kind of bored practicing nearly every day. I've been trying to switch it up by learning Acoustic through my book and learning Electric using the tutorial game Rocksmith 2014. It's been helping a little, but I am anxious for the day I get a new power cable so I can start playing Piano again. ____________ Overall I think week 1 has been pretty solid. I am hoping to keep this pace up for the next weeks following. Will soon be reaching those sweet rewards for keeping up my skills.