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Intro/Chapter 1 here: Chapter 2: A Blinky Mess WhiteGhost reaches the end of the wall and takes a bounding leap off of the back wall, tic-tacing over to a window ledge and pulls himself up. Afraid that looking over his should to check his pursuer will take precious seconds, he focuses on shimmying up a rain gutter until he reaches the edge of the roof. Only once he has pulled himself over does he risk taking a look to see how things are going. To his delight, the big man is still on the ground of the alley, trying in vain to grab the fire escape ladder. WhiteGhost breathes a sigh of relief “Well, that wasn’t so bad, but I am going to need to be more careful so I don’t get recognized. It will be a lot harder to find Blinky if I have people looking for me” he thinks to himself as he sets off at a brisk run across the rooftops. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Blinky lives in a nondescript 3rd floor apartment in Indian Flats, a middle income neighborhood on the West side of town. He started out as a CIA forensic accountant many years ago working in the organized crime unit, but he traded sides and went to work as a financier for a mob boss who made him an offer he apparently couldn’t refuse. A couple of years ago he got caught embezzling his boss' cash and as punishment got his eyelids cut off, hence the nickname. He now works as a freelance financial advisor, supplying his services to white hats, black hats and anyone else with a lot of cash and something to hide. When WhiteGhost gets to Blinky’s place he finds the front door hanging from just the top hinge, twisting slightly with every gust of wind. “I guess I’m not the only one who needs a word with old Blinky,” WhiteGhost mutters under his breath and he slips silently through the broken doorway. Inside, Blinky’s place has been completely ransacked. Drawers have been pulled out and dumped on the floor, his bed has been flipped and the bedsheets are strewn wildly around the bedroom. His bookshelves have been pulled down and the floor of the living room is a sea of books. WhiteGhost takes a look at the computer desk and smiles to himself. The guys that did this clearly were not professionals, just some low level thugs who didn’t understand Blinky’s world. The computer keyboard has been smashed to pieces and there is a hunting knife sticking through what remains of it, pinning it to the desk. The monitor has been knocked to the floor with a fist sized hole through it. However, the tower under the desk is untouched and apparently still on, the cooling fan creating a dull hum in the background. Empty diet cola bottles litter the floor and a half eaten burrito is mashed under a tipped over chair. Apparently Blinky was interrupted unexpectedly. WhiteGhost hooks up his tablet to the computer through an HDMI adapter and discovers a TOR browser open, with TrueCrypt and Bleachbit running in the background. If Blinky didn’t have time to close these, he must have really been in a rush to get out. The TOR browser is open to a Lelantos email account, but most of the emails don’t make any sense. It seems Blinky was encrypting his messages manually before entering them into the encrypted system. Given the types of people he deals with, he couldn’t afford to mess around. The last email received, though, was not encrypted. Opening it up, WhiteGhosts finds a Darknote XDN blockchain showing transfers of large sums of bitcoin to accounts in varying countries with Switzerland, Russia, South Africa, China, India and Mongolia coming up the most. The email sender is merely identified by a single letter: H. “No time to worry about that now,” WhiteGhost thinks to himself. “I need to find Blinky and get to the bottom of this.” He reaches down to unplug his HDMI cable, and decides to pull out the hard drive for later. As he pulls it out, he notices a yellow sticky note stuck to the inside of the computer tower. He pulls it off and finds “WG38.2946071.-80.3132366” scrawled in pencil. Mission 1: Improve Grip Strength 3x/week (excluding Mission 2) Mission 2: Muscle Up Routine (+full body) 2 Days/Week Mission 3: Focused Flexibility 5 Days/Week Mission 4: Homemade Meal 1/Week Go/no-Go = 15 second one hand hang on each hand by end of week 4 Neither hand = Can’t decipher the clue, needs to keep working 1 hand only = Deciphered the clue but needs help Both hands = Deciphered the clue and can act on it

Following the examples of @juliebarkley and others, I am doing a story based challenge this time Intro Cut-Scene: Shadows and Voices In the shadows of the narrow alley, a hooded figure moves silently forward along the wall trying to get a better view of the street. The street is deserted except for two men standing beneath a dimly lit LED billboard, advertising a luxury sedan. WhiteGhost’s eyes linger on the advertisement for only a moment before shifting his focus to the two men in the street. “Man, it would be nice to move around the city in that instead of creeping through shadows all the time,” he thinks to himself before shaking his head to clear his thoughts. At 3 o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday in Aldenton it would not be uncommon for a drunk office worker to be dragging himself home from a “client meeting” or perhaps a group of students from ACC, the local community college, to be finishing off a round of bar hopping. These two, however, are as out of place in this low income neighborhood as orcs in Rivendell. One of them is short and fat, with a receding hairline and deep grating voice, the other is tall and muscular with a nasal, rasping voice. “I wouldn’t want to run into that guy in a dark alley,” WhiteGhost thinks to himself, chuckling inwardly about the irony of the idea. Both men are dressed to the nines, the shorter man in a dark blue Italian double breasted pinstripe suit and highly polished black wingtips, and the other in an off-white bespoke seersucker suit and brown leather cap-toe derbys. “Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K,” WhiteGhost thinks as he inches closer to try and catch their conversation. “The BVI SPV could funnel mez cap through the Cayman holdco, it wouldn’t even hit the listco,” the gravelly voice says in hushed tones. Even in the dim light of the LED billboard, Whiteghost can see the larger man roll his eyes. “We’ve been over this! You have the routing info, I’ll message you when they execute the SPA. Now let’s get out of here before someone sees us. Who knows what kind of lowlifes might be lurking in a stinking dump of a neighborhood like this.” Both men instinctively look around, but WhiteGhost is well concealed in the shadows. “I have no idea what all that means, but sounds like these jokers are up to no good,” WhiteGhost thinks as he slowly creeps deeper into the shadows. “I better get out of here too and go find Blinky, if anyone would know what this is about, it’s him.” Suddenly the LED billboard changed to show a flashing bottle of a new diet soda that had just been launched. The light from the LED screen dissipates the shadows and both men are suddenly aware of the figure crouching at the mouth of the now fully lit alleyway. “Mishmash ‘n’ meatballs,” Whiteghost curses under his breath as he races back into the alley with the bruiser hot on his heels. Unfortunately, this alley is a dead end so getting away from this guy is going to be a bit of a climb. Mission 1: Muscle Up Routine 2 Days/Week 1. Eccentric MUs 5x3 2. Explosive pullups 10x3 3. Bar dips 10x3 4. Explosive knee raises 10x3 5. Headbangers 10x3 6. Clap pushups 10x3 7. Dragon thrusts 10x3 8. Bar ladders 5x2 9. Laches 5x1 10. Burpees 10x3 Mission 2: Flatland BMX 90 minutes/week 1. Practice & maintain current skills 2. Practice infinity loop and squeakers 3. Work on building up to boomerang and decade Mission 3: Hip Mobility Stretch Routine 5 Days/Week 1. Standing long sit 2. External leg rotations 3. Peraformis 4. Butterfly stretch 5. Frog stretch 6. Kneeling lunge 7. Squatting internal leg rotation 8. Pigeon stretch 9. Long Sit 10. Side Lunge Mission 4: Homemade Meal 1/Week 1. Select recipe by Tuesday 2. Buy online ingredients by Wednesday 3. Buy other ingredients by Friday 4. Cook & serve meal during weekend Go/no-Go: chest pullup, to the nipple, with head and shoulders above the bar by end of week 4 No chest pullup = caught by the buff dude to face certain interrogation (next challenge will be strength focused to attempt escape) 1 chest pullup = escaped but made (can identify me) (next challenge will be both strength and mobility focused to get to Blinky but take care of myself if they send goons to track me) More than 1 chest pullup = clean escape (next challenge will be mobility focused to get to Blinky ASAP) This mission will track Mon-Sun

The Target: Muscle-Up Teh Skillz: Redevelop explosive high pullup Redevelop controlled dip Redevelop controlled tiger pushup & russian dip for transition Develop kip 'Sup nerds. Been a minute since I've had an NF challenge thread. I've been thinking about it for months. And I finally remembered a goal I want to return to. (Yes.., it took months of thinking. I've been raising my infant daughter. This is my brain now. A sleep-deprived grey/white mush.)

It's fun to do music in my challenges again. I missed it. So, gonna keep this short and simple because I've started parts of it and I'm on a short amount of time. Yes, time. I was staring at my schedule - all the things that I wanted to do and want to do still - and it finally occurred to me: life would just be easier with more daytime in it. And the way that happens is to go to bed earlier. But it's not just about going to bed earlier. The truth is, a lot of my life is messy. I'm thinking about that a lot I guess because, well, my bro and I are looking at moving out of the parent's place. Yup, that's right. Now that Dad's back to dying as slowly as we can ask him to, it's feeling a little crowded under this roof. He, I, and a third roommate are looking at places where we might want to live where the rent doesn't suck. And I want to leave this place as well as I can. That'll be a lot easier if I clean my end of things up more. So. Clean time, clean house. Let's get to it. GOAL 1: CLEAN UP MY TIME - BED BY 11 GOAL 2: CLEAN UP MY SPACE - ONE WALL OF MY ROOM EACH WEEK GOAL 3: CLEAN UP MY GUT - ONE SERVING OF SAUERKRAUT A WEEK GOAL 4: CLEAN UP MY CATALOG - FINISH UNDERTALE TO MAKE ROOM FOR ME: ANDROMEDA Bonus-That-Isn't: 4 written pages a week. And with that, we're off to the races.

Hello guys, i have created a Muscle Up Tutorial for all those who want to learn it but struggle. I am showing how you can learn your muscle up step by step and what exercises you need to do in order to learn it and achieve it. Have a look and enjoy!

I floundered a bit last challenge, since I was burned out and didn't have much direction. Now that I'm studying to be a full instructor at the parkour gym and may be helping with some stunt fighting classes, I have renewed my focus and motivation! So, on that note, it's time to become Immortal and enter The Game. Each goal has a target of 100 points over the course of the challenge. Goal 1: Fight! - Immortals need to be experts in combat to survive. Points toward the combat goal are earned by doing any of the following: -2 points for every 10 minutes of weapon training -2 points for every 10 minutes of shadowboxing -2 points for every 10 minutes of remembering and reviewing hapkido self defense techniques -5 points for every strength session that includes some sort of muscle up progression, some sort of hanging core work, HSPU progression, handstand holds, and grip training). Goal 2: Run away! - Sometimes, the best way to survive is to run away. Points for running away are earned by: -5 points for parkour open gym skills practice. Fast wall top outs, vaults, and other things = easier time fleeing. -4 points for actually working on swimming when I take the kids to to the pool -4 points for any jog of any length -4 points for any nature ruck Goal 3: Immortal Healing- I'm still having some knee issues, and I need to stay on top of my prehab. So, 4 points are earned every day that I do foam rolling and prehab. Goal 4: Seek Holy Ground- Immortals are safe* (more or less) on holy ground, so they can relax a bit. For me, this goal is about reducing stress. I earn 4 points every day that I take 30 minutes to just do something for myself, like yoga, reading, playing a video game, or whatever else might help alleviate stress. Goal 5: Become worldly - Immortals who live long enough travel the entire world. I will work toward worldliness and earn points by: -50 points: plan and take vacation up the Atlantic coast. -5 points for every chapter of Harry Potter that I manage to read in Spanish. Bonus: study the instructor guide and schedule my test. Hopefully, all of this focus helps me get my mojo back!

Hello Everyone! My name is Wolf and welcome to the Masters of the Universe thread to achieving advanced bodyweight moves! This thread will be ongoing and anyone can join. This sanctum is for those callisthenic enthusiasts out there that want to get their first muscle-up, human flag or even freestanding HSPU. Lifting heavy and throwing around iron is great, almost nostalgic in nature-but to me, there's something special about manipulating your body weight and maintaining absolute control that just gets me all warm inside! I want to achieve my 1st muscle up, human flag, freestanding HSPU and both front and back levers one day soon. Realistically, some of these moves, like the levers, can take up to 2 years of training-but it doesn't hurt to post progress on the advancement for these epic moves. The muscle-up and HSPU are the first advanced moves I will be working towards. There's something sexy about the muscle-up. It's fluid and shows great power and manipulation over the body. The freestanding HSPU... well, that's just beastmode right there. Signs of a hardcore core! Both exemplify control and immense strength. Plus, advanced moves like this directly relate to functional fitness. If you're a parkour/freerunning enthusiast like me, moves like the muscle up help develop the necessary strength and power to get up and over walls that are of great height. Plus, it just looks cool. So come on in and enjoy yourself, stay a while, introduce yourself and your goals and lets get after it! Any Masters of the Universe references are always appreciated! I HAVE THE POOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRR! Wolf

Hi everyone First challenge as an assasin, I'm really excited to join you guys, one of my long term goals is to achieve the muscle up. I like hiking, bouldering, mountain biking and rocking the shit out of my guitar and mic. my motivation comes from an almost 3 years long battle with weight, I've lost almost 30 kgs in the course of those 3 years with ups and downs but I'm still dropping weight, I'm also getting married this october and hell yeah I would like to rock some kind of abs during my honeymoon, beside I made a promise to my girlfriend (my nutritionist, how convenient right?), I told her I will look like mother effin THOR (chris hemsworth, she loves that guy) by december 2017 jajajaja very long time I know but that is one hell of a body. Word on the street is that your mini challenges are awesome so I'm really looking forward to them, i hope I'll be up to them. I'll keep my main quest as in my past recruit challenge. so here are my goals and stats. CURRENT STATS: Height: 1.87 m Weight: 88.6 kg Body Fat: 17.7 % MAIN QUEST: Drop to 15% body fat for October (my wedding and honeymoon) GOAL #1: Drop to 16.5% body fat at the end of the challenge GOAL #2: Get from 6 pullups to 8 pullups GOAL #3: Keep my lifting weights and increase them if its possible, I will set a 20 lb increase goal. Squats: 150 lbs DONE Dead lift: 130 lbs Bench: 130 lbs My diet is a paleo based with milk and it hovers around 1800 and 2000 kcal daily and involves a very special relationship with beer jajajaja I have quit on it for a time now but I do love a beer, I've even brew some myself. I will try to keep myself away from beer as I've been doing so far but I cant promise anything Thanks guys

good morning guys I started doing bodyweight 3 months ago. I started with NF beginner bodyweight routine. I want to improve my pull ups, when I started I was able to do 3 series of 2 pull ups and after 1 month I got to 3 series of 4 pull ups, but since then I haven't felt any improvement, do you have any recomendation on how to improve my pull ups? I have improve my pushups, plank time, squats, but my pull ups are kinda stuck. thanks

I know that I'm coming in late to the party so please forgive my tardiness. Here is Challenge #6 Main Quest: Quest 1: Muscle Up Hunt It's tough and takes a lot of strength to master. I am on the hunt catch the elusive muscle up. It seems like forever that I have been working on getting this move. It is my goal to achieve 1 clean muscle up without excessive kipping. The plan below allows me to get use to the movements I'm doing it 2x a week. 10 Chest High Pull Ups 12 Straight Bar Dips 10 Clapping Push Ups 10 Head bangers 10 typewriter pull ups 12 jump muscle ups 8 Plyo Australian pull ups 3 cycles 2 min rest between cycles Quest 2: Stretch I have this bad habit of not stretching after all of my workouts, mainly because of time or my wife being ready to go somewhere. I will be working on the "Functional Triad" that includes the anterior chain, posterior chain, and the lateral chain. The exercises for this are the bridge hold, L-sit hold and full twist. Quest 3: Meditation With everything that is going on in my life. I have to meditate so that I will remain sane. My goal is to meditate 5-7x a week (mostly Yoga Nidra). Life Goals: WORK & School I recently lost my job during the holidays. (Just won my appeal for UI ) My goal is to find employment so that I can continue to provide for my family and not rely on my veterans disability and excessive student loans for survival. I'm not really sure I know how to find a job with this economy so guess I may need to find a coach. The second part of the goal consists of passing this class that I am in. I'm using the rest of my G.I. bill to get my MBA. After my current class there is one more class and I graduate at the end of April.

I sat out the last challenge and did an "anti-challenge" before that. It was nice to have a break and just free form my exercises, but it's time to dig back in and chase some goals down. Challenge Themesong: Tom Petty - Runnin Down a Dream Goals: 1: Handstands - Work on them at least 4 days a week. I can currently do a 30+ sec wall handstand, but my PR for a free handstand is ~5sec. 2: Muscle Up - Work towards them at least 4 days a week. Current workout includes supersets of chest-to-bar pullups and low dips, but I don't have anywhere handy to try an actual muscle up at the moment. (All the pullup bars I have access to are either free rotating or have the neutral grip handles in the way.) 3: Stretching - After every workout. I've been good about it the past couple months, but I'm starting to pickup my schedule again and need to make sure I stay on top of it. I'm not going to have a specific life goal this time around. There are a bunch of things I need to work on, but none of them jump out as "most important." I also won't be worrying about stat points any more; they weren't motivating me and the extra paperwork distracted from my real goals.

This last challenge my goals were to get to the gym and focus on fundamental body weight exercises (rows, pushups, pullups, dips), keep my eating clean, and get in the habit of meditating each day. I learned that (for me) making it to the gym is pretty easy at and eating right is the hard part. So I figure with that said I am going to focus primarily on my diet and nutrition and let the strength training continue as it is. So here we go: Main Quest: Be way more awesome at the end of tomorrow then I was at the beginning of today. Quest 1: Leangains. I'm going to do a leangains bulk aiming to put on .5 lbs a week for 6 weeks. So I will ideally gain 3 lbs over the next six weeks. I am also going to go buy a digital scale and start measuring my macro intake so I have an idea of what I'm eating and can judge how it's working. I will start eating my food in the 8-10 hour window on monday and give myself one week to figure out the macro counting and scale down to an 8 hour eating window. I'm really apathetic about the macro counting but I figure I only have to learn how to do this shit once right. Quest 2: Keep Gymin' It M-F Three days a week, bright and early, 8am gym days. I will continue to work the same routine that I have been for the last 2 months adjusting the skills and progressions as needed. The other two days a week I will either do skill work, yoga, or maybe rest. Quest 3: Read I've been netflix binging hardcore so I need to get that shit under control. I am going to read at least 10 minutes a day, but hopefully once I turn off the tv shows and get into a book I'll keep going. Life Quest: The Muscle Up I need to learn to do this. I don't know if I will be able to learn it in six weeks but I can start to learn more about the progressions and work on the skills and the negatives and everything. Except I did just see that they will be teaching the muscle up at NF camp so maybe that will speed up my skill acquisition. Motivation: because no one ever got anywhere in life by sitting on their ass. As for my Gym Routine: The Routine Breaks down like so: Warmup (15 min) Skill Work (30 min) Strength Work (50 min) Stretch (10 min) Warmup: Dynamic Stretches, Jump Rope, Bear Crawls, Wrist Stretching Skill Work: Handstands and L-sits are my primary focus. I will also start working on my frog stand working up to a tuck planche, front lever, and back lever as secondary skills. Strength: Rows, Dips, Pushups, and Pull ups. I made great progress the last 6WC but I still have a ways to go. Keep pushing and pulling until I feel comfortable with these. I'm also going to include a variety of squats and work on my deadlift. I've been active on the form check forum to improve my form before increasing weight and that will continue until I get it down.

Here's whats happening today: breakwheel wakes up in the morning, nice morning dew out in the air, getting ready to do some stretches and skill work with some coffee. He walks out to the porch to find his trusted handstand wall spot and the gymnastics rings hanging outside his house. But wait! What's that? The ceiling has been lifted! The rings too high to jump up to now! "Oh no!" he exclaims, "How am I ever going to get up over the rings to practice my support holds to level up my gymnastics skills and become even more badass then I was yesterday?!" Woosh! In comes the skills he learned over this weekend at Camp. MUSCLE UP FOR THE WIN!!! AND THE CROWD GOES WILD! AHHHH!! AHH!!! all the little buggies and tiny microscopic creatures that live on my porch can't stop cheering! HOORAY!!!!!

Here it is, time for Challenge Number 2 and here you are, reading along. We'll cure you of that soon enough. In this Challenge you will see me: prepare for and compete in my first ever kettlebell lifting competition, the Mid-Michigan Open at 90 kg lifting 2 24 kg kettlebells as many times as possible in ten minutes Compete in the preliminary rounds of the Granite Games Turn 35 years old I will maintain a bodyweight at or below and average of 90 kg I will talk about, review and rank video games wow, I said video games. What's wrong with me. I don't like video games all that much, I meant board games. (EDITED 06/17) I will tell you a bunch of other stuff you really don't care aboutYou're still here? I'm shocked. The last guy only got to number four and ran screaming. To be successful in the above I will: Train a total of fifty hoursWrite and post five boardgame reviewsWrite up a circuit that I like and have tested outI'll likely find a number of other distractions along the way but I'm leaving myself room to play with it. A normal training week will look something like the following (warning, no week will be a normal training week) Monday - off, game nightTuesday - 24 kg Long Cycle practiceWednesday - Barbell work, ConditioningThursday - 28 kg Long Cycle practiceFriday - Make up any missed days, take this day off or get a bonus workoutSaturday - Additional Long Cycle practice as neededSunday - Barbells and circuitsAdditional - somewhere in there I will attempt to squeeze 30-60 minutes of pilates and 45 - 90 minutes of aerobic work per week for a total of about 8.5 hours per weekThat's it. That's my intro. It's not great but it's mine.

Hello. I have started training for parkour. I couldn't do one pull up when I started out; now I can do 5 from a dead hang. My current goals in parkour include mastering the wall climb/top out, the kong/monkey vault and dropping from heights a little taller than me with a roll. I have the kong vault in a decent situation and I am getting better at it and I can roll smoothly on grass. However, I am struggling a lot with the climb up/top out from a cat hang and I would like to know if it requires a lot of upper body strength because I don't think there are too many flaws in my footwork and grip. Also, I would like to do muscle ups! Do you need to do an awful lot of pull ups before you try muscle ups? I watched and awful lot of tutorials but can't seem to put it all together when it comes to the transition from the pull to the dip (in the cases of muscle ups as well as climb ups). Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

But I intend to do really cool shtuff! My ultimate goal of cool stuff is a muscle up & a human flag. I've done an ugly crawl over muscle up & can hold a legs tucked flag for maybe 1-1.5 seconds. I want a full legit MU & a legs extended flag for 3 secs. To do that I will 1) Keep working out, my body weight routine that I have 2) Focus side work on MU's & flags. Do each as much as time & energy allow. That's all I have

Greetings, assassins! So I'm a Ranger, and we currently have this mini-challenge going on in which we pick one of our goals, find someone from another guild that can help us on our way, and learn from them. One of my 6WC goals is to do a muscle up. I can do pull ups. I can do dips. I cannot do a muscle up. Are there any muscle up masters in the House of Assassins? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

So I have a few goals in mind that are not very related, but together should make for quite the well rounded assassin. They are also more of a pass/fail nature and a little on the aggressive side but I want that. Goal 1- Do a muscle up. The plan to reach this is going to be GTG on pull ups and movements geared towards achieveing this. Even if just a little bit a day. If I do one I get all points 5-STR. If I make a great effort on working towards it, but fall short- 2 STR. If I totally bail- 0 STR Goal 2- Reaclimate my legs to minimalist footwear for my runs. This goal the plan is to make all my short runs (non-running partner runs) in vibrams. And My running partner runs in my Inov-8 shoes that have a minimal heel/toe drop. If I can go more than 2 6+ mile runs in vibrams by end of challenge 4-STA, 2 runs of 5+ miles 3 STA, consistent runs of 4 miles 2-STA. Anything less, 0-STA Goal 3- Lean up. I want to drop a little bf% I'll take measurements & decide what % to shoot for. No time this weekend for measuring, I'll have my friend measure me at some point this week. down more than 2% 3-CON, down 1-2% 2 CON, down less than 1% 1-CON (yes I realize the accuracy range might be a factor in this) Level up life goal- Ceiling up & dry wall mudded in the back room remodel. Ceiling up, all mudding, sanding done 3-WIS Ceiling up, mudded but not final sanded 2-WIS, ceiling up, no mudding 1 WIS