Grandkai Back to Basics in 2020

[Grandkai_NL]

Hey everyone!
Respawning again now in 2020. Maybe you remember me, if not here's a rundown: joined NFR a few years back and did some great challenges where i saw a lot of changes. Until i got to a point where i thought i had it down and stopped the challenges, it went well for a bit but i slowly slipped up. Tried a few times to get back into these challenges but ended up stopping half-way through the challenge (not sure why i stopped). But that time has passed, last year i made some changes and i want to improve those changes in the new year.

Seeing as this is the first challenge of 2020 & the new decade i decided to start simple. Also thanks to those "Back to Basics" emails from Steve  
 

Fitness: Strength train 4 movements a week; 

The focus is to get stronger with Bench Press, Overhead Press, Deadlift & Squat. And rather than call it "4 times a week" and put pressure on me i went with this. The focus for now isnt to go 4 times a week, its to get stronger. 

 

Health: No ordering food & a apple a day
The focus is to get back to the rhythm of making food i enjoy and not spend a lot of money on ordering food. The apple a day is to get more fruit in me.

Hobby/Life: Other stuff i want to get back into routine

- Cleaning every day as soon as i get home; used to do a Pomodoro Routine (10 min work, 5 min clean) every day to clean everything up. It used to work, but at a certain moment i got into cleaning up as part of my evening routine. And when that started i stopped using the Pomodoro method and stopped cleaning the big stuff on a regular basis.
So as soon as i get home its doing on of these 3: vacuuming & mopping the floor, cleaning the toilet, cleaning the shower.
- 100% Darksiders Remastered; i used to complete 1 game every month & want to get back into that. So i planned out a few hours each week to focus on this game.

 

Can't wait to start and get back into shape & routine.

 

 

[raptron]

Woo, welcome back!

[Manarelle]

Welcome back indeed. Good goals, following for the awesome. 

[WhiteGhost]

Welcome back!  Great to see you here again

 

I should probably copy that "an apple a day" thing

 

[Grandkai_NL]

23 hours ago, raptron said:

Woo, welcome back!

 

23 hours ago, Manarelle said:

Welcome back indeed. Good goals, following for the awesome. 

 

4 hours ago, WhiteGhost said:

Welcome back!  Great to see you here again

 

I should probably copy that "an apple a day" thing

 

I missed all your faces! ❤️ 
Its a great idea @WhiteGhost cause "a apple a day keeps the doctor away"  

[Grandkai_NL]

Week 1, Day 1

 

Woke up nice on time after the first night shift of 2020 and ready to start a new challenge and start working on myself. After my morning routine (coffee & reading) i grabbed my gym bag, put on my Overwatch Reinhardt shirt and headed to the gym. It was a long break since my last workout so i decided to go with 3x5 on Squat and tried to find a good weight. Ended up with 100 kgs for 3x5. Felt good and after that i did some leg presses & leg extensions. 
Went to the store to buy some meal containers but they didnt have the size i needed so i'll have to buy some later this week.
Got home turned on the oven to warm-up my home made burrito's and took a quick shower. With my burrito i took my apple (which was tasty and i forgot how nice a apple was to eat) . 

Cleaning went well & fast. Today was the toilets turn & i felt a tiny bit sick from the cleaning spray but it wasnt too bad. After that i played an hour or so of Darksiders Warmastered on my Xbox One and grinded some xp for one of the achievements. 

 

So overall i had a good strong first day. Now i have to keep this going until the end of the challenge

 

 

[Grandkai_NL]

Day 2 till Day 5.

Oh yeah i need to update this  
The last few days went well, had some good rest days and played a bunch of Destiny 2. On day 2 i went to the gym and did some overhead presses, dips & chin-ups. I wanted to go yesterday to the gym but i felt so tired from my nightshift so i skipped it. Today i wasnt really feeling it, BUT i decided to go and do a quick one. Did Deadlifts 2x5 & Bench Press 2x8 and called it. Head home, shower & put on comfy clothes cause i dont have to leave the house anymore today.
All the days i did my cleaning stuff. alternating every day and everything is nice & clean in my apartment  Also made some progress with Darksiders Remastered. There's a achievement im working on were i have to get weapon xp and there's a great farming spot, but its a bit boring. so i only do it for 30 minutes or so.

Ordering food goes oke. I'm curious how i will fare on fridays & saturdays when i'm in total relax mode. Eating my apple goes well, usually take it a bit before i prepare my dinner.

So far these first few days are going oke. Been trying to track as much as possible on MFP to get a good idea of how much i eat and help me makes good decisions for future meals. 
 

[Manarelle]

Off to a great start. I hear you on farming, it gets old really fast. Do you have an estimate of how many 30-minute farming episodes it'll take you to hit the achievement? 

[Grandkai_NL]

On 1/13/2020 at 4:37 PM, Manarelle said:

Off to a great start. I hear you on farming, it gets old really fast. Do you have an estimate of how many 30-minute farming episodes it'll take you to hit the achievement? 

Probably 2 or 3 more. So not too crazy and then the rest of the achievements are collecting stuff. Hopefully i can get through those in a week after this farming achievement.

 

[Grandkai_NL]

Okay, last week was bad to track my stuff here. I am just bad at journaling so for the rest of the weeks i'm putting down a checklist and will write atleast 1 sentence to tell you guys how the day was. But first......last weeks progress (a bit more extensive):

Week 2 Update:

This week wasnt a good one. The meals i made were really small and i didnt get close to my maintain calories, bought more snacks & food when i should be fasting. So not a great week nutrition wise. 

 

Workout wise it went oke, i did my workouts and decided to change from 4 days a week to 3 days a week in a full body setup (something i used to do before which i always enjoyed). Doing this will help me aswell in making sure i keep doing my cleaning and gives me a bit more free time which i missed with doing the 4 times a week workout plan. 

 

Week 2 wasnt a total loss, in the evenings i'm reading through a lore book from Destiny 2 (my favorite game) and in there is a "300 Spartan" type story which stuck with me since the day i read it. So much i download Blender (a 3D drawing/animation program) and going through a tutorial now so i can recreate the art in 3D and perhaps this year make a short 30 second animation from it. I'm following a good tutorial to learn the basics and i'm really excited about it  

So that was week 2 , a lot of downs but also some changes to make the next weeks better. 

Progress:
Workouts: X X X X | X X - X | - - - | - - - |

Nutrition: X X X X X | X X - X - | - - - - - | - - - - - 
Hobby: X X X X - | - X - - - | - - - - - | - - - - -

 

[Manarelle]

12 hours ago, Grandkai_NL said:

Week 2 wasnt a total loss, in the evenings i'm reading through a lore book from Destiny 2 (my favorite game) and in there is a "300 Spartan" type story which stuck with me since the day i read it. So much i download Blender (a 3D drawing/animation program) and going through a tutorial now so i can recreate the art in 3D and perhaps this year make a short 30 second animation from it. I'm following a good tutorial to learn the basics and i'm really excited about it  

 

I love that you're just like "I can do that, I'll teach myself!" The world needs more of this attitude. Here's to a better week 3. 

[Grandkai_NL]

On 1/20/2020 at 5:26 PM, Manarelle said:

I love that you're just like "I can do that, I'll teach myself!" The world needs more of this attitude. Here's to a better week 3. 

If one person can make something badass as this: 

 

 Its gonna take a long while for me to do it but in the words of Shia LaBeouf

[Grandkai_NL]

Week 3, Day 1 & 2

Monday was a nice productive day, had a good workout and a good filled afternoon without distractions. In the evening i continued my tutorial in Blender, which hit a little bit of a ditch. The program froze a few times while i was trying to move something in Blender, could be that my laptop isnt powerful enough (which can be a possibility since its also 2 years old and not the highest spec) but i will see it tomorrow/today when i try it again. If it ends up that my laptop isnt powerful enough i'll probably look into a other drawing program (perhaps 2D instead of 3D) and learn/create art with that. 
On day 2 i spent some time with my PS4 instead of my Xbox, i'm mostly a Xbox Gamer but i kept lookin at my PS4 lately and i wanted to put more time in there to finish the games i still have lying around. So like the routine type of guy i am i scheduled a couple of hours every few days so i can finish those games. And it felt so nice, playing Nier Automata and i forgot what a good game it is. Only downside is that i'm really invested again in Destiny 2 so i am easily convinced by a good friend to switch to that and game with him...

 

Progress:
Workouts: X X X X | X X - X | X - - | - - - |

Nutrition: X X X X X | X X - X - | X X - - - - | - - - - - -
Hobby: X X X X - | - X - - - | X X - - - - | - - - - - -

 

*Goal for the next few days: 
- Test Blender again, if it doesnt work trouble shoot the web for help. If there's no solution except "get a better PC" look into 2D drawing programs

- Spend the hours on the PS4 that i scheduled 
- Update here on Day 4 (Thursday)

[Manarelle]

Boo to the glitches, hopefully it's an easy fix and not computing power. 

[Grandkai_NL]

Week 3, Day 3 till Day 7
 

On 1/22/2020 at 4:56 AM, Grandkai_NL said:

- Test Blender again, if it doesnt work trouble shoot the web for help. If there's no solution except "get a better PC" look into 2D drawing programs

- Spend the hours on the PS4 that i scheduled 
- Update here on Day 4 (Thursday)

lets first look back at this. 
"Test Blender again": it took a few days but i got back into blender and i forgot to save and had to do a lot of actions again  BUT this helped me learn a few actions again so tis not a total loss. With knowing what went wrong last time i decided to not follow the tutorial to the dot. In the program you can set how detailed the drawing is and before i set it on a level 3 (like in the tutorial) but this time i went with a level 2 and it WORKED!!! i was able to get pass the sticking point and ready to continue.
"Spend the hours on the PS4 that i scheduled" did okay with this. Didnt spend the complete times but still a lot without "missing" playing on my xbox too much. 
"Update here on Day 4" yeah i totally missed that.

 

Day 3 till 5 went pretty good. Got my workouts in, got close to my calories each day. Didnt order any food online which felt AWESOME!, made some progress with Darksiders achievements (not sure if i will be able to 100% it at the end of the challenge but i'm gettin close) and overall had a good week.
Friday was my mothers birthday & in the evening we went out to dinner and had some drinks. I had a Tournedos which was to die for, it was so yummy. And i kept it easy with snacks during the evening, beers not so much but it was a celebration so i didnt really care. Saturday & Sunday were really lazy days. I was supposed to go to my mothers party (for friends and family) on saturday but i fell a sleep on the couch and woke up at 10PM. My father was a bit worried since i wasnt there but i texted him to let him know what happened. And it was all good. All i did on Sunday was go with my sister to a electronics store to buy her a tablet and a wireless speaker. 

I stepped on the scale for my weekly weigh in and, i understand why nutrition is important but now i saw actual progress and it made me 10 times more motivated to eat healthy and hit my calories. Last week i weight 83,5 kg (184 lbs) with 17,5% BodyFat. After last week where i ate close to my calories each day (2020 cal) i went down to  82 kg (180 lbs) & 16,6% bodyfat. Which puts me back on the same weight as in October. 
 

Progress:
Workouts: X X X X | X X - X | X X X | - - - |

Nutrition: X X X X X | X X - X - | X X X X X | - - - - - -
Hobby: X X X X - | - X - - - | X X X X X  | - - - - - -

 

 

*Goals for the next few days:

- Finish Level 1 Blender Tutorial;
- Once again play my scheduled PS4 time;

- Update on Day 3/Wednesday

[Akura]

8 hours ago, Grandkai_NL said:

it took a few days but i got back into blender and i forgot to save and had to do a lot of actions again  BUT this helped me learn a few actions again so tis not a total loss

 

I'm doing a Udemy course on blender, but due to work and other stress I haven't touched in a few weeks. I think I forgot each and every shortcut... 😅

 

 

8 hours ago, Grandkai_NL said:

I stepped on the scale for my weekly weigh in and, i understand why nutrition is important but now i saw actual progress and it made me 10 times more motivated to eat healthy and hit my calories.

 

Fitting into old clothes or realising that your current ones are looser might also be a good motivation! Or tracking hip/waist circumferences. The weight alone can often be quite unsatisfying...

[Grandkai_NL]

8 hours ago, Akura said:

I think I forgot each and every shortcut... 😅

there are a heckin lot of short-cuts. Luckily i got a list from Blender Guru (im following his tutorial on youtube)

[Manarelle]

On 1/27/2020 at 7:09 AM, Grandkai_NL said:

"Test Blender again": it took a few days but i got back into blender and i forgot to save and had to do a lot of actions again  BUT this helped me learn a few actions again so tis not a total loss. With knowing what went wrong last time i decided to not follow the tutorial to the dot. In the program you can set how detailed the drawing is and before i set it on a level 3 (like in the tutorial) but this time i went with a level 2 and it WORKED!!! i was able to get pass the sticking point and ready to continue.

 

Yaaaaas, that's great news. Well, not the not saving part but that it worked. Congrats!

 

On 1/27/2020 at 7:09 AM, Grandkai_NL said:

I stepped on the scale for my weekly weigh in and, i understand why nutrition is important but now i saw actual progress and it made me 10 times more motivated to eat healthy and hit my calories. Last week i weight 83,5 kg (184 lbs) with 17,5% BodyFat. After last week where i ate close to my calories each day (2020 cal) i went down to  82 kg (180 lbs) & 16,6% bodyfat. Which puts me back on the same weight as in October. 

 

Beast. I'm proud of you. You can do this.

[Grandkai_NL]

On 1/27/2020 at 1:09 PM, Grandkai_NL said:

*Goals for the next few days:

- Finish Level 1 Blender Tutorial;
- Once again play my scheduled PS4 time;

- Update on Day 3/Wednesday

Finish Level 1 Blender Tutorial; ooh heck yes i finished that one and i'm really freaking proud of it. With Level 1 you learn the basics of Blender and you make a Donut. Here's my Donut render. The next levels will all be about giving sprinkles, more detail and other objects in the picture.

 

 

Play my scheduled PS4 time; did do this on tuesday but not on Thursday, buddy wanted to game on Thursday but he ended up coming online really late so i could have spend a couple of hours on my PS4. Oh well, will probably do a few hours today.

Update on Day 3/Wednesday: yeah....totally forgot.but i'm here now, better than nothing  

 

 

Week 4, Day 1 till 4
Worked out twice, finished my Level 1 Blender tutorial (see pic above  ) and did good on eating EXCEPT for yesterday (Thursday) i had a real craving for sushi so i ordered some but it didnt taste aswell as i had in my head. So i was a bit dissapointed.
Got through the most annoying achievement with Darksiders so now its only the collectibles left. Its gonna be a bit tedious cause i did grab a bunch of those on my playthrough but i dont remember which so to be safe i'll have to check every spot again. 

 

Next week is the final week and so far i'm happy with everything i'm doing. I'm focusing more on food, tracking the last 2 weeks most foods i ate, enjoying my workouts more & enjoying playing on my PS4 and learning Blender. Yeah i'm a bit behind with updating here, but thats just a tiny thing. 

 

Progress:
Workouts: X X X X | X X - X | X X X | X X - |

Nutrition: X X X X X | X X - X - | X X X X X | X X X X - -
Hobby: X X X X - | - X - - - | X X X X X  | X X X X - -

[Manarelle]

On 1/31/2020 at 6:06 AM, Grandkai_NL said:

Worked out twice, finished my Level 1 Blender tutorial (see pic above  ) and did good on eating EXCEPT for yesterday (Thursday) i had a real craving for sushi so i ordered some but it didnt taste aswell as i had in my head. So i was a bit dissapointed.

 

Looking good, and nice donut, too! That's so neat that what looks like a complex piece of programming is level 1 and (fairly) easily accessible. Sorry the sushi was a disappointment, unsatisfying treats are the worst. 

 

On 1/31/2020 at 6:06 AM, Grandkai_NL said:

Next week is the final week and so far i'm happy with everything i'm doing. I'm focusing more on food, tracking the last 2 weeks most foods i ate, enjoying my workouts more & enjoying playing on my PS4 and learning Blender. Yeah i'm a bit behind with updating here, but thats just a tiny thing. 

 

Dang, go you. Heading into the final week with some solid wins and habits there. How'd the weekend go for you? 

[Grandkai_NL]

Oooh dang, i forgot to update....but we are all used to it by now  
Don't have a lot of time today to write something so gonna keep it short.

 

Last week went so-so. Workout went good, eating could go better, hobby stuff could go better. Didnt prioritize certain stuff and instead went for the lazy route. 

 

Quick summary for this challenge.

I'm glad with what i did this challenge. Got back in a good workout rhythm, i enjoy the workouts and they aren't too time consuming (i can get in and out in roughly 30-45 minutes).

Eating went pretty good, had some trouble in the beginning of finding what i enjoy eating but i got a better selection of what i like and don't like. I did notice near the end of the challenge and the week i was more likely to order something online (its not great, but only once a week is one hell of a improvement compared to before). 

My hobbies....im super glad i started with Blender. Its fun and interesting and those shortcuts are something i really have to learn. Every time i finish a Tutorial video im impressed with what i made. The cleaning tho...the drive to finish Darksiders went down each week. Maybe its because all the stuff i need to do i already did in the Xbox 360 version and this is the Xbox One Remastered version. So its kinda boring. I might have to try something else starting next week. Any suggestions? Maybe a different game or a skill between the cleaning times? I'll have to try some stuff out.

 

Overall this was a decent challenge. If i would rate it out of 10 i would give it a 7, not amazing but still a good start again.

Gonna take this week to think about the goals for next challenge. Things i was thinking about right now are: continue Blender (its great), use supplements to up my protein and perhaps some multivitamins......and a new skill perhaps? i dont know, i'll figure it out this week.

 

Thank you for joining me in this challenge and hopefully i'll see you guys in the next one  

[Manarelle]

10 hours ago, Grandkai_NL said:

The cleaning tho...the drive to finish Darksiders went down each week. Maybe its because all the stuff i need to do i already did in the Xbox 360 version and this is the Xbox One Remastered version. So its kinda boring. I might have to try something else starting next week. Any suggestions? Maybe a different game or a skill between the cleaning times? I'll have to try some stuff out.

 

Yeah, if you're not enjoying it, then it kind of defeats the point of relax/ enjoyable time. What's something you'd want to do in downtime, if you had no requirements, no lingering things to do or feel like you ought to do? Maybe pick a skill/ something fun and give it a try for 2 weeks/ a challenge and no pressure to like it or stick with it? Give yourself something fun to look forward to? For me, it's reading comics/ webcomics/ not serious books. Just something to relax and enjoy for a bit without feeling pressured. 

[Grandkai_NL]

Next challenge is up