Bonjour everyone!

[Roghish]

Bonjour fellow rebels, 

 

I'm Pierre from Courbevoie (near Paris, France), I'm French-American, currently studying economics and management in university.

 

Now for the important stuff, I try to work out as much as I physically am able to, so every 2-3 days depending on how hard I pushed myself in the last workout, because of my time table I can go to the gym every day if I want to, only problem is recovery time.  

 

My sports passion is karate, I've been doing it (with a few year break when I moved) since I was eight, and reached the brown belt, and now I'm taking it back up.  That's what motivated me to get in shape, in August 2014 I weighed 95kg, and now I'm hovering between 73 and 76 depending on the time of day which I'm quite proud of.  I discovered Nerd Fitness two days ago, and the main thing I seriously regret is taking my "before" picture AFTER losing 20kg!  Now my goal is to get competitive in "kumite" (no-contact combat) karate, if possible on a national level.

 

I think I definitely qualify as a nerd by most standards, I was diamond 4 in League of Legends last year (even though I took a break for a while and I'm a little rusty, now I'm getting back to it) and whenever I work out I bring my trusty Ipod with me with fantasy audiobooks, or ones about theoretical physics.  A few of my recent reads are "From Eternity To Here" by Sean Carroll, and "The Broken Empire" trilogy by Mark Lawrence.

Yesterday I followed NF's recommendation to go for the Paleo diet, which I plan to follow except during social occasions.

 

Some of my strengths are 

-Discipline, I've never had trouble working towards my goals and I plan my "cheat" meals in advance to make them as healthy as possible.

-I'm kind of tall, 190cm/6'3, which helps for karate

-Incredibly good looking, intelligent and most importantly modest (translation: I try to be funny sometimes).

 

Some of my weaknesses are (at the moment):

-Flexibility, I can't do the first flexibility quest on NF yet, that is grab my shins between my ankles and knees with my legs straight.

-Squats, I can only do 4 sets of 8 with 20kg with 1 minute 40 second breaks, and that alone leaves me aching for 3 days.

-There's a lot of room for improvement in my endurance, I find that after I do two or three katas full speed I'm exhausted.

 

I'm excited to meet the NF community, I'm glad to be here!

Pierre

[Tkal]

Hi and welcome from a fellow monk.

Which style do you practice?

[Roghish]

Thanks! I've been doing Shotokan, what about you?

[Tkal]

I started with Shito ryu ages ago. Then I moved around a bit (geographically and technically) and now I am training in a Shuri ryu dojo, although my foundation and my heart are still Shito ryu. Unfortunately there is no decent Shito ryu dojo in my area where I can train regularly, or at least none that I found so far.

 

I did some kumite competition when I was a teenager, but it was never my thing. On the other hand, in my school we had people competing at national and European federal tournaments, so the training was quite high level.

 

Do you plan do join current challenge? we are only half way Otherwise next is around the corner.

In any case, you are welcome to drop by the courtyard if you want