Jarric

I feel like I should address this challenge and give it a proper wrap up. It's fair to say this hasn't worked out as planned, and I want to examine why. This might end up rambling a bit. On @//Min's thread (last week I think) we were talking about how difficult it is getting in to stretching, and a few things really resonated with me: Just doing something without seeing progress isn't very motivating If you don't track progress you don't see progress I have a real tendency to let perfect be the enemy of good. If I can't dedicate an hours to doing all of my exercises I am liable to not do any of them. On to of that I know I'm pretty terrible at scheduling stuff - I always imagine an activity will take less time than it does and I end up late for a lot of things as a result. At the same time, this week my Crossfit gym re-opened. That was briefly quite exciting news, but after two sessions I realised that it was all going to be training inside against current CV19 regulations, and that they're just hoping to get away with breaking the rules. I'm not good at breaking the rules #lawfulstupid. I also felt like a bit of a hypocrite when I was reviewing a professional sports club's procedures for going back into training, having been to the gym the same morning. Anyway, getting to the point, I am now still working out from home, but without the aid of my Crossfit trainer as he's now back teaching classes. So I have to design my own programming, which I've drafted and am now going to see how it goes. What I need to do is incorporate some of my hip rehab within my training, somewhere, or find a way to properly schedule it in addition to my training. I think I'm probably going to challenge with the assassins next round, as I build my home workouts in a mostly callisthenic kind of fashion. Goals will be to build and stick to a workout plan, and to incorporate things to rehab my hips within that plan. I also need to track my stretching and rolling properly, rather than just tracking the bits of the workout where I can easily count reps. So yeah, I guess I have a plan. Or a plan to have a plan. Or the promise of a plan. Or something. I'm awarding myself 10XP for this challenge, despite having failed it outright, on the basis that I think I have learned something about myself and about how to programme things more effectively. Next challenge might tell me if that's actually true.

Glad Sra. Tanque is healing up well, and that you got to see you parents after 3 months.

Hope the wrist stays calmed down. You've done an amazing job these last three months, so a slower couple of weeks while you reset and prepare for the future is no bad thing.

The IT band is a tendon that runs down the outside of your thigh from your hip to your knee. It being tight or damaged is responsible for hip or knee pain in a lot of people. It's a variety of things, I had physio for my hip and they had me rolling the IT band and glutes, and other stuff I've been given to do by a trainer in the gym or have just experimented and found it works.

So I was going to write more in the post above, but apparently the emojis killed the text editor on my phone... Well done on keeping your weight down! You've achieved so much in the last few months I don't think there's anything wrong in maintaining the success you already have.

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Some thoughts on this: 1. One way to track this would be to rate how painful it is on a scale of 1-10. Healthy tissue shouldn't hurt when compressed, so foam rolling should get easier over time. I know that when I started rolling my IT band it was agonising, and now it doesn't hurt at all. 2. That's tough. I'm sure someone here can give you a great explanation of why this works, but I don't really understand it myself. Otherwise you just need to stick with it consistently for quite a long time until you see results. 3. I'd break it up and do different parts of your body on different days. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good - you're better off /doing/ one part of your body every day instead of /failing to do/ a full body routine. Reading your thoughts and writing this has made me think a lot about why I'm failing my challenge so hard, and I think it's for similar reasons. So thank you for sharing, I think I need to put some of my own advice into practice.

Take care of those wrists, and when they stop hurting get to making them stronger! I recommend handstands It's really interesting to watch you arting, digital art is so different it looks like magic!

Great recap of the game mate. I did have a bit of an epiphany halfway through fighting the Hobgoblins that I felt quite sorry for them - they were walking down a corridor minding their own business, got attacked by a skeleton, and when they tried to deal with it we leapt out and killed them Well to be fair he did what the warlock told him, and the bludgeoning did do double damage

I'm glad you enjoyed that mate

Touché. Well the correct answer to that is "No, I would like beer /and/ tacos." Glad you had a great day yesterday! I can confirm from your pullup videos that your back is amazing.

Sorry, all I meant was if you're trying free standing handstands I would recommend kicking up into a handstand as in the picture you posted. As opposed to doing a wall walk and then trying to come to freestanding from that position. I don't think there's one easy answer to this, but I'd say stick with the therapy, keep reminding yourself that you /are/ good enough, even when you don't feel like it, and know that accepting yourself will be a slow process, but that you will get there in the end. FWIW trading half an hour of running for an hour of skating sounds like a win to me.

Absolutely! Well done on these man, sounds like you're making a lot of progress. It might be worth trying to kick up into a handstand against the wall before you try freestanding. I find it better as if you kick up you're facing away from the wall, so if you fall forwards you touch the wall and if you fall backwards you land on your feet. Whereas you if you fall forwards when facing the wall you have to roll out of it, which is harder.

I hate brain fog too . Great job on hitting your goals though, and it looks like you have a solid plan to work on your motivation.

This is my favourite so far. Glad you've found a doctor who's prepared to work with you to get to the root of your headaches man, that's really good news.

That gun show though, damn! Nice shoes Puck, glad you got the enjoy that orange crush! But are they US Imperial, or British Imperial?

That might just be me to be fair - I never know if it's pressups or pushups, or whether it should be one word, two words, or hyphenated!

W2D3 - Wednesday Exercises - 3/3 Stretches - 7/7 Rolling 0/2 Warmup - Yes Pose Running - Yes That's more like it! Yesterday was a good day. Workout in the morning was a 7 mile run, including 4 x 1 mile tempo intervals. It felt good, though I was getting a bit tired towards the end - it's quite a long way before breakfast! Work was ok, still feel like I'm catching up. Got my exercises done at lunch, which helped get stuff out of the way. After work we went straight to the supermarket. Bought a lot of stuff we needed like fruit and veg, and a lot of stuff we didn't need like chocolate and crisps! I've said this before, but if there's one thing I would keep from lockdown it's the supermarkets being empty every time I go - it's lovely. WW had made a soup for dinner, so we ate that when we got in. Then I did the washing up, did my stretches in front of the TV, and went to bed!

2% might actually be quite a large number. For example: • if you have 35% body fat and you drop 2 percentage points to 33%, you've lost nearly 6% of your body fat • if you have 25% body fat and you drop 2 percentage points to 23%, you've lost 8% of your body fat. It might make more sense with weights. Let's imagine you're 150# as a nice round number: • going from 35% to 33% is going from 52.5# of fat to 49.5#. You've lost 3# of fat and gained 3# of muscle if your weight hasn't changed. • going from 25% to 23% is going from 37.5# of fat to 34.5#. Again you've lost 3# of fat and gained 3# of muscle, but 3# is a bigger proportion of your total fat. 10-12's good! I can barely make 12 reps. I've always assumed (and I think a lot of people assume), that a 'fit' person should be able to knock out 20 pressups no problem. Turns out no, most people can't do that, pressups are hard! I love your sketch; the anatomy looks really clear and realistic. Should I ask about the whip and boots?

I had to reverse image search it to figure out where I recognised it from! I have heard of it, never played it and don't really know anything about it. It's in Tales from the Yawning Portal though, same place as Sunless Citadel.

Well I was lying on my back . I guess if you've sat on the sofa for an hour moving to anywhere else is probably good? I dunno, I quite enjoy sitting on the floor anyway for some reason.

These guys are good! I know what I'm listening to for the rest of the working day.

https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?keywords=&filters=0_0_45393_0_0_0_0_0&author=&artist=&pfrom=0&pto=0 That link should give you all of the free adventures on DM's guild (but it's not filtered by system, so as well as D&D 5th edition it will give you older editions and other roleplaying games). D&D have put out a load of their adventurer's league modules for free during lockdown, and they'll be in that list. Adventurer's league is the official organised gameplay for D&D, so they should usually be fairly well written. Alternatively just browse through official/unofficial adventures until you find something/a few things you like the sound of. To add to what D_R and WG have said, the tone of the campaign can be worth knowing too. Like if you want to run a deadly serious horror game I'm probably not going to bring in a crazy comedy character that's going to spoil the mood. Likewise if you want to run a lighthearted hack-and-slash campaign I'm not going to play a serious historical reenactment type character.

W2D2 - Tuesday Exercises - 1/3 Stretches - 0/7 Rolling 2/2 Warmup - N/A Pose Running - Yes, just about Yesterday was a good day. In the morning I worked out - a superset of 10 x 80m (~89yd) sprints and 10 x 10 pushups. I never thought I'd say that 100 pushups would feel fine, even spread over 40 minutes, but they were in fact fine. I followed that with 15 minutes of handstand practice. I'd slept poorly again and wasn't feeling up to adding anything extra, so instead I did my foam rolling for this challenge to set myself up for the day, and also some bonus rolling. Work was ok, still just catching up but I think I'm getting somewhere. Got some drawing in at lunch. After work I cooked dinner - gammon, leek and broccoli pasta bake with cheese sauce and breadcrumbs. It was delicious, and surprisingly low calorie. Ate that in front of High Rollers Curse of Strahd, and then finished my drawing off (remind me to show you guys next week). Then I put away the washing, and eventually got on the floor to do my hip exercises and stretching. I got as far as one exercise before I decided I really couldn't be bothered to do any more, so I watched TV from the floor for a while and then went to bed. I have a theory that I'll be more willing to do stretching in the evening if I do the exercises and rolling during the day, as the stretching is basically laying on the floor watching TV which I'm quite a fan of. To that end I'm going to try and do the other bits during the day, and I'm going to give myself to do the stretching even if I haven't done the exercise.

I missed replying to this bit. The great thing about a pbp is you don't need to react to things immediately, so if you're not sure on something take the time to look it up, or just ask your players how they want to work things. I know in the pbp that I'm currently playing, @DarK_RaideR is using Roll20 for the battle maps and posting screenshots to the discord chat. That helps everyone keep track of their positions in combat, and you can use it for tracking monster stats if that helps. You can also turn on hp bars on the minimised settings if you want to, which means players can get a general idea of how hurt everyone is without knowing hp numbers.