So... No paladins, guess I'll have to be a ranger then.

[PaladinAlex]

Hello all, I'm Alex.

 

I'm a video game programmer, specializing in artificial intelligence. (Don't worry I promise not to create skynet ...for now)

 

I do have a fairly active background... I played Rugby all through school, even captained one year, right up until I broke my ankle in two places. After finally healing up, I was still having trouble with it, and then later discovered that I had an evulsion fracture (basicly a bone fragment free-floating in there) which was the cause of my ankle pain. Then wouldn't you know it, when they open my ankle up in surgery to remove it they found I had tendonitis because of it, so my tendon sheath had to be opened and the tendons repaired. Hurray for 10x the recovery time. So finally, once I'd recovered from that as well I was down about 45-50 lbs of muscle. Going from 155-160lbs of solid muscle to 110 lbs is not much fun. Not to mention almost a year of recover/surgery/recover totally trashed my endurance. Oh, I almost missed out on my rugby scholorship as this all was going on during my gr.12 year.

 

So that's my story. Now here I am, bringin' it, to get into even better shape than I was back then. I'm currently 130lbs at a height of 5'7", yea I'm a fairly small guy, I was the smallest guy on the team when I was captain too... Imagine how that looked when I had to go shake hands with the coke machine of a captain on the opposing team . I seem to be having a heck of a time putting muscle back on though, in the passed 4 weeks I have been doing P90X and I devouring so much food I can't even tell ya, and I've gained a grand total of about 1 pound. I'm starting to wonder how the heck I got up to 160 when I was younger. I discovered this site when I was looking for a paleo pasta alternative at 4AM (thanks steve for that awesome spaghetti squash recipe) and just couldn't stop reading. One topic lead to another and to another and to another and so on. So in a word... Epic. That's how I'd describe this community I found. I'm definately of the "One Man Army" category, so I hope this will really help me to push my limits to the extreme .

 

As for my goals... I have a couple pretty specific ones I want to hit, as well as a much more... ambitious one that I'm going for, which will rely on heavily on meeting the other two.

 

My goals are:

To reach 170-180+lbs with a 7-8% body fat (An overall increase of 40-50lbs)

To improve my 40m sprint time to 6 seconds or less

To play rugby for team Canada as Outside Center

 

I feel like the first two will be cake when I think about the last one lol.

 

...And wow I think I'm going to wrap it up there, didn't really expect to write that much. But I look forward to talking with many of you guys.

[Laureleye]

It's an amazing forum, isn't it?  We are just beginning week 2 of a challenge, but you can join in a week late if it sounds fun.  Click on the CHALLENGE tab and go to the FAQ.  Good luck with your goals. 

[Hrothgar]

Hey, Alex! I think I'm one of the few people in the middle of Kansas who prefers rugby to football. What kind of training do you do for it?

 

Best,

Roger

[PaladinAlex]

Well right now i'm really working on strengthening my ankle so my old injury doesn't hold me back. Just simple little exercises with a band. I find rugby to be a very well rounded sport, so as an outside centre my focus is fairly board. Speed, agility, endurance, and power. Right now I'm doing a lot of body weight exercises, im probably doing upwards of 200ish pull-ups, 400ish push-ups and tuck jumps, and like 10-15minutes worth of planks over a week. Plus I do short 20-25m sprints as well when my ankle is up to it. Off days I do either distance running(5k or so) or intervals (100m sprint, 100m jog, repeat) until I can barely walk lol.

 

After the challenge (and probably FOR the next challenge) I'm going to be cutting back a lot on the running and doing heavier resistance training and bulking to improve my overall strength.

 

And I concur, Rugby is so much better than football