Matt's Roof Garden
Powered by 🌱Roam GardenSeptember 27th, 2020
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A thread by Andy Henson
It's a new decade in The Discipline so today is 🔌 Connect day, catching up with people and the news of the last week or so. I've had lots of people asking about this idea so explainer thread below
The Discipline comes from an article by @fet which was inspired by the Neal Stephenson book, Anathem. In it the Avout retreat from the outside world for defined periods (1,10,100,1000 years) to focus on long term study and contemplation
It's a way to deliberately and wisely spend your available time after your daily commitments have been met. The Discipline is a 10 day period, known as a decade in which each day is dedicated to a specific focus
An aside: I learnt from this that while now we consider the word decade to mean a ten-year period, prior to the 16th century, it meant any collection of 10 things
@fet's system has 5 focus areas, 🔌 Connect, 📖 Read, 📚 Study, 🕹Play and ✍🏻 Create. I have added an extra one, 🧠 Plan. These days are repeated in a specific pattern for the decade. Create different decade patterns to focus more on specific areas
The standard decade for me looks like:
🔌 📖 📚 🕹 ✍🏻 📖 ✍🏻 🧠 📚 📖
While a Create focused decade is:
🔌 ✍🏻 📚 🕹 ✍🏻 📖 ✍🏻 🧠 📚 ✍🏻
Study & Play:
🔌 📖 📚 🕹 ✍🏻 📚 🕹 🧠 📚 🕹
Decide your own decade templates
Some guidelines:
Try to spend at least 20 minutes on the chosen focus.
A decade always starts with 🔌 Connect.
Each decade has each focus area at least once.
When in doubt, go to bed, which is a great operating principle to have in itself. Every decade starts with 🔌Connect to catch up with the world since one of the key aims is Something that’s not of value after 10 days is of no value. I definitely recommend reading the whole article if this has piqued your interest (metalbat.com/post/the-disci…)
In the future I plan to explore this idea more deeply, and look at how I could run my whole day according to this system, not just my available time.
Fin.
Shrimp Workout exercise
Based on this tweet
2mo ago: I shall be a shrimpy wood elf forever, alas
<2mo later after finally trying strength training: Oh, huh
Courtesy of coaches @michaelcurzi and his friend Ahmed
I was pretty sure I'd be a shrimp for life until I tried this. Bodies are insane.
If you're interested in trying something similar, here's what I did:
- Workouts
3 day rotation, reps until exhaustion, 2 sets/exercise
Day 1: "Ring day." Various gymnastic ring exercises. (I threw the straps over a thick tree branch near a lake. Rings are awesome an cheap, recommended.)
Day 2: "Equipment day." Ring pull-ups & dumbbells. (I only used 10lb ones bc higher weights are crazy expensive.)
Day 3: "Bodyweight day." Pushups, tricep dips, crunches, etc. (Did lots of pushup elevation variants.)
Repeat
- Eating
• I ate a lot. Like ~2300-3000 calories per day.
• I used the app MyFitnessPal to get started on measuring this out. It's remarkably good at scanning barcodes to calculate calories.
• Rough macro ratio of 50% (good) carbs, 30% fat, 20% protein.
• I ate breakfast 1-3hrs before working out and lunch 45min-1hr after for when the anabolism kicked in.
• Protein supplements, MCT oil, and Ezekiel cereal proved very helpful for meeting my daily protein, fat, and carb goals, respectively.
- Took creatine
Started with 20g daily for 7 days, divided into four 5g servings throughout the day. Then reduced to 5g/day.
With this, I went from ~139lbs to ~160lbs in ~7 weeks. I have a not-rare, but not-super-common variant of the ACTN3 gene which is probably the reason I gained muscle so fast, but I've seen similar changes in others on the 2mo-6mo timescale.
My motivation for starting this was pretty basic. With covid and my GI condition ruining a lot of my plans, I just wanted an achievable goal that I could get empirical feedback on...like using my eyes and not just the intellect. I plan to keep going until I hit 165 for no particular reason other than that I like that number.
Let me know if you give it a try!
