Ectomorph Bulking

For the past 56 weeks I’ve been trying to put on weight.

I’m naturally very thin and very tall, which is not the best combination. Last year I decided once again to rectify this situation and put on some muscle. After a year, I’ve been surprisingly successful!

So far I’ve managed to put on 32 lbs. I started out weighing 148lbs at 6′ 3″ and today I’m 180lbs at… um 6′ 3″

Being so tall, 180 lbs is still pretty thin, but I don’t look ill like I used to. (At some point I’ll post some before-pictures and you will see what I mean.)

The goal I set 56 weeks ago was to reach 185lbs, and I’m really pleased with myself for getting so close. When I do reach it I’ll probably take a break and maintain over the summer before continuing for another 15lbs over the winter. I’m not really sure what my final weight should be, but I’m hoping it’s 200lbs because of it being a nice round number!

Sundays are my day for updating my stats, so expect me to post measurements on a weekly basis from now on. Here are this week’s:

	Weight	Waist	Iliac	Forearm	Wrist	Arm	Thigh	Calf	Chest	Hips
Week 00	148 lbs	31.00″	33.00″	11.00″	07.00″	12.25″	19.25″	14.50″	35.50″	37.00″
Week 56	180 lbs	33.00″	35.75″	11.25″	07.00″	13.75″	22.25″	15.00″	36.75″	39.00″
Delta	+32 lbs	+2.00″	+2.75″	+0.25″	-	+1.50″	+3.00″	+0.50″	+1.25″	+2.00″

New Habit: Meditation

On the 1st May my plan is to start a new habit. The habit is meditation; something I’ve unsucessfully tried to intall as a habit several times. I’ve successfully mediated in the past, but I just haven’t made it a habit.

The plan is to meditate twice a day for 30 days. 10 minutes is the minimum amount of time I will spend on each meditation.

I need to work out the best times. I’ve been working on improving my morning ritual over the past few days with great success. Somewhere I need to fit in 10 minutes of meditation; but where is best?

Do I do it as soon as I wake up?

After my revision?

Just before my shower?

Just after my shower?

I’m not sure what the best time will actually be, but rather than think about it too heavily I’m just going to follow my instinct and do it straight after revision. I can always change my mind later, but that feels right.

Now what about the evening?

My evening is less structured than my morning so it could be more difficult. Generally at the moment I am working out at about 6pm. Dinner is usually after 7pm, but is often later than 8pm. I can’t do it just before dinner, as it will be too difficult to get the timing right. My thinking is to do it around 5pm. I want to remain a bit flexible so that I can do it as soon as I finish my work. This will allow me to go straight from meditation to working out. I’m not sure if that is the best order, but I can always switch it around later if need be.

So:

• at least 10 minutes of meditation in the morning straight after revision.
• Around 5pm, at least another 10 minutes of meditation.

There are different types of meditation and tomorrow I will explain which one I’m going to do and my exact procedure.

Batman is My Personal Motivator

I absolutely love the 2005 film Batman Begins. When I watch it, I feel like taking on the world and making a difference. It’s not just the desire of dressing up as a bat and driving around in the coolest car ever, I actually feel like doing the hard graft as well.

Honestly, when I watch that film, I feel willing to work hard and suffer in order to do something good. I just feel incredibly motivated.

So what do I do with that motivation?

I let it burn up inside me while I sit on my comfy sofa and enjoy the rest of the film. Luckily the motivation is still there when the film ends… but then what am I going to do with it at at 9 or 10pm. When the film ends, I’m usually pumped enough to have trouble getting to sleep and that’s about it. By time morning comes that motivation has sizzled away.

If only I could bottle it…

I considered for a while watching motivating films in the morning to get my day off to a good start (ala yesterdays post), but it’s a bit time consuming to do that, and I’d probably end up watching movies all day while I tried to find something really inspiring. I’m willing to use that strategy in emergency situations, but really I want to be able to motivate myself. No outside cues should be needed. I should be able to tell myself to be motivated and I would be.

And actually I’m getting pretty good at doing just that.

Earlier today I was proof-reading some work, and I was getting a bit fed up. I was considering taking a break, not because I needed one, but because I wanted one. I’d been working really hard all day, so this wouldn’t really have been a problem. But I wanted to see if I could push myself.

One trick I use is to tell myself to work for 5 more minutes, or get to the end of a section, but it always feels like I’m forcing myself to do something when I do that. When I force myself, I generally don’t stay disciplined for long.

So instead I imagined I was Batman!

I’m good enough at acting to at least fool myself into believing I am a character, and so I just pretended I was Batman as I continued my work. This really doesn’t take much in the way of acting skills, but it may take a bit of practice if you really want to suspend your disbelief.

As Batman I easily had enough discipline to continue my work until completion. After all, proof reading some of my writing was a holiday compared to cleaning up the crime of Gotham City.

Start as you mean to go on

Only a short while ago I trained myself to get up at 6:30am every day (yes even Sundays). While doing so, I didn’t want to give myself any reason to not get up when I asked myself to, so I made sure I started the day doing something I really enjoyed. In my case this was checking my RSS feeds for fascinating new posts and articles.

While there is a lot of good reading in those RSS feeds, I tend to read more than necessary if I start at the beginning of the day. They’re a tad addictive

Now that I’ve got the habit of getting up early down, I’ve now forming the habit of starting the day in a more productive manner. So within ten minutes of my alarm going off, I’m now revising.

The absolutely wonderful benefit of this is that once I’m in work mode I tend to stay there. Sure, it’s pretty easy to slack off, but not as hard as starting something in the first place. So just making a small improvement in the morning has actually improved my entire day. It used to be that I repeatedly slacked off from my work in order to surf the net. I’m not doing that anymore; or at least not nearly as much. Consequently I’m finishing work early and having completly free evenings. (I used to work until bedtime.)

Try it for yourself. Form the habit of starting the day perfectly by making a plan and starting every day in the same way for 30 days in a row.

Start the day as you mean to go on.

Article: The 6 Key Steps to Mastering Anything

I thought it makes sense to announce new articles on the main site here.

I’ve just posted an article on…

The 6 Key Step to Achieving Mastery in Anything

Enjoy

Self Discipline Hour by Hour

Without doubt, self discipline is still the biggest thing holding me back. I’m constantly making improvements and I’m a lot better than I was, but there are still major weaknesses present.

Previously I’ve made solid improvements by taking something such as email or television and restricting my use of it for a period of time such as a week or a month. This has worked very well.

That method has some weaknesses, however, which is that I tend to replace that activity with something else. I may not be watching television anymore, but I’m aimlessly surfing the web instead. I’m displacing my lack of discipline; rather than solving it. It’s an improvement, but it’s still far from perfect.

So I’m now trying a different strategy. I’m focusing on improving my day hour by hour. It’s too much to just tell myself I’m going to be more disciplined throughout the day. That would make a dramatic shift in my life, and I wouldn’t deal with the change efficiently. But if I just focus on part of my day, and make it a priority to improve, I know I can happily go back to my old habits for the rest of the day.

This seems to be working well. So far I’ve managed to reguarly wake up at 6:30am every morning, get breakfast and then revise. The revision bit is what I’m really focusing on at the moment. I’ve been doing it without fail for about a week now, and the rewards are so amazing that I would hardly want to break the habit.

It won’t be a true habit for a couple more weeks yet, so I need to make sure I stay focused on that. However, I’m going to add a couple more things on top of that to speed up the process.

So…

1. After revision I immediately begin my work (this will be some time between 7am and 8am).
2. I eat breakfast while I’m working, and I want to be finished eating by 10:00am.
3. At 10:30am I’m going to hop in the shower.
4. When I’m showered I’m going to go outside and do some work in the garden
5. At 12pm I’m coming back inside and making lunch

I’ll leave it there for now. I don’t think this is perfect; but I want to get things going. I can always improve it later.

Turn off your TV week

Apparently it’s turn off your TV week. I shall not be partaking as I already have TV watching under control. I used to be an addict like the majority of the populous. I used to watch several hours every single day. Not any more. I have a simple strategy that took a surprisingly long period of time to learn.

Step 1. Check the TV guide at the beginning of the day and decide in advance if there is anything worth watching.

Step 2. If there is something watching, watch it. If there’s not anything worth watching (here’s the secret), don’t watch! That’s where most people go wrong.

Step 3. At the end of any worthwhile programmes, turn off the TV.

Of course the difficulty is not in the strategy, but in breaking an addiction. And that’s why ‘turn off your TV week’ is such a good idea. I spent a week without television many years ago, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was also one of the most beneficial.

I’ve had times since, when I’ve spent long periods of time glued to the box, but they were usually when I was either with friends that couldn’t stop watching or when I was feeling lonely because my friends weren’t around! But most of the time I just have no desire to turn on the TV. I only watch it when there is something worth watching.

At the moment I spend about 1.5 hours watching television a week. I watch Derren Brown and Grand Designs. That’s it.

Compared to my previous tele-addicted period of life, I probably now have an extra day every week to do productive things. That’s 52 wasted days per year. Or for every 7 years I live, I wasted one year watching television. To reach the same figures all you need to do is average just under 2.5 hours of TV per day. Do the maths and see how much time you are losing.

Not that all television is bad or a waste of your time. I just think it is important to make educated, intelligent choices. This is why I’m particularly fond of the idea of Killing the Television but keeping the shows.

Already thinking about own domain

It may just be my connection, but wordpress seems incredibly slow. It will drive me crazy if it continues to run at this snail pace. Also I’m a bit concerned about not ultimately owning my domain.

But really I can’t afford to host it myself at the moment, so this is the best option. It will give me a chance to see if I actually get anything out of this or whether I feel it is a waste of my time. It was a bit of a rush decision to have another go at starting a blog, but that’s the way I generally operate. I like to set things in motion, even if it means I’m not going to be perfect to start with.

So this is a trial. The ultimate success of this blog will not be it’s popularity, but the amount of value I personally get from it.

Having said that, I’m very impressed with how user friendly everything is. And there seem to be a fair amount of features. Everything is integrated in a very seemless manner, which makes editing incredibly easy. I’m just not sure what others see, so I will have to log in on another computer at some time.

Improving the Human

I’m writing this for myself.

It will be great if this is interesting enough for others to read and comment on, but this is not my intention. It’s my place to write my ideas about improving myself, especially about improving intelligence, and possibly a place to spread my creative output.

I tried to do this ages ago in blogger.com, but it kept failing me. Hopefully wordpress is better, otherwise I will have to pay for hosting.

I am particulary interested in improving intelligence, and I have my own website about it over at http://www.improvehumaniq.com.

I’m passionate about this subject, and I will probably take it further than anyone else has ever taken it before. This will be my personal, honest, open account of my progress. I’m 24 years old now. I hopefully have a long life ahead of me, and I want to see what I can become in that time.

I’m trying to become something more. Not quite a renaissance man, but something along those lines.

The site above offers a condensed and more focused view on improving intelligence. This blog will be less focused, less worried about being commercial, will cover the wider topic of my self improvement, will be less instructive, will be more open and honest, and will be full of my emerging thoughts.

My lack of focus will probably mean this lacks popularity. I’ll be reasonably focused on human improvement type issues as that is mostly what I think about; but I make no promises to keep only to that topic.

As I say, this is for me.