Decide My Future - Fitness Edition

I have been recently working my way through the anime Baki The Grappler (great anime btw) and being the highly suggestible person that I am it made me want to get big and lift some weights. So I did one set of dumbbell curls and now feel like the most buff motherfucker on the planet.

I thought what I'd mention today is my history of fitness / unfitness. I have mentioned before that I used to do martial arts but I also did competitive swimming. Up until I was 17 I trained Monday to Saturday, sometimes multiple times a day. I would train swimming with my swim club in the morning before school and train Taekwondo in the afternoons. I even trained twice on Saturdays.

I could literally swim before I could walk and I started Karate not long after I started walking. I left Karate for Taekwondo because I wanted full contact competition. In Taekwondo I became state champion five times and national champion twice. In swimming the best I did was make it to the state championships for 100m backstroke and 100m butterfly. I made it to the finals for butterfly but did not place. I made the school cross country team every year and made the school swim team every year.

I was one fit motherfucker.

when I was 17 I first injured my ankle and weakened the ligaments in my ankle which put me out of any sport for a while, when I finally got better and was about to start training again I injured my knee badly. I was at the BMX track and stacked it, dislocating my knee and tearing my PCL (a ligament in the back of the knee). This took me out of action for a long time. I was on crutches for months and it took a lot longer to recover completely, although it is an injury which will never be completely fixed without surgery, which I do not plan on having.

After that I moved with my family interstate and started TAFE (similar to college for you Americans) and did not get back into training at all. After a while I put on a lot weight. When you train as much as I did your calorie intake is much higher than a normal person because you require immense amounts of energy to burn during training. When I suddenly stopped training it is nearly impossible to also suddenly cut your food intake at the same time. I was eating 4+ times the recommended calories for a normal person. So obviously I put on a lot of weight.

At my peak I hit about 125kg (metric system motherfuckers... it's about 275 pounds) The weird thing though is, when I was way overweight like that I had no problem getting girlfriends, and I'm not talking girls my size, I'm talking hot girls that even at my physical peak I would have considered out of my league. The other thing is at this point, although I was not 'fit' I was way stronger than I was when I was training. I could lift things that I could never lift before and can not lift now. I had big arms and a massive chest, even if they were covered with fat.

After a while I made a decision to loose the weight. I immediately cut my food intake by half, completely stopped eating all the junk food snacks, and at the same time try to speed up my metabolism by basically eating many times during the day but in small, low energy portions. After a few weeks of much stomach pain I think my stomach actually shrunk and I would become full with much less food. After a while this just became the way I lived without thinking about it and I started loosing a lot of weight without even realising it. Over time I began eating more and more but the weight kept coming off and I didn't realise because I never actually weighed myself during this time. (and it was also the time when I kind of stopped having any normal type of social interactions with people)

When I finally realised I had actually lost a lot of weight was when someone got me a new t-shirt for Christmas and it was a medium and I put it on and it actually fit me. I looked at myself in the mirror thinking 'WTF?' and then decided to weigh myself to see what I weighed now. Last time I had weighed myself I was about 120kg... when I got on the scale it said 85kg. I actually thought there was something wrong with the scale and tried again. I had lost 35kg without even realising it, mostly because by this time I was back to eating whatever I want and it no longer affected me.

So now I am... actually I have not weighed myself recently... but somewhere around the 77kg-82kg area. The thing is now I feel so weak. First I was super fit, then I was pretty damn strong when I was fat, now I am neither. I want to start trying to do something again but I don't know what. There are a lot of weights at my house that I can use at any time to bulk up and get stronger, but at the same time my real passion is doing martial arts and getting fitter. But to train martial arts I would need to join a club, which means paying them money and taking up a lot of my time which even now I feel I do not have enough time to give. I don't even have enough time to choose between playing a game and watching a movie or some anime. I literally had to completely stop gaming for the last few weeks to find the time to watch Baki The Grappler (which I still have not finished).

To overcome the time restraints at the moment I have taken a pair of dumbbells and some extra weight up to my room and I just do some sets while watching shows at the same time.

So what is your opinion on this? Should I just keep doing what I'm doing and just lift some weights in my room while watching shows? or should I cave in, join a club, start training again, and have even less / almost no time to do the things I love like gaming and watching anime and movies?

I guess there is also the social interaction that comes with being in a club, and also the possibility that some day down the track I could become a better fighter than I ever was before and one day be a champion again...

... that post turned out way longer than I expected.

TLDR; gaming, anime, and doing weights in my room? or join a martial arts club and have no time for shit?

Shows - The Shield

One of those things I do a lot is watch many TV shows, usually on my PC... that I may or may not have downloaded from the internets. And the one I want to mention today is one that actually finished a few years ago called The Shield.

I have to admit that I am not really a fan of cop shows on TV, but The Shield is the exception to the rule for me. In my personal opinion, it is the best cop show I have ever seen. Now being in the mindset I was in when The Shield was in it's early years I thought 'oh great, another crappy cop show to add to the ever growing list of a million other crappy cop shows' and did not give it much thought, so it was not until years later that I was re-introduced to the show by a friend.

The thing you have to take into account with The Shield is that, unlike most other cop shows, you can not just watch random episodes here and there because, unlike other cop shows, there is one EPIC ongoing storyline that runs through the entire 7 seasons of the show, not separate stories for each episode. If you just want to check out an episode to see what the show is like make sure you watch the pilot episode (Season 1 Episode 1) and if it does not blow your mind in that very first episode then don't bother with the rest of the show. (Blew my mind when I watched it, did not expect what happened at all)

Things that make The Shield awesome:

Detective Vic Mackey, the most bad ass cop you will find on film. He makes Dirty Harry look like Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Although he is the main character there are many times through the show when you don't know if you love him or hate him, or if he is the good guy or the bad guy. Most people would say he is both (but mostly bad). You love to hate him and hate to love him. You will call him pathetic yet praise him like a hero. You will want him dead yet feel sorry and sympathise with him. On Bravo TV's countdown of the 100 Greatest Television Characters, Michael Chiklis described Mackey as "a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Dirty Harry." Also he probably has the biggest Wikipedia page dedicated to a single character from a single TV show I have seen.

Epic story. And when I say epic, I mean a non stop, action packed, edge of you seat, continuous story that spans the entire 7 years of the show. None of that 'chasing a different bad guy every show' bullshit, or even every season. If you can not watch every single episode, do not bother watching it at all because every episode is vital to the story.

Guest stars are another thing that The Shield does completely different to other shows. When you see a guest star appear on a show you usually expect them for a single episode, maybe two if they have a good character. When a guest star appears on The Shield, they stick around for an entire fucking season! Or even 2 seasons if they are awesome enough. And I'm not talking about crappy celebrities trying to break into acting as guest stars, I'm talking awesome actors like Glenn Close, Forest Whitaker, and Anthony Anderson.

The Shield has won Emmys, Golden Globes, AFI awards, Satellite Awards, and has been nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards and Ewwy Awards.

The show finished back in 2008 and when it did it left a massive hole in my show watching activities that needed to be filled. And after looking around I found out that many of the production team from The Shield had moved onto another show called Sons of Anarchy. I'm not going to go far into SoA right now but it is another fantastic show and just started its 3rd season.

TLDR; The Shield is fucking awesome and you should watch it.

Also check out this video of 'Solving Crimes the Vic Mackey Way':