After getting out of my culinary school for the Summer, I began to search for a part-time job to make ends meet.  Not finding much success in the first couple of weeks, I started  to look at other options.  I had created an account on Elance a long time before this, but I never got to the point of actually bidding on jobs.  I decided to devote one week exclusively to setting up my profile and bidding on freelance writing work.  I’ve always loved to write, and I had a good amount of experience that I could show to potential clients from my blog and weekly restaurant reviews.  So I decided that this would be my area.   I set up a schedule of four hours a day to devote to this, and to eliminate distractions I would do it from my laptop at the library.

Before bidding on any work, I figured out how much cash I would need to cover monthly expenses.  I decided how many hours per week I wanted to work.  (20).  One division problem later, I found that I needed to earn at least $20 per hour on this schedule to cover the basics.  (Also accounting for the amount I’d need to withhold for taxes at the end of the year).  So I now had my minimum hourly rate, and I started bidding on jobs with this as my guideline.

It’s two weeks later, and I am now working with my second client, who has just extended me to a long-term contract.   I’m also talking with a potential third client about a large project, which combined with my current project would put me right at working four hours a day and earning plenty to cover all the basics.  I made a point of giving my all for my first client, who gave me an excellent review – probably making the second and third clients possible.

Is this my end-all-be-all?  No.  But it accomplishes one key goal: freedom of location.  I will be able to earn my living no matter where I am.  I can do my job from anywhere with an internet connection.  I could be in a Japanese karaoke bar or a French bistro.  And I’m excited about that.

The other big “win” for this is being able to work within my own parameters, on my terms.  I decide when the workday starts and ends.  I decide how much I’ll be paid.  And because of this, I am able to devote the majority of my time and energy towards my next big goal: automated income.

I want to produce a product that I am proud to stand behind and that people will love.  Something that serves a purpose and makes people happy.  I’m narrowing down the possibilities, and when I decide on the final product I’ll put all my effort into developing a following for it.  Using the techniques I’ve learned from 4HWW and my own experiences in internet marketing, I’ll create an SEO-driven site with an auxiliary PPC campaign to drive traffic there.  And the day that I achieve my income goals through that site, that will be the dawn of a new age in my life.

I have felt the thrill of achieving my goals over the past two months, both physically and financially, and I don’t intend to stop now.

During my month of high intensity training coupled with a high protein diet, I’ve seen some significant gains in strength.  Check out some of my advances:

(Bench press weights include bar weight of 45 lbs)

Regular Bench Press

First workout: 175 lbs x 6 reps

Final workout: 195 lbs x 4 reps  – (note: my lifting goal for the whole Summer was to bench my body weight, around 190 lbs.  I guess I need a new goal now!)

Decline Bench Press

First workout: 195 lbs x 4 reps

Final workout: 215 lbs x 5 reps

Leg press

First workout: 300 lbs x 7 reps

Final workout: 480 lbs x 6 reps

I went to my buddy Michael at Clark’s Tuxedos again to get my final measurements:

Bicep: 13.5″ (.5 inch gain)

Chest: 37″ (.5 inch gain)

Abs: 31″ (1 inch gain)

Thigh: 21″ (1 inch gain)

Shoulder: 43.5″ (1.5 inch gain)

Looking back at our workouts this month, the results make sense.  The exercise my buddy and I did most regularly was the leg press, and we clearly saw large gains in our leg strength and size.  We also focused more on shoulders than we ever had before, and when combined with our chest exercises this made for a significant overall gain to my shoulder breadth.

I suppose a picture is worth 1,000 words, so here’s a couple before and afters:

Note – I told you I’d be tanner by the time this was over! 

Now, is this even close to the results posted on Tim Ferriss’ blog?  Nope!  But that’s coo with me.  I learned a ton throughout this month, and I’ve seen some concrete gains.  I plan to take this month to rest up and focus on muscle tone and maintenance, and then I’ll give HIT (high-intensity training) another shot in July.  Now that I actually know what I’m doing, I believe the results will be even better.  I’ll focus more on upper-body development next time around as well (but I’ll still make sure to do full-body workouts each time).

I really want some friggin’ french fries.

Foods that I used to eat without batting an eye now mock me from restaurant menus and my own countertops.  It’s amazing how much more careful I have to be during the week.  But I think simplicity is the key: each meal, I only focus on carbs (beans, already cooked so I just have to warm them), protein, and some vegetable matter.  Protein is already my specialty when it comes to cooking, so I’m having fun coming up with a billion different ways to cook pork chops.  I went on a field trip to CostCo and stocked my fridge with all kinds of raw meaty goodies, so I won’t run out of stuff to cook for a while.

But still, sometimes I feel like that just doesn’t cut it.  Beans are great, but they don’t really give you that “full” feeling as much bread or other carbs do.  So, I find myself getting stricken by french-fry and pasta cravings, something that I’ve never had to deal with before.

The first week was fine because everything was new and novel, but I think from here on out will be the real test.  But no worries.  I can eat those carbs right after my workouts, and Saturday is still “anything goes” day.  I think that’s the only way to do it – you need one day to let loose.

As for the exercise, my gym-bro and I are seeing improved max weight on nearly every exercise every week.  But I still don’t feel like I’m working my muscles to a state of pure exhaustion.  I lift at my max every time, sure.  I lift at the point where I can do no more than 4 or 5 reps per set.  But even after a couple sets, I still don’t feel that deep fatigue in my muscle tissue that I expected.  A couple minutes go by, and they feel ready to go again.  Is it really possible to come to complete muscle exhaustion in less than 30 minutes at the gym?  Maybe for one or two muscle groups, sure, but the whole body?  So maybe I should just focus on one or two each time and rotate.  I’ll still do multi-joint workouts, but I’ll make sure that the focus areas are hit the hardest.

All in all, I think things are going well.  I’m going to keep pushing the envelope over the next two weeks, and I’m anxious to see where I’ll get to by then.

Note: I had been increasing in weight over the first couple of gym trips, but at weigh-in today I noticed that my weight was 1/2 lb lower than it had been at the beginning!  Now ideally, this means that the diet part has successfully lost me fat weight while gaining muscle, but I guess we’ll see in the end.  I’ve been eating a ton, so this one threw me for a loop!

Because I have been going to the gym for about a solid year now, I’m finding it difficult to really blast my muscles into exhaustion.  I am going for my max weight every time, though, and that has gone up in just these past two workouts.  Now I just need to focus on intensity and blasting specific muscle groups.  I will still exercise my entire body each workout, but I will alternate my main focus between upper and lower body every time.  Oh, and that 5/5 cadence is murder – it’s great for tiring you out quick, especially when you’re working with heavier weights.  (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down.  It feels like an eternity).

My gym-going buddy and I are both seeing weight gain from this program already.  Both of us were about two pounds heavier than our norms when we weighed in on Friday.  And that was our hungry weight – we probably went up another 2 lbs each after we went for a post-workout meal.

Saturday was Dieters Gone Wild day, and I think I sufficiently sickened myself with all the junk I ate.  I’ll be just fine on beans and meat now, thank you.  Time to gear up for workout week 2!

I have put together the following plan from various articles that I’ve found across the internets.  This article from Tim Ferriss has the best summation of all of the information that I’ve found so far, so they are the main guidelines that I will follow.

Diet

What to eat:

Firstly, I need to eat large amounts of protein (beef, pork, chicken, eggs).  We’re talking lots of protein.  This is my main food group for the next month.

For carb energy and additional nutrients, I will eat legumes and assorted vegetables.  Lentils, beans, peas, spinach, asparagus, etc. etc.

What not to eat

Bread, rice, other “white” carbs.  No breaded, battered, or deep-fried foods.  I’ll avoid most dairy, and cut out any “liquid calories”.  (i.e., no soda, juices, other sweet drinks.  Unsweetened drinks are A-OK).

Dieter’s day off: Every Saturday all bets are off, and I can eat whatever I want.  I can also indulge in some white carbs and/or dairy immediately after working out.

Exercise

Overview

The key concept for building muscle is simple: intensity. I will only go to the gym twice per week.  I will only go for about a half hour every time.  The idea is that the workouts should be so intense that any more than this would kill me.

With every exercise I’m aiming for “one set to failure” – I should be so close to my max that I can only do 3-6 reps before complete muscle exhaustion. At max I will do two sets of an exercise, but I will aim for one. I will also employ a slow cadence to every exercise to eliminate momentum and maximize resistance. (Tim Ferriss recommends 5/5 – five seconds up, five seconds down).

Specific Exercises

I will focus on multi-joint exercises, and make a point to work out my entire body each time I go to the gym.  Leg Press, Trap Bar Deadlift, enhanced-weight dips and pullups, Squats, Yates Bent row, overhead press, etc.  In the past I was isolating specific muscle groups too much and not focusing enough on multi-joint exercises like these.

Logging

I will record every detail of my workouts, including time spent in the gym, exercises done, reps done, amount of weight, etc.  This way I will be able to track my exact progress.

Current Measurements

Michael over at Clark’s Tuxedos on University Ave here in Provo was kind enough to take my measurements for the project.  Right now, they are as follows (in inches):

Neck – 15

Bicep – 13

Chest – 36.5

Abs – 30

Thigh – 20

Shoulder (entire circumference) – 42

Currently I weigh 190 pounds.

And there you have it.  I’m psyched to see what I can accomplish.  I’ll publish a couple updates along the way, and if you have any ideas or suggestions for me, please let me know!

Oh, and lest I forget, here’s the official “before” pictures:

(Yes, I really am that white.  Lay off, all right??  I swear, Winter in Utah just got over like a week ago…)

So Summer’s on its way and I’m getting restless.  I’ve been going to the gym for a while now and I’m seeing some progress, but I want to see what I can achieve when I really focus on muscle building.  I happened to come across this article, which got my brain going on the possibilities that I could achieve.  The guy who wrote it is selling a “how I did it” guide on his site, but he posts up a lot of free info on the process that he used to build muscle.  Enough for me to fill in the gaps.

He described it as an 8-week process, which I feel is a reasonable time frame.  So I decided to use the first two months of my Summer vacation to try my own muscle gain program.  I’m going to kick it off on May 1st.  I’m still shopping around for the best ideas that I can combine into a program that will be all my own, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know.  I’ll post updates along the way, and then a conclusion article to summarize the experience.  Here are my main guidelines:

1. No drugs

No steroids, no testosterone supplements, no hormones.  I don’t even want to go into creatine or vitamin supplements.  I want to do this only using the nutrition from straight-up real food.

2. No living at the gym

I want to do this on a normal schedule that anyone would be able to do.  My plan is to hit the gym three times a week max, for 45 minutes max each session (15 of that being for cardio and warm-up).

And that’s pretty much it.  As I’ve searched for more ideas, I came across this muscle gain article by Timothy Ferriss on the very same topic.  I respect the work Tim has done with effective time management in the Four Hour Workweek, so I’ll apply some of his principles to my workout program as well.

For now I’m planning to focus on a high-meat protein diet, pushing myself to the max at each exercise, and recording my workout results so I can have solid numbers to track this experiment by.

Until May 1st I’ll be fleshing out this workout plan, so if you have any tips or suggestions now would be the time to make them!

Oh, and here’s some pics of my current physical state (and keep in mind that I hope to be a lot tanner by the time this experiment ends )

I can think of a few incarnations that this idea could have.  There’s the traditional “build a biz plan, get outside funding” approach, which could work, I suppose.  But there’s also the more organic, grass-roots type of startup, where a bunch of us with similar goals get together and just build the thing ourselves.  This is more appealing to me.  It would have to start small, of course… unless one of the founding members happened to be independently wealthy.  Not impossible, but not something to plan on.

But I don’t think this has to be a super-expensive project.  Honestly, what did real ninjas have?  Did they have amenities and utilities and all that jazz?  No!  They were hardcore survivalists who used everything they found in nature for their training.  And how about the fun aspect?  Do we need a bunch of electronic gadgets or expensive accessories to have fun and get exercise?  Remember how much fun you used to have on the playground.  And what was that?  A field, some monkey bars, a metal slide, stuff to climb on.  Do we need much more?

There’s a training field for a school close to here that has adult-size monkey bars, a balance log suspended from cables, and a few log hurdles and posts.  A couple friends and I stumbled into it one day by accident and proceeded to spend about two hours just screwing around on the obstacles.  The course was simple to the extreme, but it was fun!  If we just could find an appropriate piece of land to do it on, couldn’t we build a wicked ninja course with our bare hands?

I know there’s a ropes course in Provo, too, and I really want to go check it out.  I don’t know how “ninja” it is, but at least it would be an adrenaline rush!

What do you think?  Do you know a place or persons who would be interested in building something like this?

Make Goals

If you just write your ideas down without ever attaching action to them, they will very likely end up getting lost to time.  I know I have notebooks full of ideas from my lifetime, but how many of them ever saw the light of day?  Not a whole lot.  Setting goals for action is the critical step in getting you idea from the dream-world to the real one.  Create small steps you can take to bring the idea to life, set time lines for doing these steps, and then hold yourself accountable to it!

Tell others

When you have a good feeling about an idea – you’ve set goals for it and the preliminary outlook looks good – tell a trusted friend about it.  Tell a family member.  As it comes closer to fruition, start to tell more people.  Like-minded people will encourage and support you.  They will motivate you and give you a greater feeling of accountability – you will want to deliver on what you’ve told them you will do.  And when you’re putting in regular work on your idea, add to that the amount of people you have told about it, and sooner or later you will reach a ‘tipping point’, to use Gladwell’s phrase, and your idea will have so much momentum that it will start taking you along for the ride.

Disclaimer

Sure, some ideas just don’t work.  You will need to be the judge of when to give up.  Also keep this in mind: the more fantastic the idea, the fewer the people who will support you in it.  That is why I recommend choosing your sounding boards wisely.  But hey, if you happen to have an out-of-this-world idea that you’re absolutely convinced will work, do it!  I try to be supportive of any impassioned, endeavoring soul.   I’d rather not have history find me in the position of, say, Newtonian physicists in the early 1900′s who mocked Einstein’s theories, or religious devotees in the 1600′s decrying Galileo’s sun-centered universe.  Nothing is impossible.

Augh! The colors!

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel that keeping up with all of my ideas and projects is an overwhelming task.  First, I’ll have (what I think is) an amazing idea.  Then I’ll get all excited and scribble down a basic outline in my idea notebook.  I’ll think about it more and lay down a plan over the next couple of days, and I might even get as far as detailed competition/industry research, building a website for the idea, etc.  But inevitably, it seems that sooner or later the initial brain-fireworks wear off, and exciting fresh ideas come up to take their place.  This is where the whole diligence thing comes in handy – something I am not skilled in.  Yes, I am trying.  And yes, I’m getting better at it.  But when that new, shiny idea bubbles up and bursts fourth in all its wondrous glory, it’s so hard not to become enraptured with it!

This is a problem that many of us wanna-be entrepreneurs face.  By nature, we are idea people.  And that doesn’t necessarily come with the “diligence” add-on.  But think about it: if you had seen every one of your great entrepreneurial ideas through to the bitter end, where would you be right now?  If you had actually walked each idea into the real world and gave it every chance in your power to survive and thrive, would your life be different?

I’m guessing… YES. I know my life would be different.  But that’s why I’m trying to close that gap – and the key for me is organization.

I don’t throw away every new idea that I get in favor of pursuing only one.  I can’t bring myself to do that.  So I try to prioritize and organize all of my projects in a way that makes it easy to see where they’re at and what steps I need to take.  In fact, I made myself a spreadsheet to do just that – have a look:

Schedule Template

My personal copy is a lot more full, but you get the idea. Since I started doing things this way, it’s been a lot easier to break every project up into meaningful steps, which I can then schedule myself to do one at a time.  It also gives me a birds-eye view of everything I’m doing, and it keeps any ideas from falling through the cracks.  (Unless I make the conscious decision to let it do so.)

Tell me, how do you keep your own world o’ projects organized?  Do you have a system?  I’d love to hear it!  I’m always interested in new ideas.  (But, you already knew that).

The best way to learn of course is to actually speak the language with another person – nothing can take the place of the tension you feel during real conversations, where you’re the one in the hotseat and you have to think up words and grammar patterns in realtime.  But anime can help you get an ear for the language by introducing you to the sounds, intonation and flow of natural Japanese.  It helps to hold your interest by providing interesting storylines and characters, and most any anime will introduce you to some cultural aspects of Japan, even when the anime doesn’t necessarily take place there.  And on top of this, it also gives you plenty of new (and fun) vocabulary that you’ll never learn from a schoolbook!

How about a companion guide for certain animes that could be purchased from an online storefront?  Even just one episode of most animes provides a huge wealth of information that could be delved into.  I’m envisioning a full transcript of the episode, sentence-by-sentence, with English translations of each sentence, plus an explanation of key phrases and grammar principles.

You could just go scene-by-scene and try to figure out the Japanese from the subtitles, but far too often the subtitles (and dubbing, for that matter) have been adjusted to the point where they are only vaguely similar to the true original meaning.  An accomplished guide to walk you through every word and explain it in plain English could be invaluable.  What do you think?