Walked 30m
Simple & Sinister
- 10×10: 20kg one-handed & two-handed swings
- 10×1: 16kg get-ups
Read: Obviously Awesome
Watched: Laracasts Vue intro videos
Listened to: Asian Not Asian
Workout Log (4/2/2020) — The joy of movement (even when stuck indoors)
Alright so I’m going to just have a log for workouts here. The idea, hopefully, is that I’ll be able to make these visually interesting at some point. And my web development skill will progress enough that I can organize this all in a decent way, even if it mostly means hiding most of the fitness log stuff. I don’t want to split this all up into different sites and platforms, because I’ve had multiple sites before and don’t like having to decide where I’ll post something.
Here I am blogging about blogging again.
Anyway. Today’s workout:
- Simple & Sinister (10×10 swings, 10×1 get-ups) — while watching Cobra Kai
- 20 kg two-handed swings
- 6 kg kettlebell for the get-ups.
- Treadmill walking (while watching Westworld)
- 20 mins with Nike Reacts on
- 15 mins with Xero Prios
- 10 mins with Nike Reacts
I’ve been trying to get 90 minutes of movement in every day during quarantine. I’ve done some very unscientific tracking but it’s pretty clear that days with workouts are better than days without.
Which reminds me of something Kelly McGonigal (author of Joy of Movement) says in her interview on The Unmistakable Creative:
”You should not expect, when your alarm goes off, to crave getting out of bed and putting on your sneakers and going for a walk. You should expect, that a couple minutes into it, you’re going to be so glad you did. And you have to learn to trust that process and be familiar with it. Even someone like me, I love movement. I’m like in love with what it’s done for me and my life. And I don’t want to do it when I wake up in the morning. That paradox is real and I don’t let that be a decider.”
I know that I’ll feel better after working out. The day will be better in almost every way. And still I need to convince myself to get started in the morning.
But I’m learning to trust the process.
Anyway, I really want to clean up my form on the swings. Going to practice some hip hinging.
I have a 28 kg kettlebell on the way so I’m going to need to practice some patience when it arrives. I’ll keep it to the kettlebell progressions (deadlift, hike, single-rep swings) for some number of workouts before using it for two-handed swings.
It’s been great having the kettlebells around during quarantine.
Procreate and the cutting room floor
One thing I really like about Procreate is that it creates cutting room floor material.
In Show Your Work Austin Kleon talks about sending out a dispatch of in-progress work:
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.
I was recording a sketching session for illustrating this week’s newsletter issue and shared that time-lapse:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-m-cFlHVGl/
There are a couple cutting-room-floor-related things that I love about Procreate:
- Time-lapses are on by default. I can pull up any drawing in the entire time I’ve used Procreate on any one iPad and then watch the timelapse for it. I can export those and speed them up or slow them down however I want.
- There’s always layers to share. Any sketch longer than 5 or so minutes always leads to a few different layers. If I want to share a sketch, I can usually toggle layers on and off and share different stages of a drawing. None of it is great on its own but they’re a little more interesting together.
Some day, when I actually know how to draw, I’ll be ready to explain the drawing process better. In the meantime I’ll keep sharing the cutting room scraps.
Note to Self: Goals April 2020
This setup worked really well while writing issue #4 for my newsletter, The Listener.
It looks like I actually can finish a newsletter in one sitting. A couple things that worked really well in this writing session.
1. Using the iPad Pro — this is mostly me just justifying buying a new iPad every year. I do think that because I’m slower in iPadOS for most things, I’m better at focusing on writing when I’m supposed to be writing.
It’s really really great (as mentioned in that newsletter post) for making a notecard right when a visual comes to mind while writing instead of filing the idea away or, worse, switching from my laptop to my iPad to draw. (I love AirDrop, but it’s still a few extra taps.) Inevitably in that situation I’ll get distracted by… something. This week I was really inspired by this post by Neville Medhora: Why Images Are Greater Than Text In Marketing (In Many Cases).
2. Using a Gymboss timer — maybe this will be my one weird trick. I’ve used Bit Timer for years and use it any time I do a kettlebell workout. It hasn’t worked as well when writing or doing other kinds of work at a computer. I think it’s because using a timer on my phone just leads to me procrastinating on my phone. Having the physical vibration just worked well right now.
I tried 25 intervals at 1-minute and… stopped like 4 rounds in. Too quick to really get anything done. I switched it to 7 intervals of 3-minutes and that worked much better. Three minutes is good for a chunk of writing and then I could keep it moving. Three minutes is also a good amount of time to draw something worth sharing in a post. (And another three if I want to do a little bit of animation on it.)
Can’t wait to send you all my free bonus PDF. HIIT WRITING – THE 3X7 ROUTINE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE.
Note to Self: Places I’ve used the iPad in the first week
Drawing with some inspiration from the book Dare to Sketch. I’ll use the time lapse in the next iPad journal video.