Do you have geeky hobbies, inactive lifestyles or work at a desk job but still want to find a way to get in shape? Don't worry fellow geeks and geekettes you can still get healthy and in shape like you have always wanted. Getting there will take a bit of hard work, dedication, and a game plan but it can be done. Soon you will be a Tech with Pecs, a Geek with Obliques, you can go from I.T. to F.I.T. Who says you can't have brains and brawn?
For this installment of Picture of the Month I chose this picture of how the best of me is yet to come. Firstly let me apologize that I haven't posted on my blog in a while, I have recently been extremely busy with work and trying to get certain goals accomplished regarding it. Well, I also can't discredit the release of patch 2.1 of Diablo 3 and now the Warlords of Draenor expansion for WoW. Anyhow without further ado please let me jump right into why I like this motivational picture.
I feel this picture has two messages built into it, both of which are a realistic but inpiriing messages. The first message is how as we start down the path to getting physically healthy and fit we can look forward to discovering the best of ourselves. After I started my endeavor to get in shape and become healthy I learned a great deal of new things about myself and how they can be applied to all sorts of other areas of my life. I learned that working out is hard and you constantly have to apply yourself at it to get results. Despite it being hard, with continued effort and determination you do obtain results each and every day you continue to devote yourself to it. This helped me to unlearn some of the helplessness I had developed and realize that any goal I set my mind to in life can become a reality if only I put my mind to it and continue to pursue it with determination. Besides this mental epiphany I also felt more confident about my physique and had much higher energy levels.
The second message I feel is the "Under Construction" subtext. To me this does tie in with the first message a bit, but this indicates that it takes time and there is a "construction" process that needs to occur along the way. I feel this is the hard hitting realism of the motivational picture. For instance when you decide to start something like working out to get in shape, despite all the bogus bull crap on TV about miracle diets, pills or workouts, it will take time to get there. Sometimes it might seem like a huge undertaking, I know for me it felt that way, but you just need to not overwhelm yourself with how far you must go but on how to get there step by step. Say for instance you were going to build a house by yourself, instead of trying to figure out how to put the house together all at once you would focus on how to build the house one element at a time. You would start off making the foundation, then the floor, then one wall at a time and finally a roof to finish it off. Once I realized how to apply this process to my goals they seemed far less insurmountable.I do this by creating incremental short term goals that I can work on each day or week to continually make progress towards the large end goal. To me that is the beauty of this motivational picture, because once we realize this ABSOLUTELY ANYONE can accomplish their goals. It all boils down to continued determination and working on it bit by bit till you achieve your goal. And this process can be applied to anything from losing weight, getting a new job, creating an invention, or even grandiose things like changing the world!! Hope all reading this find it motivating and have a great day. ^_^
Hey everyone, today I decided to talk about a game that has made a huge comeback in my library of games that I play, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Reaper of Souls (RoS) is the expansion for the Diablo 3 (D3) franchise that came out on March 25th 2014 for PC and Mac. There was also a release of RoS for Xbox and PS4 that more recently came out on August 19th 2014. RoS was hugely anticipated due to the fact that it was bringing some very big changes to D3. I myself at the time of the PC release was very excited for these new changes and couldn't wait to try it out.
RoS had some very major changes slated for it's release, most notably the closure of the D3 auction house (AH). Blizzard decided to close both the gold and real money AH's because they felt that it was ruining the way the game was played. Blizzard felt that farming gold to buy an item on the AH was not what they were going for with D3 gameplay. Blizzard thought that the most rewarding and funnest way to get items should be by finding them yourself by killing monsters. To accommodate this change of removing the AH Blizzard made legendary items drop way more frequently and were subject to smart stat rolls. Smart stat rolls would ensure that if you got a legendary drop on your wizard that the vast majority of the time it would roll Int and not something useless like Str or Dex making it much easier and faster to find upgrades. Since they buffed drop rates and gave the items smart stats rolls, when legendary items were identified they became account bound. Items however can still be shared with friends, as long as you were playing in a game together when the item dropped it is tradeable for up to 2 hours afterwards. At first it felt a little bit like it would take forever to gear up since I wouldn't be able to buy missing pieces on the AH. I quickly realized though that this was a myth and that items dropped frequently enough to make it possible to gear fairly quickly. Since I have been playing I've geared up both my Wizard and Witch Doctor with enough gear to play the hardest difficulty Torment VI with several different build specializations.
Along with the removal of the AH they also decided to implement a new character to the game, the Crusader! The Crusader is a champion that uses their great faith and determination in the law to lay waste to the evils that seek to destroy the world. Crusaders have a slew of Holy abilities (along with many others) to help them dispatch the forces of evil. Crusaders are very durable with their plate armor and shields. Crusaders have some specific items such as Crusader shields and large 2h Flails that are used only by their class. The Crusader also has the unique ability to Equip a 2h weapon in 1 hand along with a shield. This combination allows them to be a hard hitting and still keep their high survivability.
In RoS they also did a major overhaul of the Paragon leveling system. In the new Paragon system they first removed the level cap which was really cool because this gives continued incentive to play because no matter what you can always continue making your character better via higher paragon levels. In addition to removing the level cap they also made it so paragon levels were shared on all your characters. This was an excellent change because you now don't feel like if you don't play your highest paragon level character that you are underpowered. This shared paragon levels made it much less detrimental to swap to another character to play because they were still getting the paragon bonuses. Paragon levels now rather than gaining a flat amount of predetermined stats you get points to spend in 4 different tabs with 4 different options in each tab. This allows you to customize how you spend your paragon points per character and per build. You can also reset these points as many times and whenever you want to try a different customizations for your characters.
Another new addition that came with RoS was the addition of Act V to further add to the plot of D3. With Act V there was also a raise in the level cap from 60 to 70. All the current classes in original D3 got a serious make over for all of their abilities to rebalance their power and to make them funner to play. At level 69 all the original classes also got brand new abilities to add to their arsenal. I will give just for a brief summary of the plot so as not to spoil anything for those who have not played the game yet. After you defeat the reincarnation of Diablo in the high Heavens the black soulstone falls down and is recovered by Tyrael. Tyrael, now human, decides to take it upon himself to hide the black soulstone because contained within is still all 7 of the prime evils. Malthael, formerly the angel of wisdom but now the angel of death, ambushes them and steals the black soulstone. Malthael feels that he must use the black soulstone's powers to once and for all destroy the demonic horde and end the eternal conflict between angels and demons. In his madness though this includes killing all humans because they are composed of both demon and angel within their souls.It then falls on the Nephalem to once again stop this evil act from reaching completion.
Besides Act V and the new crusader class, Blizzard added Adventure mode to the game. In adventure mode they have 2 main goals that can be accomplished, bounties and Nephalem Rifts. Bounties are similar to quests in any typical RPG game. You go to any of the 5 acts and Tyrael has 5 bounties for you to complete. They are typically to go clear a certain area of monsters, kill specific champions or rares, cleanse cursed shrines or chests, and always to kill one of the several bosses of the act you are in. Each of these bounties yields a large amount of bonus experience, gold, and sometimes rift stone fragments as a reward. Once you are done with all 5 bounties in the act you talk to Tyrael and he rewards you with a Horadric Cache. Within these Horadric Caches you receive several rift stone fragments, crafting materials, a few bloodstones and a rare chance for specific legendaries which only drop from within caches. Once you collect 5 rift fragments you can open yourself a Nephalem Rift. Nephalem Rifts are hard dungeons that are randomly generated and randomly populated with different monsters and elites that can come from any act of the game. At the end of the rift once you have cleared enough of it to fill the rift meter to 100% one of many different possible Rift Guardian will appear. The Rift Gaurdian is a boss of sorts for this randomly generated dungeon and will drop several items with a greater chance for them being lengendary items and a large amount of bloodstones. More bloodstones are rewarded for the higher the difficulty setting you are playing on.
Along with all this exciting new game play they added in 2 new vendors to the game. There is the Mystic and the bloodstone vendor. The bloodstones I had mentioned in the previous paragraph that are obtainable from bounties and Rift Gaurdians are used to "gamble" at Kadala the bloodstone vendor. Kadala has all the armor slots to choose from and several different weapon and off hand categories. Say you have lots of good legendary items but you still need a good set of legendary gloves, with Kadala you can spend all your bloodstones on gloves trying to get a legendary. This can greatly speed up gearing out your characters because you can focus on the pieces you are still missing. Just remember that you cap out at 500 bloodstones, so make sure to spend them before then. The Mystic is an indispensable new tool that everyone utilizes to perfect their new gear. What the mystic allows for is to take any item and for a certain cost you can pick one single stat on it to reroll to another. Say for instance you get bonus armor and on that particular item you would rather get crit %. You can then pay the cost and reroll that stat for a 2 chances to potentially get what you want. This however can be a double edged sword if you are unlucky as each time you have to reroll the price goes up to continue rerolling. This can sometimes make you run out of gold and crafting mats very quickly so be careful. Also a good thing to know about rerolling is that when you get the 2 options from the reroll instead of picking one of those 2 you may instead select to keep what the items current stat is. This is good because let's say in the earlier example you finally rerolled your crit % on bracers but it rolled to the lowest possible value of 4.5%, you could then continue to roll trying to get the maximum of 6% but if neither of your options that you rerolled were crit % you could continue to select the 4.5% to keep what crit you currently have. Sadly I didn't know this little tidbit when I first started playing RoS and wasted a lot of gold and materials until I figured out otherwise.
That pretty much concludes all the new additions that have been implemented to D3 in the RoS expansion. I now wanted to take a look at some up coming changes that have been in the works for Blizzards first major content update for RoS patch 2.1. Patch 2.1 looks to be very exciting since they will be adding several very big additions to RoS's available content. It has been in the works for a few months now and I am still eagerly anticipating it's arrival, but I think it should be coming out very shortly. I think they waited as long as they did to perfect some of this new content and at the same time to wait for the release of the console additions so that they could release the patch for both PC and console versions at the same time.
Without further ado the first notable change slated for patch 2.1 that I will talk about is Seasons. Think of Seasons as a competition system that takes place over a set amount of time. In each Season as the come you will have to start a new character for that Season. In this competition your success will be tracked via leaderboards. I'm assuming there will be leaderboards for highest overall paragon, highest paragon for the class you are playing, and several other things. In seasons there will also be challenges that are tracked called conquests. Conquests are very difficult achievements that only be able to be accomplished by first 1000 players able to finish them. I'm again assuming these will be tracked via leaderboards for who completes them the quickest and also who completes the most of the available conquests. Also in seasons there will be some exclusive legendaries that will drop during the season that only players involved with that season will be able to get. If power leveling and gearing to compete against other players in an attempt to achieve high rankings on leaderboards sounds like fun Seasons will definitely be the thing for you. Oh and if by chance you don't feel like doing Seasons don't worry those exclusive items will roll over into the normal item pool once the Season is over and a new one begins.
With how they added Nephalem Rifts in RoS they are going to take it one step further by adding Greater Nephalem Rifts in patch 2.1. Greater Nephalem Rifts will be another thing that will be tracked on leaderboards in both Seasons and regular gameplay. What a Greater Nephalem Rift will be is a continuation of a normal Nephalem rift that will chain into higher difficulty for each subsequent one completed. Once you complete a regular Nephalem rift the Rift Gaurdian will drop a greater rift fragment which will allow you to open a Greater Nephalem Rift. The Greater Nephalem Rift will be slightly harder than the regular rift you just finished as well as timed. In order for you to get the fragment to open level 2 of your Greater Nephalem Rift you will need to defeat the current one and do it within the time limit. It will scale like this for as high of a level of Greater Nephalem Rift as you can continue to defeat. The higher the level you get continues to be harder but at the same time will also yield greater and more bountiful rewards. Also the higher and faster you get there the more fame you can possibly achieve by gaining high rankings on the leaderboards for Greater Nephalem Rifts.
Along with these two new game modes (well Greater Rifts being more an addition to an existing game mode) there will be many new items in patch 2.1 along with some upgrades to existing ones to make them more interesting and viable to use. Some of these redo's are on several of the existing class specific sets that were underpowered compared to the others that no one used, as well as multiple legendary items that players never used because they weren't viable. If you currently have a full set for a class that you play that you don't use because it is underpowered hold on to it because the changes for set items will be retro active! Legendary items that are receiving buffs however you will have to go out and find new ones because they won't be retro actively upgraded. Along with this slew of new items and buffed old ones they plan to introduce Legendary Gems. All I know so far about legendary gems is that they will only be able to be socketed into rings and amulets. Along with that these gems will only be dropped in Greater Nephalem Rifts and will be able to be leveled up to greatly improve their power. There will be a set amount of different types of Legendary gems of which you will only be able to have one of each account wide. This means if you have Legendary gem "X" on your wizard it will not drop again for any of your other characters. You can transfer it to other characters but in total you will only be able to have 1 Legendary Gem "X" on your whole account, so make sure to equip them wisely to your characters. And the last new item I would like to mention that could be a very serious upgrade would be the new Hellfire Amulet. Currently there is a Hellfire Ring in game (which sounded like it would get a revamp). The special ability of the Hellfire amulet that will make it worth while is that it can grant you an additional passive ability so that your character at level 70 could potentially have access to 5 passives. I look forward to getting one of these because this could greatly boost your character's overall power.
That is my summation of all that is new in the D3 expansion of RoS and the upcoming patch of 2.1. I personally feel that with the release of RoS that Blizzard did an amazing job of breathing new life into what I felt to be a dying franchise. The original D3 was a very monotonous endless grind that yielded very little results due to horrible drop rates of items. This resulted in the game becoming about grinding for ok items to sell (or if you were super lucky getting one god like item to sell for absurd amounts) so that you could find and buy the gear you needed via the auction house. There was no fun in identifying items because 99.99% of the time they were useless and you never had that excitement of finding a drop on your own that would be an upgrade for your character. Also the way abilities were in original D3 for the big majority of classes there was only one viable build to play the game at high end. RoS brought back the excitement of getting those new drops to upgrade your character as well as making multiple builds for each class viable for doing high end difficulty. This made it possible to be able to play the way you want and customize your character in a variety of ways to play however funnest for you. Not to mention that fact that Blizzard, to accomplish a lot of these changes, took out the the real money AH which was a big income for them. To me this speaks very highly of Blizzard's dedication to make a high quality game that they are willing to remove an asset of the game that makes them additional revenue. I also like the fact that they are continuing to add new and exciting content for patch 2.1, which just further shows their dedication to continue making D3 even better. So if any of you out there are thinking about either picking up the D3 franchise to give it a second try or want to become a new player I would highly recommend D3: RoS as I feel it is a fun experience and a must play in my book!
In the Spring of 2013 I decided to focus solely on workouts and diets to promote additional fat loss until I reached a body fat percent that I was happy with. Over the last couple years I had been playing around with my diet enough to realize that for me there are two modes of dieting. One I can eat in manner to maintain strength and build muscle but I will not lose any body fat on this eating regiment. The other is to eat at a caloric deficit to lose body fat, however when I sustain this type of diet over an extended period of time I begin to lose some of my strength. If I had an outstanding genetic makeup like some people (Arnold Schwarzenegger for example) I could use my maintain diet to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously, however that isn't my body type so I have to use different eating methods to accomplish my goals.
At this point I had first decided to change my diet up. Ever since I had got back on track and had converted over to Intermittent Fasting (IF) I had been getting decent results and was steadily losing weight each week. I decided to add one more element to my diet, Low Carb. My goal was to keep my daily intake of carbs at around 50 grams or less and then on Saturday I could eat my fill of carbs to refill my muscles with glycogen. Glycogen is how carbs are stored as energy in your muscles. Glycogen is where your body pulls from first to burn energy, after you run out of glycogen it has to pull from other sources such as fat. This is why Low Carb is effective, because once you run out of glycogen you have to burn fat. However when doing exercise on a consistent basis it is important to have one or maybe even two days with carbs (preferably on a workout day) so that you aren't constantly exercising without glycogen stores in your muscles. Low Carb is an absolutely excellent way to lose fat but it can also cause muscle loss. If I was working out with depleted glycogen all the time due to the Low Carb it will hasten strength and muscle loss. This muscle loss occurs because of burning additional calories from the workouts and constantly eating at a caloric deficit and having no glycogen stores in your muscles causing your energy production from burning fat cells not to be able to keep up. When you get to this state of being energy starved from your fat not producing enough energy your body will start to "burn" muscle. This effect is the same as what happens to starving people and why their muscles are so atrophied. So to avoid my body losing muscle I made sure to have at least one day to refill my glycogen with carbs.
Along with this additional change up I decided to give HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts a try. I had been doing long 30min - 45min cardio sessions, these were the first exercises I changed over to HIIT style. Instead of running on the treadmill, or whatever machine I was on, for those extended durations I would run fast for 1 minute and then do a slow jog for 1 minute to catch my breath. I would repeat this process until I had done 8 sets of running with jogging at the start and finish for warm up and cooldown. This lowered my cardio routines down to 17 minutes. Not only does it save you a bunch of time, but I still got a superb workout because of how much energy I exerted while doing the fast running. If you want to try this make sure you build up your stamina first before just trying to jump straight into HIIT style cardio. Either do steady slow running or begin with shorter run intervals like 30 seconds running and 90 seconds jogging. I also went to a HIIT style of weight lifting called Hundreds. In hundreds You do 10 sets of 10 reps in quick succession with low weight (enough though that it is still a bit difficult to complete 100 reps) then you follow up with like 3 sets of 5 with a heavier weight.
With these combined efforts of low carb and HIIT workouts I felt that this was a good combination for me in being successful at burning fat. I lost quite a bit of additional fat and lowered my weight even more. With this combination of diet and exercise I got down to as low as 191 lbs. Just remember though if you want to plan out a similar diet and exercise regiment make sure it will be something that is designed for you. You will want to make sure that it will be something catered to your nutritional needs and that the exercise routine will be something your current level of fitness can handle.
This PotM (picture of the month) is all about being determined in achieving our dreams. I decided on this picture because I felt it was a good testament to how I feel sometimes. In my particular case I've been working on losing weight, and improving my strength and health over the past 3 years(since I started in 2011). Occasionally I feel like I'm not making progress but then I remember how far I've come and how much I've improved in my strength and health. I have to take a step back and remember how I am still continuing to make progress (as slow as it may seem at times) and am well on my way towards accomplishing my dreams and if I continue on they will become reality.
I know a lot of people suffer from this dilemma other than myself. It can be numerous factors that cause us to have doubts of being able to reach our dreams and goals. For some people thinking about the sheer time it might take to get to where you want is overwhelming. This can be daunting and make you want to give up because it seems so far away. It is important to have your end goal but if it is something that will take a long time to accomplish remember to set small attainable goals along the way that will help to keep you motivated in continuing towards your dreams and goals. The time it takes to get toward your goal can definitely be daunting at times. If you really sit down and think about it though, whether or not you are struggling towards making your dreams a reality the time will pass by anyway. What better way is there to spend that time than working on accomplishing your dreams or you could let that time pass by anyway fretting about how much time it will take. This was best stated in one of my favorite inspirational quotes, "Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take. Time will pass anyway." by Earl Nightingale.
Another thing that can be a big deterrent for people is if they run into road blocks or failures. Sometimes these setbacks can be a huge hurdle to get over, but more than likely we will run into them somewhere in life whether it's our goals / dreams in being fit and healthy or our success in relationships or success in our careers or any aspect of life where we set goals for ourselves. What matters when we run into these roadblocks is that we pick ourselves back up and shake it off and learn from our mistakes. If we learn from our mistakes we can then also realize that it isn't the end, that we are still alive and there is still time to work towards our dreams. Just because there was a bump in the road doesn't mean our dream has to end.
Hopefully this PotM will provide some motivation if you are having doubts about how long it will take or you are encountering setbacks in your path to your dreams. Just as this picture says there is no expiration on your dreams, as long as you have the will to keep on pressing towards it you can and will accomplish it.
In October 2012 I had another run in with a plateau which was my third encounter with this hindrance. At this point in time I was now down to about 215 lbs from my original starting point of 270 lbs. I had been making excellent progress but yet again ran into an all too familiar roadblock. This particular plateau was my longest to date and was mostly due to my own fault. Since I had been making such good progress I got very lax with my diet and was cheating quite frequently. It all started with a trip to Las Vegas in October and continued on through the holidays into the new year. Granted this is a hard time of the year for anyone to stay true to their diet but I was most definitely not making my best effort. Even after the new year I had let my cheating continue on for quite some time afterward. I also slightly tried to justify my cheating by thinking that it was ok since I had gained some muscle and would burn more calories naturally, which is true but the excess I was eating was far too much for a successful diet. I really wasn't making any headway on my weight loss and had even gained a few pounds.
Another reason my cheating was in excess and that I wasn't keeping very good track of my diet was because at my job, during this time, I was provided a free lunch. I would usually try to mentally keep track of what I was eating but more often than not I'm positive that these meals only added to the excess in my diet since I wasn't 100% sure of the total calories I was consuming. At this point I had realized I needed to stop being lazy and get back to a regimented way of eating that would be easy for me to follow and keep track of my caloric intake. I had to remember that cheating happens (sometimes more frequently than we would like) and even if it does it doesn't mean that my success had ended I merely needed to buckle down and get back on track and my good progress would return.
At this point in time I had been looking into intermittent fasting as an option to help me better organize my eating habits and eating schedule at the time. Intermittent Fasting (IF for short) isn't a diet so much as a way of rescheduling your eating habits. While doing intermittent fasting it is still necessary to count calories and make sure you are getting appropriate amounts of protein, carbs, and fat for your nutritional goals in your particular diet. The basic idea behind IF is that you consolidate your eating to a certain window of time so that you put yourself into a "fasted" state for 16-20 hours per day. Being in a fasted state longer than 8 hours has many benefits such as lowering insulin levels, and increasing leptin and glucagon which all aids in fat burning as well as increases in natural growth hormone and testosterone (in men only) which helps build muscle. IF however isn't a miracle method to lose weight and build muscle but it will aid in weight loss and muscle gain with proper nutrition and exercise. The other benefit to IF is that it can give you more flexibility with your eating schedule and more time to do things other than cook or prepare food 3 or more times a day. There are three methods to go about IF the first is a 16 hour fast with an eight hour eating window. This is probably the most popular method that people use because with the 8 hour eating window you can have two meals that are slightly larger than if you were eating 3 meals a day (still within your caloric limit though). The second is a 20 hour fast with a 4 hour eating window where you have 1 large meal with a few small snacks during your 4 hour window to meat your caloric goal. The last method of IF is where you eat normally 3 meals a day and 1 or 2 days a week (max) you do a full 24 hour fast. So if you had dinner at 7pm on Thursday you wouldn't eat until 7pm Friday.
The method of IF I chose to do is the 20-4 split. This provided me with lots of extra time not having to make breakfast and lunch, and since I was skipping my lunch at work I could more carefully monitor my nutrition at home where I was making everything. The other benefit for me in going to this method/schedule of eating is I like to eat a bunch of food and this provides me the ability to eat one big meal that leaves me feeling full. Eating three small meals a day was very difficult for me because it always felt like they would never fill me up and I would wind up snacking on things sometimes because I didn't feel full. It took me a little while to get used to the new schedule of eating once a day. After about a week I became accustomed to the new schedule, but that first week was a little bit hard when I still got my normal hunger cravings at the times when I used to eat. To get through the first week I made sure to drink lots of water to help keep my stomach full during the day. With this new schedule of eating I was able to get my food intake more under my control and it was a big help in getting back on track to weight loss. If these benefits look like they would help with your particular schedule or eating habits I would recommend looking into IF to see if it would be a good fit for you.
Hearthstone is the one of the newest games being developed by Blizzard. Currently it is still in beta testing, so if you want to play it you need to have a battle.net account and apply to be accepted to the beta test. It seems like it is fairly easy to get into the beta if you are interested. When I applied for beta access to Hearthstone it only took about 2 weeks for me to receive a reply that I was accepted. Hearthstone is a fairly easy game to setup and install since you just download the game right off the battle.net site. It is a small game in size at just under 2gb, but large in gameplay.
Hearthstone is a game based off of their TCG (trading card game) that is set in the universe of their very popular World of Warcraft. The premise is very simple with two people (or 1 person against a computer opponent) that face off against each other with two decks to deal damage to the opponent and reduce their health to 0. Each player selects the type of deck they play based upon 1 of 9 different hero classes. The 9 different classes are druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, warlock, and warrior. Each hero has a different set of abilities and spells that are available for use in their decks as well as a unique ability that each hero can use at any time. Each player starts with 30 health,1 mana, and 30 cards in their deck.
On the first turn depending on whether you go first or second you draw 3 or 4 cards (second turn gets 4) and draw one additional card each turn until the end of the game. You also start off with 1 mana and earn 1 additional mana each subsequent turn up to a maximum of 10. Your mana is used to "pay" the cost of the cards in your hand so that they can be put in play, the more powerful the card the more mana it will cost. As an example say on turn 5 (you will have 5 mana) you could play 1 card with a cost of 5 mana or 2 cards one 2 mana and one 3 mana. Spending your mana like this will deplete your mana to 0 till the end of the turn. At the beginning of turn 6 you will gain 1 additional total mana and it will refill. There are two basic types of cards that use up your mana, minions and spells. Minions come into play and remain in play until the end of the game or they are killed. Minions have a printed value of attack and life and typically can attack once per turn. Minions are good to have because they can attack the enemy hero multiple times as long as they are alive or they can also become the first line of defense to stop incoming physical damage to your hero. Spells can do a large variety of thing such as buff heroes and minions, debuff heroes and minons, deal damage or heal heroes and minions. Damage dealing spells are useful because they can bypass minions that protect your hero and attack them directly.
Depending on what you want to do with your deck and what hero you play you can build decks in numerous ways. There are hundreds of cards to choose from (you don't start off with this many but will accrue more as you play) which make the number of combinations almost endless for deck construction. Just as a few examples you can make decks focused on buffing minions, offensive spells, healing decks, minion swarming, aggro decks (defensive), or control decks (debuffs and counters) and many more. You start off with 9 preset decks for each hero type and as you play and level up the different heroes you get 20 bonus starting cards for each class. After you collect enough cards you can go into your card collection and build your own custom decks for each class. As you play against other people and gain more levels and experience you will occasionally be rewarded with coins that you can use to purchase "packs" of 5 cards to further expand your collection. Along with leveling up you will get quests to accomplish and each quest you complete will reward you with more coins that you can also use to purchase additional packs of cards. If you are impatient you always have the option to spend real money to get packs of cards faster. There is also a disenchanting system to turn extra cards that you don't use into arcane dust. This arcane dust can then be saved up and used to craft specific cards to help progress your growing card collection.
This game to me was a very easy game to pick up and learn. I also liked it because there are so many variations of decks you can construct and that you could encounter playing other people. It can suck you in for hours or you can hop on and and play one game in 15 minutes for a quick bit of casual entertainment. And even though this game is a very quick to pick up the learning curve is almost infinite with how many hundreds of cards there are and the endless possibilities of constructing decks. Even after very many games you can run into someone with a deck style you have never seen before and learn something new. Having this much of a learning curve really helps with keeping the game interesting even well into the "end game". For additional detailed information about Hearthstone please check out this page http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/9882328198.
Overall I found the game to be great fun and think it will have a bright future once it is released. I am not 100% sure but I do believe once it is released it will be free to play. I think that Blizzard will be looking to make money off of the micro transactions from the purchases of additional card packs in game. I also think that Hearthstone would be an excellent candidate for a smartphone or tablet port on the Google Play or iTunes market places. With the ease of use and the mouse only nature of the game play, which will be very easy to use on a touch screen, I think they are setting it up to be an easy crossover into the mobile gaming market.
As a side note to Hearthstone it seems that Blizzard is going to a battle.net launcher system. If you have played any of the newer games from blizzard like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, or WoW you will be familiar with how each of them has it's own laucher that takes care of making sure the game is up to date and launching the game. The new battle.net laucher is an all in one laucher that takes care of all the games that blizzard produces in one consolidated program. If you are familiar with how Steam works it is very similar with the exception that battle.net will only support Blizzard games. Who knows though maybe in the future Blizzard will expand to offer games from 3rd parties as well through their battle.net system to become more like Steam as an online distributor of games.
Geek Fitness Network is a blog that I started to try and help fellow geeks and nerds to have a spot where they can go to learn about how it is still possible for anyone to get fit and in shape. If any of you are like me and enjoy doing physically inactive hobbies such as playing video games, watching anime, watching movies at the theater, watching tv shows, and playing card games or even if you work at a desk job all day you know it makes it more challenging to stay in shape. All of these activities or jobs typically don't aide in helping to keep you fit and make it more challenging but that doesn't mean it can't be done. I've come to learn over the past few years that it is still possible to get back in shape and wanted to be able to share some of my experience in this blog so that others might be able to pick up some useful tips. I also wanted to share my experience so that others could learn from some of my mistakes and might be able to avoid them so that they can travel down the road to fitness faster and safer than I did. Along with my personal experiences I wanted to share general tips about fitness and nutrition, as well as post motivational articles to help people find the drive and motivation to pursue their own fitness goals. Lastly to tie in with the whole geek theme I wanted to be able to post a few articles here and there about geeky things I find interesting.
The MY TRANSFORMATION section is where I will discuss all the different things I learned and mistakes I made along the way during my endeavor to get my health back. This section starts from back in May of 2011 when I decided that I had finally had enough of being unhealthy and was going to get back in shape. Throughout the various articles I post in this section I cover the various stages of how my diet and workouts evolved as well as what I did to motivate myself and how I made several mistakes and what I learned from them.
The FITNESS TIPS section I will cover a wide variety of fitness tips from beginner to advanced and it will also cover all sorts of workouts. I wanted to cover from beginner to advanced so that any reader can find something that might be able to help them no matter what level of fitness they are currently at. The workouts will range from simple workouts you can do from home to serious routines that will help you to build muscle at the gym lifting weights.
The NUTRITION TIPS section will cover a wide variety of things including diets, nutrition science, and general recipes that I like that I think are delicious and healthy. There are so many diets to talk about there should be one that could be tailored to meet anybody's lifestyle and requirements. Nutrition Science will have a bit more advanced articles about nutrition to help better build muscle or lose fat.
The GEEK NIGHTLY NEWS or GNN for short will be my section to talk about all things geeky. It has sub sections for video games, anime/manga, tv/movies, technology and a final section for anything else geeky. Posts here will just be about something I found interesting from my geeky hobbies and wanted to write a small blurb about it.
The MOTIVATIONAL section will be devoted to articles that will hopefully be able to help any readers that visit my page to find motivation and determination to pursue their fitness goals. I also have a section for what I call Picture of the Month. These will be a motivational picture with a short post about how I interpreted it and how I think it will be a motivation to the reader. Lastly there will be a section for success stories of fellow geeks who have made an awesome transformation for themselves.
Around May of 2012 I started to feel a bit off. I noticed that I had a lack of energy. I also was getting hunger cravings all the time that were astonishingly hard to resist. Along with these problems I also noticed that I was having troubles during my workouts as well. During many exercises I was having trouble completing the same number of reps that I had normally been doing, as well as maintaining the same amount of weight with those exercises. At this time I was very perplexed as to what was going on and went back to researching things to try and figure out why I was having these difficulties with my diet and exercise. After much reading I realized I was having trouble because I was overworking myself due to a combination of an inadequate diet and too much exercise for my current fitness level.
At the time I was doing a 1500 calorie per day diet and working out 5 days a week. In my diet I wasn't bothering to track my carbs, protein, or fat intake. After all the reading I did I realized I was being too aggressive with my diet. With my BMR being around 2100 I realized that cutting 600 calories a day along with working out was too much. By cutting this many calories while on a routine workout schedule I was over a long period of time causing myself to be malnourished, thus causing my hunger cravings and muscle fatigue. I was also working out 5 days a week doing 1 muscle groups and 40-60 minutes of cardio. This workout routine was a bit excessive for my diet and fitness level as it aided in causing myself to be overworked and malnourished. When you have too aggressive of a diet and workout like this, eventually the glycogen in your muscles is constantly depleted. Glycogen is the energy our bodies burn first before it pulls from other sources like fat for energy. When you are constantly working out in a state like this it will burn fat but after extended periods of time the fat stores aren't enough to keep up and you start to burn muscle for energy as well. This is what happens when you are slowly starving yourself, which with my combination of diet and workout routine I was doing.
To combat the cause of this fatigue and hunger I decided to change up my diet to v3.0. After much reading about eating correctly I decided to make several changes this go around on my diet. To help make sure I am getting most of the vitamins and minerals I need I decided to start taking a mens multi vitamin and an omega 3 fish oil pill. Since on most diets you are eating less it is an easy way to help make sure you are getting all your vitamins and minerals. Along with adding the vitamins I lowered my caloric deficit from 600 calories to 300 calories. So from my 2100 calorie BMR I was aiming for my daily intake to be at right around 1800 calories instead of the previous 1500. Eating just these 300 more calories made a big difference so that I was not slowly starving myself. I also took a closer look at how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat were important for helping to balance your diet with working out. The biggest thing I noticed was that with all of the working out I was doing I needed to be eating lots more protein. I wanted to lose fat weight, but not muscle. So I used a pretty generic, but popular, method to estimate how much protein a person should eat to help build muscle which is 1 gram of protein for every 1lb you weigh. This would put me needing around 200 grams to help aide in maintaining and building muscle, previously I had only been getting maybe 100 - 150 grams a day. As an easy way to get my additional protein I started buying whey protein. All that whey protein is is a byproduct from the process of making cheese.
This is not my workout but it is actually pretty close to my schedule.
Along with changing my diet I decided to change my workout to v3.0 also. To help combat my overworking and fatigue I decided to cut back my cardio time. Previously I had been doing cardio on all 5 of my workout days, anywhere from 40-60 minutes. I decided to lower my cardio times by half which put it at 20-30 minutes. In all my reading I learned that too long of cardio sessions can cause loss of muscle, which is why professional distance runners look so skinny. I also decided to consolidate my workouts into 4 days a week rather than 5. I wound up doing 3 days with 2 muscle groups and a short cardio session and 1 day with core and a long cardio session. This wound up being roughly the same amount of weight lifting each week but provided me with much shorter cardio sessions and 1 more rest day.
A couple weeks after I made these changes I was getting very positive results. I no longer was getting uncontrollable hunger cravings, since I had stopped slowly starving myself with my diet. In beefing up my diet and cutting back on my workout a little I also began to see a decrease in my muscle fatigue. I was able to slowly get back to my previous amount of weight and reps and start progressing again. Make sure if you are dieting and working out that you plan your diet and workout to work together rather than against each other like mine were.
Here is the new PotM (picture of the month) that I chose for this go around, Bruce Lee and his quote "What is defeat?". Defeat, or failure, is something that we will all experience during our life times and how we respond to it will have a drastic influence on the outcome of our success in the future.
Before I delve completely into the meaning behind this quote from Bruce Lee I wanted to talk a little about the man himself. Bruce Lee was born in Chinatown, San Francisco on 27 November 1940. His parents moved back to China and he was raised in Kowloon until the age of 18. Bruce Lee then moved to America to go to college and try to make it on his own. To help pay his way in America he started teaching martial arts. He initially learned Wing Chun style in China but went on to develop his own style of martial arts known today as Jeet Kun Do. Bruce Lee is well known for such movies as Enter the Dragon, The Big Boss, and Game of Death. Bruce Lee Died on July 20, 1973 shortly after finishing the the film Game of Death. Though Bruce Lee's life was short, as he died at the age of 32, he accomplished many great things for the world of martial arts and the way westerners viewed people of Asian descent. Undoubtedly Bruce Lee knew very well the harsh taste of defeat in both his martial arts and in his personal life, however he chose to use it rather than be dragged down by it. His philosophy and way of life, I believe, go to show the validity of this statement that he has made about "What is Defeat".
The full statement is "What is Defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.". To me this is about how, in our own lives, we view defeat or failures. Many people, in my experience, think that a defeat or a failure is a bad thing and that it means we can not accomplish what we set out to do. This statement is implying that defeat as a bad thing is completely incorrect, which I agree with 100%. If we let it, defeat or failure will surely get us down and make overcoming things harder because we let it affect our determination and mentality. Instead if we approach defeats or failures like Bruce Lee suggests in his quote as education we can use these and learn from them. If we learn from our defeats and failures instead of letting them overwhelm us we come out the other end of the situation as a wiser and stronger individual (whether that is physically or mentally). This is how we can take these negative situations and turn them into positives to move on towards something better.
I truly believe the greatest people throughout history are people who do exactly this and learn from their defeats and failures and go on to overcome them. As an example take Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln went into bankruptcy twice, failed to get elected multiple times, and the first lady he was engaged to died before they were married. Even with all these trials and hardships throughout his life he wound up becoming one the most influential and remembered US Presidents in history.
Defeat or failure can happen for us numerous ways when it comes to learning how to become fit or lose weight, but remember folks just because you experience a defeat or a failure doesn't mean it is the end of things. Stand up, learn from it, and continue to press on towards completing your goals and dreams!! I hope in the future I will continue to learn from my defeats and that you all will too.
In February of 2012 I had run into another of the dreaded plateaus that happens during weight loss. I had been sitting at the same weight of 230 lbs for quite some time with this particular plateau. If you have read my previous post about my first plateau you would know that the cause of that plateau was because my diet was quite lacking in direction and discipline. To overcome that plateau I did get my diet in line and set specific caloric goals that got me back to losing weight. This plateau however had a different culprit that eluded me for a while. I knew my diet was good and that I was at a sufficient caloric deficit, so I was fairly certain that my diet wasn't the cause and went back to researching other possible causes. After reading several articles about how to get over weight loss plateaus I realized that my workouts had become stagnant. I had been using the same amount of weight with the same amount of reps for quite some time and my workouts were not pushing me enough to induce weight loss.
My workout had been the same routine now for several months. I would go to the gym and use the same exercises on the same days (which isn't necessarily bad) with the same amount of weights and the same number of reps. I was in a set routine and my body was too used to that particular workload. When you don't push yourself your body isn't forced to react to overcome the situation and if your body isn't reacting to overcome the situation it means you won't lose fat or build additional muscle.
I started to figure out what I needed to change to swap my workout to v2.0 so that I could overcome this plateau. There are several ways you can change up your workout to make your body work harder. One of the ways you can accomplish increasing your workout intensity is by changing which exercises you are doing. Even if the exercises are ones that workout the same muscle groups, sometimes the slight variation is enough to cause your body to react and start the process of fat loss or muscle growth again. The second way, instead of changing exercises, is to add additional exercises or increase the number of repetitions in your exercises. If you have been using 30 lbs for curls and doing four sets of ten start trying to do four sets of twelve or more if you can handle it. Or if you have been only doing one bicep exercises try doing two or three types of bicep exercises. Obviously this will be more total work and help increase your workout intensity. The third way is to lift heavier weights. Again in the example of the curls if you are currently doing 30 lbs for four sets of 10 instead try doing it with 35 lbs. The last and fourth way to increase your workout intensity is to decrease your rest time between exercises. This will help keep your heart rate up and will cause your cardio vascular system to work harder.
What I decided to do with my workout was to implement a couple of these options to bring up the intensity of my workouts. For starters I changed the types of exercises I was doing. I had predominantly been doing most of my exercises on the weight machines and changed over to doing stuff with free weights. This helped to vary how my muscles were being used. I also added a couple additional exercises to each of my muscle groups. This was a big help in increasing my intensity in my workouts. Lastly I also decided to try to keep my rest periods between workouts shorter. I also decided on a system that I would start for all my new exercises to ensure my intensity would keep increasing in the future as well. On pretty much all of my exercises I would do four sets of eight reps and continue to increase my number of reps until at that specific weight I could do four sets of ten to twelve reps. Once I could achieve this I would use a heavier weight and start back at 4 sets of eight and work my way up again.
All of these small changes added up to big results because I wound up overcoming this plateau and continuing down the path to weight loss and muscle growth. So if you find yourself hitting a plateau either in your weight loss or your muscle growth, remember that your workout might be suffering from stagnation. If your workout is stagnant you will need to revise it to ensure you are keeping the intensity of your workouts high to keep you on track.
Sometime around April of 2012 I had a sudden and devastating injury take place. I was doing my super set routine that I use for my shoulder exercises. I don't use max weight but I do five exercises in a row to complete one set and do a total of 4 sets. On this particular day I was on my fourth and last set and the second from the last exercise I felt a little bit of discomfort and ignored it. I thought to myself "Ehh, I just have one last set then I will be done", and proceeded with my last shoulder exercise. Almost at the end of the set is when it happened I got a sharp pain in what felt like the muscle between my shoulder blade and spine. At first I thought I might have partially torn the muscle the pain was so bad, I came to find out later that it was a pinched a nerve in between some vertebrae in my spine.
This injury was severe enough that I couldn't do anything for the next two weeks because any movement would cause me a great deal of irritation and pain. After two weeks I finally was well enough that I did cardio for a couple weeks until I finished recuperating enough to go back to doing light weights. Grand total it was 4 weeks before I was able to get back to weight lifting with light amounts and 6 weeks before I was able to go back to lifting as heavy as I was before the injury. And this all occurred because I ignored my body's signals saying something wasn't quite right.
In retrospect this really was a minor injury in comparison to what other dangerous things could potentially happen and it also turned out to be a valuable learning experience. Now if anything at all is feeling weird or I don't feel 100% I skip the exercise or even stop my workout completely and wait for the next workout. It is important to make sure and continue to push yourself and try for new personal bests all the time by upping your weights, however not so important to warrant injuring yourself. Injuries are never fun and if you do wind up injuring yourself you will only be setting yourself back from all the progress you have made. So don't be like me and ignore the signals your body gives you, listen to them and take it easy or even stop your workout so you don't injure yourself.
After injuring myself and having to deal with the recovery and setting myself back in my progress I became interested in ways to help myself avoid injuring myself again. At this point I took a good look into how I lift weights to make sure I was using correct form. Having correct form in weight lifting is very important. Good form is important for two reason. The first is that it will help you avoid injury and the second is that with correct form you better exercise the target muscle you are trying to build.
There are many good ways to learn correct form for lifting weights. In particular I went to YouTube and started watching numerous short videos about correct form when doing different weight lifting exercises. Another good way is to get a personal trainer for a couple sessions to help show you the exercises and the correct ways to do them. If you can't afford a trainer you can also ask some of the people at your gym for advice. I know I picked up a few pointers from some of the guys that went to my gym that turned out to be very useful. Once you have learned correct form for weight lifting that also serves as a good indication if the weight you are trying to lift is too much or not. If you can't do the exercise with correct form you are using too much weight for that particular muscle group and you will be increasing your risk of injury. If this is the case make sure to lower your weight until you can do these exercises with correct form. Remember guys pushing yourself to new limits and continuously progressing is important but not at the expense of injuring yourself. So if you are hesitant about your condition for that exercise or workout take it easy or stop for the day.
If you do wind up with the unfortunate injury and it seems fairly serious don't try to tough it out for a long time before you get help. Get yourself in to see a Dr., chiropractor, physical therapist or some other form of a medical professional to get it checked out(depending on the injury). More often than not they can give you some easy to follow directions on how to help yourself heal faster and more completely from an injury, however let's hope that you don't ever get injured in the first place.
