Tuesday, October 12, 2010

What should i talk about?

The last couple nights, I've been thinking about getting re-organized.  Somewhat standard cycle for me where I cruise along with most items neatly tied up and things in control.  Then for whatever reason, stuff starts to pile up or get ignored.  Sometimes it's due to being extra busy, sometimes it's due to being extra lazy.  Recently, I've been busier than normal, and also spending a lot of time reading about strength training and nutrition.  Any specific questions or things you'd like me to write about, let me know.

I'll probably transition this blog into more of that, as I said in my last post, just because I no longer have anything interesting to say about poker.  OK, I probably rarely had that much interesting to say about poker before, but now, it would be all about bad beats and coolers, and that's no fun.  As you know, for quite a while now, my volume had been drastically reduced.  But for a few months, I was doing well results wise anyway, albeit at lower stakes than before.  The last few months have been pretty bad results wise, and I honestly haven't done a critical evaluation of my play to determine the ratio of bad luck to bad play.  I'm sure there is both.  I did go through a cursory review of my best sessions and worst sessions over the last few months.  For better or worse, my play in them is about the same.  But there are a ton of coolers (set over set, top 2 vs. set, JJ-KK vs. overpairs), beats, and lost flips in the losing sessions.  Fair enough.  But, there are very few times when I'm coolering other regs in my winning sessions, and even in my winning sessions, I'm not coming from behind or winning many flips.  Just avoiding having it happen to me.  Making pretty good value bets in both winning and losing sessions.  I do notice that I am bet/folding a lot more than I would expect.  I suspect I'm just running into hands, but as I haven't been watching videos or participating in any sort of forums and discussions, I guess it's possible that people are raising a lot thinner or bluff-raising more than they used to.

Bottom line is that poker seems like a chore, and the last several months, I've basically been playing just enough to maintain Iron Man status on Full Tilt.  I think this month, I'm just going to let it lapse.  I'm not winning enough (nor do I expect I should be) to make it worthwhile if poker is just a chore.  At this point, it may be better to just let it go, and then when the urge to play again crops up, play.  Or maybe get the urge to dive back into the real work behind poker.  That will have to come with some time being available to do the hard work off the tables, though.

My fitness journey, on the other hand, is still going well.  I'm closing in on 50 pounds of weight lost this year, I think a lot of it from fat loss.  I've made some pretty sizable strength gains over the last 6 or so months, meaning that I'm hopefully preserving whatever muscle I had.  In the last couple days, I changed up my weightlifting program to a somewhat popular strength-oriented one.  It's known as Madcow, but it's really an adaptation of  a program created by Bill Starr, who if you're into strength training you probably know about.  I'll cover the details of the program as well as some tweaks I made to it for myself in an upcoming post.

Really, the bigger success that I've had has been with my diet.  There's actually room for improvement there, too, but just like I did with poker, I'm balancing my diet with the wants/needs of my family life.  I'm pretty dedicated with my diet, but I will still have a desert with the family after dinner, eat pretty calorie dense meals (but smaller portions) with them, etc.  I'm hanging, virtually, with some guys that are incredibly disciplined, and I'm learning a lot from them and what they do.  If you want to see your abs and/or you want to bulk up and show some muscle, you can't get there just by hitting the gym. 

Leave me some comments about any particular fitness/nutrition topic you're curious about or you think would make a decent post.  Baz left some other good blogs (professionals) in comments from my last post, too.

2 comments:

Bazclef said...

"I'm closing in on 50 pounds of weight lost this year"

Amazing!!! Congrats, you must be very happy with that!

I'd be interested in hearing your new workout schedule and how you progress with it.

Unknown said...

That is amazing Marc! Keep up the good work on the fitness aspect of your life. I am working on losing some weight myself, been working out for a couple months and eating better for a few weeks and the results are definitely there.

Can you extrapolate on some details of your diet?

Keep it up!