Apologies for the delay in update, this was because my schedule has been somewhat erratic lately with moving house and haven't had a proper day off all month til now.
Poker
It's been a very slow start to March results-wise. Lost 10BI two days ago, amazing how many times you can run it into AA preflop, and then finally you get AA in a dream spot and when the money goes in, of course they have AA too.
Feeling really good about my game though despite results - learning and improving everyday. People say in life making mistakes is okay as long as you learn from them but for me wrt poker it feels as though I have to make a mistake 2-3 times before I am able to really implement a meaningful strategy adjustment to prevent it from happening another time. If I make the mistake once, then the second time it'll manifest in a slightly different spot (like a different sizing, or different player type, etc) and it isn't until I've seen enough mutations of the same mistake that my brain learns from it. I don't think this is the case for everyone, some people are likely way better at adjusting. Regardless, playing lots of volume is really the best thing I can be doing it seems since it allows me to make the 2-3 necessary mistakes to improve in a shorter period of time, even at the expense of $.
Volume so far in March has been very low (64 hours) - found it was very difficult during the 10 day fast to concentrate for long periods of time and I've been busy settling into the new place. Going forward though I will look to resume some serious volume. I've now got my standing desk set up which will hopefully help me get through the 9+ hour days.
Diet/Health/Fitness
Last update at the end of last month I was about to embark on a 10 day fast, which I'm happy to say was a success. Initially I'd planned to do 5 days dry (no drinking water), but since I spent a couple days in a row out in the sun running around at immigration, assembling Ikea furniture, basically doing a lot more than I'd hoped, I decided to cut the dry fast short at 3 days and resume drinking water.
Think I lost about 8kg over the 10 days and I'm pleased to say the bubble gut / inflammation is gone. The last few days I've been back in the gym doing some full body stuff to ease back into lifting and avoid a crazy amount of DOMS.
The plan going forward is to continue 'cutting' down some excess bodyfat. I'll be doing an alternating day fasting protocol with a 72 thrown in about once a week. In other words, it'll look something like the following,
Day 1: train, eat lots
Day 2: train, fast
Day 3: train, eat lots
Day 4: rest, fast
Day 5: train, eat A LOT
Day 6: train, fast
Day 7: rest, fast
On the eating days I'll shoot for about 4k cal, 5-6k + sodium load on the day before the 72 hour fast. Every day I'm weighing myself and using scale feedback to determine things like exactly how much I need to be eating on the eating days.
Why?
Why do all of this and not just follow the tried and proven eat at a caloric deficit, lift and do cardio?
I think this is a great question and it reveals a lot about the current scientific progress of the field. We're now learning that diet is no longer so much a question of what to eat, but the much more important question is how often to eat. It's all about manipulating insulin levels, growth hormone levels, and metabolic rate.
There is inf research nowadays showing the comparison between the typical calorie restriction diet and prolonged fasting protocols. Fasting keeps your metabolism high, CR lowers it to the point that you need to constantly cut calories every week to the point where you're going to be extremely low on energy while working out/generally feeling like trash. CR also lowers growth hormone and test production as well as increasing cortisol - basically a calorie restriction protocol is the worst thing possible for your endocrine system and remaining anabolic.
When you're in a fasted state and break that fast, you're way more insulin sensitive which means your body makes better use of the food you're consuming. Additionally, your have a huge increase in GH which massively improves muscle protein synthesis, especially if you train fasted and then eat afterwards.
Anyway, I'm convinced this sort of a protocol is going to be the best way for me to get down super lean and maintain (possibly increase) muscle mass. We'll see how it goes over the next couple months anyway. Once I'm happy with the BFP I'll start a lean bulk on a similar protocol, except doing 72s closer to once a month.
Poker going forward
My focus for the time being is to resume playing a high amount of volume poker-wise as well as increase slightly the amount of study I'm doing. My short term goal is to get back to 500NL as quickly as possible. I could easily be playing 500NL now bankroll-wise, but I decided it would be wise to nit it up a bit in terms of bankroll management on account of losing close to half my savings last week with the crypto crash
Even though I talked at the start of this post about how slowly I seem to learn from mistakes, on the other hand I'm quite pleased because I can genuinely see the process of synthesizing these learning spots and feel as though it's moving at a good pace. When I was playing 5-6 hours a day, I feel as though the learning process was super drawn out and I relied more on coaching sessions to properly digest and synthesize strategy improvements. But now that I'm playing 8+ hours a day and doing daily reviews, I feel like even though I'm making more mistakes than before, my poker improvement metabolism if you will, is running at a much higher rate.
I'm really confident that I'll be shotting 500 again shortly (when I finally manage to string 2-3 winning days together
) which I'm excited for, if for no other reason than the fact that the rake is lower and I'll earn more monthly rakeback. I have no desire or ambition or hunger to rush back up to playing 1knl, I'm very happy just putting one foot in front of the other, playing whatever games I'm rolled for, continually improving, and just putting the hours in. Really enjoying the process.
Until next time!