Connor / Twitch (Old School RuneScape) Streamer at https://xitter.cf/t.co/A87hch4Bm1 / Business inquiries see: [email protected]
Florida, from Maine
Joined March 2018
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I wanted to make a small write-up pertaining to dietary practice, supplementation, exercise methodology, and everything in-between. More specifically, navigating advice and claims one sees online, and weighing their relative significance. My feed is frequently inundated with these types of posts regardless of my interaction with them and how many times I dismiss them away, thus I assume that the same is true for many others.
It is from a bodybuilding background that I approached the fitness space from the very get-go. For many years of my adulthood I was obsessed with all things fitness - absolutely OBSESSED. I was personally entrenched in the lifestyle, I went to school for the subjects, I had mentors with elite qualifications whose shoulders I had the good fortune of standing upon... for all of this, my words should be read with the same skepticism as those of anyone else.
Old-heads in the space always seem to develop this crusty exterior when speaking on these topics, and it comes across as very reductionist. I used to HATE that demeanor; I thought they were dismissive, I thought maybe they'd just lucked their way into high status and didn't possess the intellectual merit to hang. What I came to recognize with age and experience is what many who walk my same path (or really any path of expertise) come to find: they were right! These expert figures are not reductionists, they are not dismissive, they do not think they know better. High expertise necessitates an understanding that there is potential for a level beyond what wisdom they might possess, but with it also comes a deep understanding of what steps truly got them to where they are. They have had these conversations more times than they can count, they have weighed evidence both scientific and anecdotal, they have corresponded with the elites of their field, and in doing so they have grown tired. After a certain amount of time, one begins to recognize that game-changing additions to their protocol begin to dwindle, and those who continually offer them up become nothing short of annoying.
I must impress upon the layman that for diets, exercise selection, volume, intensity, supplementation, drug use, there is absolutely nothing that hasn't been tried long before you're hearing about it. There is no stone left unturned - that is not to say that you shouldn't maintain interest in turning over whatever stones you might come across, but just know that someone has turned it before. Efficacious protocols begin as anecdote and if they have merit they transcend into common practice, and eventually into conventional wisdom. Hard science admittedly does a very poor job of explaining why some of these wisdoms function in practice due to the presence of near infinite confounding variables, yet wisdoms they remain. If a new magic-bullet supplement comes to market, if a secret spectacular rep range is discovered, you will not be hearing about it from MALE_OPTIMIZER_GIGAMAX420 on X. What you will so often find, however, is a nice referral link to buy that magic supplement in the comments below their original post. These posts are always dressed to the nines with advanced vocabulary, infographics, and even proper citations (just don't go reading the bullshit study they're derived from). So ask yourself, no matter how tantalizing the "proof," do I have to spend money on this advice or product? Or is the post simply made by a nerd offering food for thought that they don't intend for anyone to genuinely incorporate.
I reiterate that I don't encourage reductionist philosophy; if you're anything like me, I cannot stop you from turning over every stone you come across, I just request from the bottom of my heart that you not get swept up in sensationalism. From the beginning to the end of whatever fitness journey you embark on, I encourage baby steps of progression. The less you change at any one time, the better understanding you will gain of what the changes you have made are doing for you. Progress is doing more (or less) than you are currently doing, directed towards where you eventually want to end up. That could be as simple as striving for 5,000 steps a day if you currently average 3,000. That could be 140g of a chosen protein with a daily meal instead of 112g. The point is that ideally the change you make is measurable or repeatable in some way, and that you ride that simplistic change until it elicits minimal adaptation, and now you have a new reference point to make a subsequent change. As your knowledge increases you'll develop an understanding of what certain changes will do to you, then you can be a little more gung ho about it, but understand that is an advanced approach.
TLDR: Keep things basic and don't go metaphorically stepping over dollars to pick up cents, don't spend your money on anyone or anything, and if your fitness routine starts to become so intricate that it stresses you out, you very likely need to take a step back.
Content like TFA makes one stop to ponder that OSRS seems to have shifted seamlessly into playing almost like an entirely different MMO at times, all while keeping the same format and running on a proprietary engine. Surely that hasn't been without-victim with respect to some fans, but it must be appreciated in how effectively it's kept things from getting too stale for such a tremendously long time.
I have no comments to make regarding RuneScape Reignited as an idea, as I have no horse in that fight, but I will make an observation.
A large number of people online from outside our sphere heard about RuneScape Reignited in the gaming news cycle, got excited, and thought to themselves:
"Oh shit, RuneScape? I used to play that."
Without having any idea that it was pertaining to RS3. They do not know that OSRS has existed as a project for almost 14 years.
OSRS should probably have been renamed to something a little cleaner around about 2016.
Dude, @Faux_Freedom 's pacemaker must have been putting in work during that summit
Really interesting RuneFest announcements today!
Tough to call the impacts of any individual proposition, as there's still a lot of ambiguity, but suffice to say they're holistically very substantive.
Furthermore, quality irrespective, they're all indicative of a continued level of care and appreciation from developer unto player that we've come to expect and be spoiled by over the years. This level of care and willingness to take risks and break new grounds can be plainly seen to have permeated the entire gaming industry.
Big ups to Jagex, all three (now four) development teams, and all corporate players who have shouldered these risks over the years.
Fun visual for the ~4 people on the timeline who will find it interesting. One month, to the day, of erratic eating and its correspondence with bodyweight over time.
This period, for context, was preceded by just over four months of more measured dieting with much tighter consistency and data ranges.
The first 2 weeks of the plot have me gaining 21 lb, followed by 14 of those being lost in the second half. There's no meaning or lesson behind this post, just a neat vantage of the data from behavior that shouldn't be replicated.
Intentionally meaningful or not, one can still draw a lot of associations based off the displayed relationship. Two that stick out to me are the significance of inflammation & water-retention on weight from large calorie input variance, as well as a noteworthy lag-time between calorie input, directionally, and its corresponding effect on weight in the immediate term.
Fun to measure, would not recommend. Consistency is #1 and I'd always rather see someone remain 50% optimal 100% of the time than 100% optimal 50% of the time.
