The Beefy Nerd

Like many people I know, I have never been able to stick with a work out, I always do it for a couple of days and get lazy and stop. So I thought to myself, why is it that I can mine 12 hours a day on MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft but I can’t spend 30 minutes a day doing a few push-ups and sit-ups to stay healthy. Why is that? Do people despise physical pain? Actually, I think the answer to that is a no, which brings us to today’s quote.

Today’s Quote

“Motivation is a battle for the heart, not just an appeal to the mind. Passion is always an expression of the soul.”-Patrick Dixon

Some say people are naturally lazy, that we depend on our brains to do all the physical work for us. Some people say our brains made us lazy. I say we just don’t have any motivational ideas. Sure we can come up with cell-phones with internet, put 50,000 songs on a plastic chip to be listened to at any time, we can cure diseases, put the sick on life support, make magical pills and operations for obese people, but we can’t come up with any ideas to motivate ourselves to come up with ideas, or can we?

The leveling up systems of RPG’s always gets people addicted, people just keep wanting that next level. This is why I developed a work-out based on the MMORPG, Runescape’s leveling up system.

It works like this, the workout works with anything that involves sets and reps such as push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, curls, stuff like that. But it doesn’t work with lap stuff like running and swimming because it’s just impractical with those.

Anyways, before I get started on the explanation let me give you the numbers of the level system.

Lvl 1 – 10 – 1
Lvl 2 – 11 – 1
Lvl 3 – 12 – 1
Lvl 4 – 13 – 1
Lvl 5 – 14 – 2
Lvl 6 – 16 – 1
Lvl 7 – 17 – 2
Lvl 8 – 19 – 2
Lvl 9 – 21 – 2
Lvl 10 – 23 – 2
Lvl 11 – 25 – 3
Lvl 12 – 28 – 3
Lvl 13 – 31 – 3
Lvl 14 – 34 – 3
Lvl 15 – 37 – 4
Lvl 16 – 41 – 4
Lvl 17 – 45 – 5
Lvl 18 – 50 – 5
Lvl 19 – 55 – 6
Lvl 20 – 61 – 6
Lvl 21 – 67 – 7
Lvl 22 – 74 – 7
Lvl 23 – 81 – 8
Lvl 24 – 89 – 9
Lvl 25 – 98 – 10
Lvl 26 – 108 – 10
Lvl 27 – 118 – 12
Lvl 28 – 130 – 13
Lvl 29 – 143 – 14
Lvl 30 – 158

How this works is the first time you do this work-out it’s just a test. Just do however many push-ups or sit-ups or whatever you’re doing. Try to match the number up with one of the middle numbers so if you can do 53, go ahead and push yourself to 55 to get to level 19, otherwise you’re stuck at level 18. =) After you do this, congrats, you’re done for the day! Unless of course you want to do something else, for example I do both push-ups and sit-ups with this work-out, which is only about 15-20 minutes worth in the end.

After you’ve figured out what level you are the next day, start out with 10 warm-up reps, next do however many reps that is shown in the third column next to the level you got to the previous day, so if you got to level 19, do 6 reps, take a deep breath, and do the next set (5) and move up the third column. This may seem easy, but by the time you get down to the 1’s you’ll be having some trouble if you honestly pushed yourself to the max level you can do.

After you get this done, you’re finished for the day, and the next day you’ll start with the number in the third column of Level 20 (6), after your 10 warm-ups of course.

With this workout I’ve gone from doing 61 push-ups and 118 sit-ups in about 20 minutes to doing 74 push-ups and 143 sit-ups in the same amount of time in 3-days. This, was actually the only alpha testing stage of the whole thing, now for the beta, I’ll continue doing this, but I would appreciate it if some of you guys tried it out for me, and tell me if it’s working out for you, and whether or not this is motivating you to do more everyday.

If this works out I think it will be a good way for the RPG fans, nerds, and anyone else for that matter to get beefed up without having to force themselves to work-out every day. With this, I think some people will want to advance to the next level, and actually have some way to track their progress without looking into the mirror and hoping that their arms grew 5 inches in diameter overnight.

All bad can be turned into good, you don’t have to make working out seem like a horrible thing to yourself, you can make fun, or a contest/challenge for yourself, and turn it into something good, so that you will be motivated to do this for your health and confidence.

That, as I always say, is today’s quote.

As a side note, if you go beyond level 30, the difference between each level is a multiplication of 1.1. For instance 10 x 1.1 = 11. If you get an improper number, just round it to the nearest whole number. For the third column just find the difference between the level your on, and the next level. So for level 12, 31 – 28 = 3.