2020 Fitness

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Dolesky and Wes Boss. Welcome to Syntax.

This is the 2020 Fitness Show. How many times have we done a fitness show here, Scott? Maybe this is our third or fourth? Number three.

Number three. Yeah, we've done one every year. So this is our third year of Syntax, and this is the third fitness show. Awesome.

So today we're going to be talking about where we're at with fitness. Developer fitness in general is an important topic because we sit hunched over a keyboard all day, and I think one of the ultimate productivity hacks that you can have is being in good shape and having good energy for the work that you do. So that's kind of why we like to do this episode, just kind of explain where we're at. We are sponsored by two awesome companies.

First one is a fitness company, DevLifts. DevLifts has actually sponsored all of our fitness episodes and a bunch of them over the years. They offer a bunch of personal training plans. We'll talk about them partway through the episode.

I'm currently on one. It's awesome. The second one is Sentry, which does all of your error and exception tracking, front end, back end, native application, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, you name it. We'll talk about them partway through the episode as well.

So happy new year, Scott. Happy new year. How are you feeling this new year? You know, let me give you a little bit of an insight to how I'm feeling this new year.

I, when we started getting ready to do this episode here, I, I'm kind of getting over colds. I'm a little congested. I wanted to take like a decongestant. I went to take the decongestant and I also went to put my headphones in.

I put my headphone in my mouth and I put the decongestant in my ear. So that is how I am feeling. No, yeah. Your ears are decongested then?

My ears are decongested. Absolutely. You know, uh, Cordy and I spent a good amount of time really just doing that, you know, spring cleaning, kind of cleaning the house. We got the kitchen table cleaned off, got rid of the Christmas tree, that sort of stuff.

And house feels so dang good that I was able to like, I spent a good 20 minutes. And I say this as a B boy, those of you who don't know, break the answer. I spent a good 20 minutes rolling around on the floor in my living room last night. And so the fact that we have that much room in our living room right now is pretty unheard of for all the toys and Christmas stuff that was going on.

So I'm feeling nice and open and ready to go. I'm just going to get a little bit of a jumpstart, but how are you feeling? I'm feeling great. I, this is obviously the first day back at work for 2020.

I spent a couple of days over the holidays, totally rejigging my office setup because over the past, like three years, I kept adding more and more gear, which is more and more cables. And I just got to a point where there's just too much stuff in my office. So I built a thing called a Lack Rack, which is an Ikea coffee table. And then you take a second top of an Ikea coffee table and you put it underneath.

And it's the exact same width as a rack mount server. So I put everything in there, put wheels on it, you can roll it out. And then I clean up my office and it's looking amazing. Like I can roll around in this place as well.

I actually am looking at getting some kettlebells. I'm actually not looking at them coming today for my office because I'll talk about that in just a bit. But I'm feeling so good that like new year, new me. I got my office all cleaned up.

My desk is looking really good. And I'm just like ready to, ready to charge forward with the year. Cool. Well, that sounds good.

Which is, you know, I think this episode hopefully will be inspiring to those of you who aren't doing anything and those of you who are doing something will be inspired to do more. You know, I think that's really, I'm not necessarily the type to, you know, really think about resolutions being the thing, because honestly, you should be thinking about these things more than once a year. But I do acknowledge that that's like a huge driver for a lot of people. It's this new year.

It's exciting to get going. And I think fitness and health related things, especially, which is why there's that whole joke about, you know, January 1st, the gym is, you know, hyper crowded. And then, you know, February, it's not crowded anymore. So hopefully these are the type of things that you could implement in your life now if you're not doing them or work for.

And hopefully this just inspires you to do a little bit more. So yeah, no shame if you're not doing anything, though. Let's all just work to better ourselves in this new year. Absolutely.

So let's start off with just kind of reflecting on the past year, sort of where we're at health-wise. We've updated a couple of times over the time. So where are you at right now, Scott? Yeah.

So if we're talking about fitness, you know, for those of you who don't know, I had a tailbone injury. So I have this nerve damage in my back, essentially, that goes down my leg. And because of that, it's been not a great thing for me in terms of a lot of the fitness things I've been like to do in the past. I'm a b-boy breakdancer for about 15, 16 years now.

So I like to move a lot. And it's really limited my movement. I haven't been able to do snowboarding as much. So last year, I didn't get to do any snowboarding, which was a really huge bummer.

I went for like a week for one single trip and then paid for it for a while with how much it hurt my tailbone. So that's a huge bummer. But I really tried several different things weightlifting-wise and fitness-wise. I tried different things.

And sometimes I fell off and I didn't lift for, you know, a couple weeks here, a couple weeks there. But pretty much for the entire 2019, I at least had some sort of spent time in the gym at least every month for a little bit, even if I was going through some health issues. Sometimes, you know, I'm trying to do things where I have this nerve pain. And it's like, okay, maybe if I take a month off from the gym, it will help it.

And then, okay, it didn't help it. So let's go back to the gym, you know? I'm an experimenter in those types of ways. So I tried several different lifting platforms or lifting versions.

I even got to go breaking a few times, but not as much as I would like. I did, however, finally find a full body workout, which I'll get into later on in this episode that I've really come to enjoy. I've been doing it throughout the entirety of November and December. So coming into January, I'm still feeling hyped on the progress I'm making here.

So I finally really found a nice little flow that I've worked on. My cardio is non-existent right now because I haven't been doing any sort of cardio things. And a good friend of mine lent me his weight belt, which I've been using to get feedback for while I do things like deadlifts or squats. And it's not like a supporting belt, but it helps you brace your core a little bit more.

Oh, really? And I found it's really helped me understand the form a little bit better that I need. And I've been able to more safely lift heavier weights. And so that to me has been really exciting that I'm able to do that.

Another thing I think that I've been really working towards is that we have an old shed. It was like a very old shed. In fact, I'm going to do a whole before and after when I finish with it. It looks amazing, by the way.

Thank you. It was dank. It was so dank. To say the least.

It was like the grossest looking thing in the entire world. But not a good dank. No. Not a good dank.

No. It was a 1920 shed that people have been using as a shed for 100 years. Cattle in it. Yeah.

Yeah. I really wanted to make that space more enjoyable for us to use. So I just covered the whole thing in several coats of different kinds of paint. It took maybe like seven days of just hard work on there.

And it looks like an actual gym now. It's so cool. It's got these black padded floors. We have a swell rack.

I painted the walls. I painted the ceiling. Motivational quotes put up on the wall. Yeah.

Cut your Arnold. Yeah. We just put a giant TV in there, which is going to be fun. It's an old TV that we had, like our first physio from 15 years ago.

The last set up for 2020 to be my best fitness year yet. Man, I'm TJ-ing on your... We should say, Scott once said he was TJ-ing. And I was like, what does that mean?

It means totally jealous-ing. What you don't know is that I've occasionally said I'm totally TJ-ing. Yeah. You're totally TJ-ing.

I'm totally TJ-ing your little home gym. That looks awesome. You painted it? Thank you.

It was hard work. Do you have photos on your Instagram? Or you will eventually? I'm going to do it eventually because it's not done.

And I do want to do the whole before and after thing when it wasn't finished. But maybe other times episodes live I'll have those photos up because I just hung our lights up yesterday. So it's like getting there. That's so cool.

All right. So my update here is we said on one of the last shows that 2019 was a tough year for both of us. Just having kids, kids not sleeping. I had my workload.

I was probably a little bit overcommitted for that. And unfortunately, that means that gym and probably more nutrition for me takes a bit of a hit, which is a bit of a bummer. So I gained about 12 pounds from where I'd like to be. So I'm working on getting that back down.

And it's incredible the energy difference that you feel just not necessarily just the extra weight, but just not going to the gym and actually going to the gym for even just like you start going for like two weeks again. The energy difference is amazing. And it's funny how I often forget that because it's all about energy for me. It's all about feeling good and cranking out as much work as I can possibly get done in my eight-hour day.

And it's such a life hack being able to be doing exercise a couple times a week. And it translates so well to getting stuff done, writing better code, just having that motivation to finish yourself up. So that's kind of where I'm at right now is trying to work through that. I've been doing a DevLifts plan.

So they're one of our sponsors today. They hooked me up with another plan. I was doing one of their plans for probably about a year and a half, and I really liked it. And then basically once I got back into it last November, I said, like, hey, can you do another plan for me?

Here's where I'm at with – I'll talk about that in the sponsor spot. But basically I've been doing another one with lifting. I'm doing a lot more cardio recently, which I've been enjoying, specifically because when we go to our cottage for the summer, I don't have anything up there that is like a gym or something like that. But what you do have is beautiful running around the lake.

So in the summers, I usually like to go for runs nice and early in the morning. So I've been trying to get my cardio up in preparation for this coming summer to do that and be doing a lot of HIIT high-intensity interval training. Is that what it stands for? That's it.

That's it. Basically, what that is, is you just run like crazy for 90 seconds, and then you cool it down for 30 seconds, and then you go absolutely bonkers for 30 seconds. Usually I'm that person in the gym where you're, like, looking over, like, what's wrong with that guy? Like, they're going way too fast.

You know what I prefer when I'm doing high-intensity interval training would be, there's a fitness blender that has a whole ton of free videos. They do, like, burpees or something where you get to the floor, you jump up in the air, you get to the floor, you jump up in the air, you do mountain climbers, those kind of things. That, to me, is, like, maybe the preferred version of that same thing. But, yeah, I'm never going to end up running for some reason.

Never, ever. Oh, man. All right, so now let's move into what we're doing right now. What does our current workout look like?

Yeah, current workout for me is really interesting. So I've been doing a lot of workouts over time. In fact, I was doing a double-lift one for a little bit. But, you know, the workout they gave me was really great geared towards the things I was doing and breaking.

The problem is my joints have taken a bit of a beating, and I haven't been breaking as much. So I wanted to focus a little bit more on general full-on strength. So I've just been doing this lifting routine. Now, my lifting routine has gone through so many different revisions.

But here is its current state. And I know that some people will not like this. I'm going to just say that up front. But I've been doing this now for three months, and I haven't seen any downsides yet to it.

So, okay, I do a four-day split where I have four different exercises I do. I have a chest and triceps. I have a back and biceps. I have a shoulders.

And I have a leg day. So those are my four days. And within all of those four days, I do – I alternate abs and, like, leg development with a glute ham developer. So my workout days are – my workout schedule is seven days on, zero days off.

So, I mean, people talk about me eating a rest day and all this stuff. But let me tell you, I've been doing athletic anything for my entire life. I was a, you know, sponsored rollerblader, and I was a B-boy for 15 years, and I've been weightlifting for 10 years or something. So I've been doing a lot of stuff for a long time, and I can listen to my body and know when, in fact, it's being overworked or not.

So I do this four-day split. I spend about an hour in the gym, seven days a week. Make sure Courtney gets that time as well if she wants it. But my back – okay, let's start.

So my chest day is incline bench press with dumbbells, then a bench press, then a decline bench press, and then I use the glute ham developer to do sit-ups with holding a weight, and then I do close-group bench press for my triceps. So I do a lot of stuff. It hammers it. Then back day, I do weighted pull-ups.

Then I do deadlifts. Then I do bench-supported rows. And then I use the glute ham developer to do glute ham raises, then concentration curls, and then reverse concentration curls. So, again, my workouts are pretty stacked here.

Shoulders, I do overhead press, lateral raise, close-group bench press, and then sit-ups. And then, let's see, what's my leg day? I do squats, deadlifts, calf raises, glute ham raises, concentration curls, and reverse curls. So, like I said, these are pretty loaded, and I've been doing this now for, like I said, three months, and you would think that it would, like, be a little bit overworked, but to be honest, I'm not.

I'm making progress. Every single workout, I'm adding 2.5 to all my lifts, and I'm having, like, really good workouts. So this is what it looks like for me, but I would say I'm fairly advanced in this stuff in terms of how long I've been doing it and being able to understand my body. And I haven't gotten injured at all, which is a big plus for me.

That's great. Are you still using the Heavyset app to track if you're progressing in your weights? Yes, I'm using an app called Heavyset for iOS. It's not the most intuitive app.

You kind of have to set some stuff up yourself, but the benefits are really outweighed that for me. Well, I posted on Instagram. I'll post it on Twitter. It's funny because this chart looks a lot like what progress really looks like in life.

It goes up and down and up and up and up and up, whatever. But the average is, it's like a steady progression up. So even if one workout from the next, I'm not moving as much weight, I'm still growing every single workout. One of the things I really love about this app is it tells you your total volume.

So, like, I can look and see that. Let's see. Yesterday for my workout, I moved a total of 21,500 pounds between all of my exercise, whether that's deadlift, fall-ups, deadlift, whatever. And so I can look at that and see, okay, I'm doing about the same amount of work every single workout, whether it's a back day or chest day, whatever.

And I can fill in with volume or whatever where I need it to see that progression upwards. Cool. That's really neat. So I've been going three days a week, which is just about as much as I can handle being away from – like, the gym is pretty close.

Like, a 10-minute walk, which is great. Yeah. But I can't – My gym is about a 10-second walk. DJing.

Yeah. So I go three days a week. I go once at night. I sort of have a trade-off with my wife.

And then twice during the day. So after I record this podcast, I'll – like, Mondays for me, I usually, like, wake up. For the two hours before we record this podcast, I do emails and sort of just, like, tidy up stuff that needs to be prepped for the week. And then we record this podcast.

Then I go to the gym. And then I'll come back and do some more sort of tidying up. And then the rest of the week is sort of just, like, heads down, doing, like, heavy, heavy codes. So I try to go once on Monday.

And then I'll try to go once on Wednesday. And then again, on Thursday. Sometimes we can sneak it in before a date night, which is my favorite because there's nothing better than, like, just healing it at the gym and then going and having, like, a nice beer and a nice steak at night. Oh, yeah.

Apparently, according to DevLifts, guys, apparently that is one of the best times to have a beer as well is your body's still burning stuff. So I like that. Basically, one day it's chest and back. It's got a bunch of different exercises through that.

And then legs and chest on the second day. And then legs and back on that. I've sort of neglected back in the past. Not in the last couple of years.

But, like, when I was young, I was just more about chest and arms, right? Yeah. And, like, just, like, I had my daughter on my shoulders for, like, half an hour the other day. We were walking home from something.

And, like, the next day, I was just the hugest headache ever. And I was like, oh, man, I, like, I don't know if I pinch something or if I just need a stronger back. But I was like, I need to make sure that I'm not, like, this old guy that has back problems, right? Are you doing any sort of, like, pull-up motion?

Like, maybe, like, what's that machine where you get pulled down? Yeah, this one. Yeah, where the straight bar is above you and you pull down. Is that good for that type of thing?

Oh, yeah, yeah. And especially if when you're doing it, you're, like, focusing on feeling it in your back. They talk a lot about, this is a little, like, a little small thing where they talk about this mind-muscle connection that when you're doing a specific exercise. Specifically, like, one like that.

You could do that exercise and feel it all in your arms and your chest, right? And you're just, like, pulling it like that. But that exercise, your back is the muscle that should be doing that exercise. And your body is often wanting to substitute the weaker muscle with, like, a stronger muscle.

So if your chest and arms are stronger, it's going to try to use those more than your part of your back that's weak. So, like, if you really think about those back muscles and pulling those in when you're pulling it down, and that goes for any exercise. It makes it so much better for that specific growth. So, yeah, I mean, if you want back stuff, that, Rose, whatever that you're doing, I'm sure it does.

Let's get you covered. Yeah, no, that's helpful. Actually, I'm going to right after we record this podcast, and it's back day. So I'm going to make sure.

Like, what I've been doing is, like, trying to go super light when I'm learning a new exercise, just to make sure that I have the form and I can feel it. Because I know you can either hurt yourself or just be wasting back day because you're, like you said, you're. compensating with other ones so that's a good good one yeah that that uh going like not allowing your ego to step in like it's too easy for me to look at my app and be like well i did this amount last year so i should be able to do this like that's not really what it's about maybe like specifically yesterday i was doing rows and uh i was doing it at a i do these like bench supported rows because it's like less hard on your back to hold yourself in that position and i was doing like 125 or something i was doing it and like the last one it felt fine but i felt like i was sacrificing my form so i dropped 10 pounds and i did the next one and i just did it really concentrating on my form and it's just as good i mean like don't let that ego yeah and i'm not saying you are but like no no tips for everyone listening that's such a hard thing is to not let your ego jump in there and be like well i'm gonna do this you know because it's just something that we're innately want to do totally totally another thing that the guys gave me that i love they call them cardio finishers i call them blasters because um they're just like like you want to leave the gym just like toast you want to you want to leave the gym empty and sometimes when you are lifting weights and you have like sets in between like you feel like tired but you don't feel like you know so at the very end after i do all my lifting weights uh they gave me like these eight different blasters um the one my favorite one is rowing i didn't even know i enjoyed rowing so good it's 500 meters row 500 meters as fast as possible and you aim for under two minutes and i'm just like you get into it like two minutes i bet i could do a minute and a half and then and then once you get like close to two minutes i'm dying and it's like just like panting like crazy and i could barely do it and you can see on the screen like your pace and you keep going over two minutes and under two minutes and oh i love that because it's just two minutes at the end just do it on your way out just do it real quick and uh just like those little little cardio hitters blasters are i really enjoy those if you're not like the most athletic person in the world or just anybody you can still do rowing and let me tell you if you replace your treadmill or your um what's that one thing where you got your arms going the elliptical if you replace the treadmill or elliptical with rowing oh my gosh like that like watch a couple of videos on rowing form because the form is important but once you do rowing at all it will absolutely kill you and it's not like like the cool thing about rowing is that like really super advanced people can get their butts kicked by the rower and people who are basic can still get that same butt kick from the rower and you can grow with it so much there's like one piece of equipment that i would splurge on it would be a really dope rower a buddy of mine just got uh like 200 bucks he said he got one from china on black friday whoa and he said he's like it's not great but like it does the job and it was like i'm sure you can find one like on the local classifies as well yeah i feel like you don't want to totally invest in something like that just to see if you like it or not and uh surprisingly affordable right and i know 200 bucks is not cheap but i don't have the room for one is the problem yeah they're big right and you can't just like fold them away like a treadmill either well maybe you can actually you can you can hold them up it wouldn't fit in our gym with all the stuff we have in there right now so that would be a huge thing you need a second level level up scott uh i think that's oh that's the other thing i'm trying to focus on right now is figure out like what can i do when i'm stuck on something in my office so i just don't know i have like a fairly large office maybe i don't know 25 feet by 11 feet or so and the ceilings are decent it's like a third floor house it's not like like 10 foot ceilings but i think it's high enough to do some like just like kettlebell workouts some um some swings and stuff like that so i've ordered some they should be coming any minute now actually just look at the door and i'm gonna try that because sometimes when i'm stuck on a programming problem instead of like just like going to youtube or whatever to just take my mind off of for a second like maybe i should try doing some sort of exercise in between so that's kind of what i'm trying right now that's a good thing you know a lot of people they don't know when they can fit in an exercise or whatever even just like going for a walk at work right like if you are stuck on something go for a walk around the block that gets your blood moving it's way better than whatever you're going to be doing sitting at your desk we used to work at a pretty big office building my boss ben and i and we would just we not only would we do laps outside around the building but on good days what we would do is we would do a lap around the first floor and then we'd walk up the stairs and do a lap around the second floor and walk up the stairs and like it wouldn't be like and we would just chat and have a conversation it would be more like just you know buddies hanging out than getting movement but at the end of the day you're still burning calories doing that you're moving you're doing something that's better than just sitting in your chair and that's like a low-hanging fruit to move when you're stuck at a programming issue because we have all that we all know those those times when you're just butting your head against something and you're not going to necessarily solve that issue just sitting there butting your head against it still totally totally so i'm so excited about like do you use kettlebells at all i just got into them in the last like month or so just there's just like new room at our gym and they just got a bunch of them in there so i was like watching some youtube videos on how to do swings and they seem very versatile so i thought 20 30 bucks might as well try it they are versatile yeah we have a 35 pound kettlebell uh that was gifted to me from uh level of tutorials developer eric he's living in denver for a little bit he bought this kettlebell and he was like flying out to go live somewhere else he's like how the heck am i gonna get this kettlebell anywhere i don't have anything here i'm not driving so he just uh he gave it to us for super cheap so we got to do that do the swings the ones where it's between your leg and you're doing it and yeah the 35 pounder kicks my butt i don't do a ton of stuff with it anymore but i do fairly often it's in the gym we have it there just whenever you're feeling like moving the good thing about those exercises your whole body's moving it really kicks your butt i always saw people doing like the swings i was like come on like what does that do and then i did it and i was like oh it feels pretty good and the next day my butt hurt so much yeah yeah and so it was uh it's a good one uh all right let's take a break for one of our sponsors this one is devlifts which is totally related to the fitness episode so devlifts is out there to refactor your body so it's jc and thad jc is a developer and obviously super into fitness and thad is actual personal trainer and they put together a couple different plans and things they can sign up for to get in shape and it's totally targeted at developers in the lifestyle that we live and sort of the community that we like to have around that thing so there are two things that devlifts currently has there is fit.start which is has a couple different options basically what i like about devlifts is that you you talk to them you fill out the survey and you talk about like where are you at right now what do you want to achieve you want to get lean do you want to uh remove body weight you want to get strong and then you also talk to them about eating habits can you go to the gym do you want to do it at home do you travel a lot and they'll compile all that information into um just a set of exercises and a nutrition plan that will help you out and that's really cool because uh that's exactly what i want as a developer i don't want a personal trainer i don't want a thousand different youtube videos i just want someone to take all of the aspects of my life into account and tell me what to do and then i can follow that i can follow the instructions once i have that so uh that's what devlifts will give you they've got fit.start you can you can have a few options lean body weight and strong the workouts are delivered to you via email each month and you also get access to the slack community so you can ask questions as they're like i specifically pinged jcs and hey i ever do kettlebells like what's this all about and he kind of gave me some some of his thoughts and things that you can do with them some stuff that i hadn't even thought of which is cool um then they also have uh their premium option which is a custom tailored options where you get your workouts and nutrition advice after answering the questionnaire they'll also check in with you each week via slack make sure see how it's going if you need to tailor it a little bit different here and there so pretty cool i recommend it they are offering 50 off their plans if you want fit.start you can use the coupon code syntax and if you want the premium offering uh use the coupon code tasty and each of those will give you 50 off go to devlifts.io to check it out and i'm sure they'll answer any questions that you possibly have before you want to sign up and check it out if you want to get healthy and fit and focused on on your fitness this year thanks so much to deadlifts for sponsoring thank you yeah i would think i want to point out before i guess we go any further in this episode is those of you who are maybe newer to syntax you might be listening to this and you might be thinking okay this is great we're getting these stories but i don't know a whole lot about any of this stuff maybe i've never done anything we have two other fitness episodes like we mentioned at the get-go on the site we had the fitness one the very first fitness one and we did a follow-up last year so if you want to learn a little bit more about some of what we uh how we feel about some of this stuff put on the other episodes the past two episodes and you'll learn a little bit more about maybe some beginner things that you could do or ways that you can get started or whatever and it's fun you'll also notice that devlifts have sponsored those episodes as well uh they've been a long-time supporter of syntax so again thank you devlifts for supporting us for this long and uh we really appreciate what you're doing yes so let's get into nutrition which i think is just as important as or maybe even more important than uh and then working out so uh what you eat how much you eat those types of things really affect it so where you at right now with your nutrition yeah so one thing i'd like to say is that like a lot of people make it really complicated but at the end of the day we're talking calories in versus calories out it's just simple physics right you're probably gonna you know if you expel a bunch of calories and you income a bunch of calories the end result is going to be what happens to your body so that said yeah i'm not really doing anything that crazy courtney makes really good meals um yeah she she makes a really good food that is like what she gets a lot of um i wish i knew it was like skinny taste which is like sounds like it's not gonna be good um i think it's a vlog a lot of the stuff on here is like really good recipes and they're not like i don't just want to put these people down because i'm totally into this but like uh they're not like vegan vegetarian stuff like it's actually a good recipe they're just made using nice ingredients it's stuff that's really good for you and so you know i'm lucky that uh she's really into making really nice food like this and so because of that we we eat pretty pretty nice here we eat pretty clean with the addition of the new baby it has been a little bit difficult to also make food all the time even we're both feeling worked not just her courtie's feeling worked i'm feeling worked yeah neither of us want to make anything and then we end up ordering a pizza so you know that that happens and i think this year it's happened more than any other time but at the end of the day i'm expelling so much energy via my workouts via breaking whatever that i kind of need a lot of food i need to eat a lot of stuff so for the most part i don't think too much about nutrition i have a set of recipes that i make that are all pretty good courtney has a bunch of stuff that she makes and we just sort of go through the schedule and make it uh so good dinners yeah that's one um salads for lunch are really super easy here's what you do you go to costco you buy a couple bags of the big salads and then you buy rotisserie chicken you rip up that rotisserie chicken you put it into a bag every single day for lunch you have a salad with croutons and chicken chicken and uh that's five days of lunches that's five days you can have a little little extra there but that's like really super easy low-hanging fruit let me tell you i don't crave any of that so i occasionally will go out and get panda express because you know kind of that panda but uh you regret it afterwards right um yeah personally i don't do a lot of fast food and maybe that helps i'm working at home right i can walk to the kitchen and get that salad rather than being like a bunch of buddies being like oh where do you want to go out to lunch totally oh man that's that's hard because that was a huge thing for me when i worked in an office when i worked in office it was always me sending panda gifts to my co-worker so that we could go to panda express we just it's a little bit easier for me i recognize that but at the end of the day it's easy to make those salads because you just buy those big bags buy those pre-made things and you have to really do a lot yourself as far as like dessert and stuff like that i've never been a sweets person ever never really been a sweets person although we got into a routine when brooklyn was born that courtney and i were just so wiped at the end of the day we were like let's have some ice cream and that was like let's have some ice cream became an everyday let's have some ice cream and like you don't eat ice cream every day like i'm just as good with like a couple of pieces of uh chocolate with peanut butter or something like peanut butter cups i'm good with a couple of that i don't need a whole thing of ice cream every day and so for me it was recognizing that maybe that's a little bit of a slippery slope to just start like relying on some of that stuff after dinner and so uh i do that i also do intermittent fasting but i don't do it i don't do hardcore and intermittent fasting for me isn't like just not eating it's basically just cutting out eating before 10 o'clock and it's cutting out eating after dinner so i don't have any snacks after dinner i eat dinner i have a little dessert and then i just drink water uh or tea or have a beer or something instead of having like snacks so that's it for me it's just like not a lot of extra stuff but this wasn't a major life change for me to get here this has just been like a progression yeah every year changing a little bit differently so my advice if you want to be eating a little bit better doing these things just to make small changes here or there right make a small change uh don't make a big change make a small change and stick to it then make another small change and stick to it and just go from there so that's really what i'm doing uh for my nutrition again i'm not thinking too much i'm doing so much work but what are you doing for your nutrition yeah so i'm uh i think for me the biggest thing with nutrition is just making sure that i don't eat more than i should because like you we don't really eat bad stuff uh we're lucky that all the kids so far are great eaters you can pretty much give them anything you don't have like i know a lot of my friends have to cook like two meals like one for their kids and then one for themselves we kind of gotta do that landon's not a great eater yeah no that's i'm so glad that our kids like they're not amazing like some days like ew no i don't like that and stuff like that but we never have to cook two meals basically just give them what what we're eating and we don't like i don't have any tips on how to make your kids not picky eaters because i think we just got lucky um we're crossing our fingers for the third one right now because we it's been going well we'll see about brooklyn but like landon it's so funny because like it's not necessarily that he doesn't like the things i just really want to try it like yesterday i made like teriyaki noodles and all this stuff he loves noodles and he's gonna like it's teriyaki it's kind of sugary it's kind of whatever and he's just like i don't like it and i'm just like you didn't even try it you like noodles these are salty sugary noodles just give him a try he's like i don't want to try it i'm like oh come on we uh i don't know if you're familiar with daniel tiger daniel tiger and there's an episode where it's like you gotta try new foods because they might taste good and so we sing that to him all the time and he's just like i don't want to oh man yeah that's i think i'm actually my only tip i know i don't have tips but i always have tips is that like we never stress our kids out around eating we just basically put it in front of them and we also did what's called baby-led weaning where you just as soon as you get six months old you start giving them just a piece of food and you don't like look at them you don't tell them to sit down and eat you just kind of like put it in front of them and sometimes they don't eat anything but when they're hungry they will actually eat it i think that mixed with just being lucky as has worked out so anyways um what i do to whenever i feel like i'm probably overeating or eating too much or eating some of the wrong stuff is just like macro tracking so usually for about a month i'll try to track every meal that i'm having and put it into an app and then i find like after a month a month and a half you sort of get in tune with like how much you can eat of each meal and and that and then i stop doing that and then uh you're sort of in tune with with how much you're supposed to be eating i am still going low carb um it definitely makes me feel i was the first episode we did i did was doing full-on keto which i really liked it's just a bit hard with family to do that low carb is the way to go yeah that's great we don't need a whole lot of bread and pasta and stuff like that anyways at our house most of our meals are high on veggies so russell sprouts salad chickpeas roasted chickpeas are one of our favorite lately uh green beans things like that big fan of that and then some sort of meat so we usually don't do like a like when i grew up it was potato or pasta and then along with the other one so we generally don't do a whole lot of pasta things like that we replace a lot of stuff with cauliflower lately and i thought i hate it i thought i would be like no thank you like cauliflower rice i don't want cauliflower rice or uh cauliflower gnocchi or something but i don't know if that's actually cauliflower whatever but i'm surprised at some of these substitutions that you can get at trader joe's or wherever that are just really good yeah the cauliflower is a bit hard for me to get on board but if you dress it up enough or you cook it properly then i can get on board but like i've certainly been served cauliflower rice before and i couldn't put it down just because um but that said uh for me it's like i absolutely love food i love cooking and things like that and last episode i said i was getting super into like fermentation and i'm still super into fermentation and crunchy sour spicy those are my players i don't like sweet i don't need a whole lot of sweets or like you said candy things like that jar i went to drop my daughter off at school and one of her friends is korean so naturally i'm asking her like hey like do you make kimchi and she's like my mom makes the best kimchi ever so she can eat this like big thing of stinky kimchi and oh love kimchi i could eat it all day long it's for those who don't know it's fermented cabbage that's also kind of a bit spicy so it's crunchy and spicy it's got a fermented flavor on it it's probably one of my favorite toppings ever well here beer is probably my downfall that's probably the reason why i'm a couple pounds overweight right now it's just like nothing better than especially with having kids you're stressed out from a day nothing better than having a beer with my wife at the end of the day but that's something i'm working to cut out over the next couple months just as i'm trying to drop because beer especially like some of these like super heavy ipas things like that those things are loaded with carbs and calories so do you know how i cut that out for me how michelope light i just stopped keeping it in the house yeah that's that's it for me that's the problem is that we have a liquor store two blocks away but it's still two blocks i gotta go walk right i could walk two blocks to the liquor store but at the end of the day if i have a beer and i would go to the grocery store and i pick up a six pack and just have it in the fridge i'm gonna drink it i'm gonna have one i'm gonna have two maybe at the evening i'm gonna drink them if they're there uh yeah and if they're not there i'm not gonna be like you know what it's seven o'clock 7 30 8 30 whatever i just put the kids down let me go walk two blocks a little i'm gonna be like i'm too tired to go to the liquor store so just not having the house has been a big thing for me i've switched mine over to kombucha at night instead um because i just like a i just like a bit of like a fizzy drink and that's not a pop and i i never would buy a lot of kombucha because it's so expensive at the store for some reason yeah it's like rotten tea why is it so expensive but i'm just like whatever the beer is expensive as well i'm just gonna buy a bunch of kombucha and replace that as my like having something at night so i'm excited to see how that pans out yeah that's good we were doing that too in fact when courtney was pregnant to you know i didn't want to drink to you know make her feel left out although that did change at some point uh you know we would both drink kombucha out of wine glasses you put in a wine glass it's a little bit more like having a nightcap yeah it's good stuff um so speaking of tracking macros what about tracking errors guys oh year new west wow big one big one right there yeah let's talk about our sponsor today which is century now century at century.io is a longtime sponsor of us over here at syntax and it's a great way to track those bugs you can track those bugs all day long you can track them with a release you can track them with a specific user you can do all sorts of maybe one user is having this very specific issue you can attach that user id to that issue and then you can go look up and see all right what's so special about this particular user's data that's causing this issue or what could possibly be the problem here that's my really my favorite thing about century is that allows you to understand that the errors that your application is giving off and allows you to understand when and how you fix them so you're gonna want to try century again century at century.io use the coupon code tasty treat all lowercase all one word you're gonna get two months for free again this is one of those tools that i cannot see my my business even functioning without just because it is so dang important to understand what the user is seeing on your application it's funny people message me all the time they're like i'm sure you saw this in your century but i'm experiencing this i'm like yeah i'm on it i'm working on it so again hello century thank you so much for sponsoring okay so let's get into the supplement side of things here this is going to be easy for me because in the past i've taken supplements i was doing like i don't want to seem like these were like no-dos or something like that these were just like divvied out caffeine so like 100 milligrams of caffeine that you could have instead of a coffee i was thinking that was better because you were saving on calories and it was cheaper and all this that was cheaper than coffee i have long since cut that out and i've since moved to coffee i know coffee has a lot of benefits i drink tea in the afternoon now i was drinking tea a lot i have been brewing a lot of my own cold brew for the caffeine but to be honest i think uh i'm getting a little too hot and heavy a little too much with the cold brew here it's a little too much so i'm od on that calf which is like a you know legitimate concern so i've been trying to pull back a little bit i have like a one coffee a day limit now i have coffee in the morning and then in the afternoon i'll have like a green tea or white tea something a little bit less than the caffeine i have a really great app for ios um because i'm really into tracking i'm just so into tracking and this is what's it called caffeine app well appropriately named but the cool thing about whopping 230 milligrams of caffeine in it woof and this app will show you the lifespan of that caffeine in your body and a nice little chart that shows how like sort of like the half like how the caffeine depreciates over the course of a day so you can see that okay at 3 p.m today i'll still have 110 milligrams of caffeine in my body because of that cold brew that i had at nine o'clock uh which means uh what the cool thing is they have like a little bar that says like this is the amount of caffeine that you can have in your body and still sleep comfortably so you can like plan your caffeine throughout the day to make sure you're below that bar so caffeine for me is really the only supplement that i'm doing other than maybe a probiotic i'm doing probiotic because i i've been on a yeah there's a whole whole fiasco with me getting strep throat four times per row i've been on antibiotics so much in the past two years that like my stomach is just goofed up in terms of the biology there so i understand the pros and cons and all of the stuff about probiotics and if they actually work i'm taking a specific one and i am drowning myself in probiotics to try to get my stomach i'm also doing kefir which i mentioned before as well as just other fermented things to get that sort of bacteria out to where it needs to be and then i take a few medications for my nerve damage so because of that i've cut out all supplements other than a high quality protein for our workouts um i was taking a few supplements and you remember in the past oh i guess i am taking supplements i'm acting like i'm not taking anything i'm taking fish oil um yeah and i'm taking a psyllium husk it's a fiber supplement but that's it that's nothing really major great i am taking a few things and experimenting with a few things as well so um the one that i always take is a multivitamin i was taking the vita gym ones for a while but i switched i listened to kevin rose podcast and he recommended these ones called mega food men's one a day and they're basically just a multivitamin but they come from actual organic natural sources so like i don't know how they get a carrot into the vitamin but oh cool they're great so you can take them on an empty stomach you don't get that kind of feeling and the actual like the numbers on the side of the bottle are higher than most of the stuff that you find out like a cvs or something so big fan of that one again it's called the mega food men's one a day i'll put link in the show note for that yeah i've been really enjoying that one i've also been taking magnesium um at a different point don't take them together um apparently if you take magnesium with a multivitamin they will cancel each other out uh so i've been taking that to try to get better sleep like i sleep a lot but i feel like i don't get great sleep sometimes and the magnesium i've tried a whole bunch of things and magnesium is the one that has actually been helping me take fish oil every day it really worked for me too magnesium yeah yeah i was a big fan of that i have a question about this multivitamin before you yeah go for it uh is this the 78 for 180 tablets one of that yikes i mean uh i paid 60 us okay for 72 tablets but yeah it's not not cheap okay let's make sure that we're on the right one that's that spicy yeah 83 cents although vitamins yeah it's 83 cents a day that's probably 60 cents american a day let's like add up right like if your your vitamins is 50 a month that does that i don't know shoot i didn't even look at that now i'm uh now i'm looking at it i don't know i think it's worth it for me at least just to do it yeah i think i ordered the smaller count 72 but i think if i reorder now i'll just get the much bigger one because okay i just want to make sure yeah uh what else so after i said i was like having trouble getting good sleep um on one of the podcasts a bunch of people reached out and said these work for me um so i tried lion's mane which is a mushroom powder a bunch of people recommended that for a full month and nothing nothing didn't feel any different so that was a waste of money yeah i didn't either also tried ashwagandha yeah i like yeah yeah yeah i'm on an ssnri which is for my tailbone and um that is also like an antidepressants thing so uh what's funny is that it works really super well with ashwagandha when i take an ashwagandha it feels way different than it did when i took one like a year ago before before i was on this for my tailbone let me tell you man yeah ashwagandha can really get me in the zone yeah so i've only been doing it for about three weeks so far and i haven't noticed anything but i'm gonna finish the bottle yeah and see see what we have and then the other one that people recommend is i can't pronounce this shiljot yeah no idea what that is yeah some it's a blackish brown powder excluded from high mountain rocks if it is excluded i don't know if i'm taking it uh i don't know it's a black rock um i haven't excreted i haven't uh oh my god that's amazing um i don't i ordered it on amazon and it was expired when it came so i have to send it back so i haven't haven't tried this one just yet plus also like i don't know how much i trust buying something like this on amazon it seems like it already seems kind of hokey yeah wild wild west and like i'm kind of scared that you would get like fake stuff on amazon so like i think i need to find like a local health food store that actually knows the stuff that i can talk to them about it yeah that's what i buy most of it at whole foods or like a local place you know at least it's it's at least like tested or quality with the place i go to because i in the past i have experimented a lot with supplements the place i always go to validate supplement ideas is examine.com because what you can do is search for anything and what they do is they tell you a little matrix here of the level of evidence of the outcome the magnitude of effect consistency and results and some notes for each uh different um thing that it says it's supposed to do like is this thing supposed to reduce your blood pressure it'll show you the level of evidence how much it reduces your blood pressure and if that study is actually legit and they'll give you information about the toxicology of it and it's very great i absolutely love this website and i always check this for everything it's got a huge i just went for shield chat yeah i don't know i just there's a huge page on it i'm gonna read through this neat it looks like it has it has a verified magnitude increase in antioxidant enzyme profile so there there you go i'm in so that's that's kind of where i'm at with with supplements and stuff i was taking um the what did i call it blockchain amino acids yes what is it actually called oh bc i don't know yeah bcc bc block blockchain that's bitcoin yeah branch chain amino acid which apparently helps with muscle recovery and you can get some with caffeine in it so i did like that taste like juice it made you all jump up so i might get another scoop of that uh once i start doing the gym a little bit more heavy this uh this year yeah we'll see when i when i'm like a little bit past where i'm at right now with my nerve stuff i was taking beta alanine i was taking um um sorry i'm blanking on it i was taking a few things that you would find in like a pre-workout like there's all sorts of pre-workouts that are loaded with caffeine and i was just found to buy some of the ingredients and mix it myself uh that way i could limit the amount of caffeine i'm having that sort of way but yeah i might i might be on more supplements later but right now i'm just like hanging with the basics all right let's move into the last section which is just looking forward um we sort of touched upon this but like what does next year look like you or what are your goals for going forward scott yeah um goals going forward is just to increase like full body strength like i spent way too much of last year really doing upper body stuff and because of my tailbone i was avoiding doing lower body stuff i was avoiding squats and now that i've like really gotten in the flow of with the weight belt and perfecting my form and um just feeling a little bit better here my goal is like leg strength so i'm gonna hit my max that lift ever was three sets of 300 for five so i'm gonna try to beat that this year and get up to 350 just because you know i it's nice to have a number of goals to look forward to i i've really been into this glute ham developer which if you don't know that is google it it's a really hard exercise and i've been working on it now ever since i bought one on black friday i've been working on it now for several weeks and it was so hard for me and i'm just now feeling like i'm getting it so at the end of the year i'm gonna be like a glute ham master i'm gonna have the strongest dang legs ever so that's really like where i'm focusing this to get more full body uh cardio needs to be a thing for me i went to breaking practice a couple weeks ago and i swear i thought i was going to die my heart rate was like 180 for about an hour i was just like not able to breathe so i'd really like to be able to get back into that sort of shape in terms of cardio and not be panting like crazy i've been stretching every day i have a new app called streaks on ios which allows you to track a whole bunch of stuff and you know me i like tracking i'm now at let's see how many days i'm now at a streak of 12 consecutive days of stretching every day so stretching every day is a big thing for me big big fan of making sure i get some stretching time in i'm gonna be trying to at least get to breaking practice once a week i'm gonna continue my lifting every day i'm so very focused fitness focus for me i'm gonna start going to yoga once a week but i'm gonna do so in like february once the new year's crowds start to thin out a little bit here i might do some yoga at home in the meantime i think all that stuff's just going to help my my body heal a little bit more and like you can do sort of fake yoga or even just like stretching while you're watching tv people are wondering how you have time for this stuff man i stress while watching like we'll like the mandalorian or whatever we're sitting down watching tv you're relaxing it's just as easy to sit on the floor and do like a little toe stretch or bend over whatever while you're watching tv it's not hard the gym remodel is going to make my life a lot better and get this last night i put on my apple watch and i did a little bit of like that activity tracking and i don't know how accurate this is but i had it measuring my heart rate and i played a game called super hot on my vr headset and super hot is like a matrix style game where time only moves when you move and it's not like super violent i mean it's violent but you're fighting these polygon people it's not real people but like it gives you a situation where you can punch a guy catch his gun as it's in the air shoot another guy and you can do all this like you're in the matrix and since i'm me and this uh vr headset i have is the oculus quest it's not tethered to anything i'm me i'm literally like like army crawling on the ground in my living room and jumping behind barrels and rolling around laying on my back and doing like all this stuff i burned 400 calories playing vr last night so yeah like just finding little ways to move around while i'm being entertained or whatever that's like more than some people burn in the gym i know i looked at my watch after i was like what the heck i was i was sweating and i was doing all this work and i'm sure corny was just like cracking up watching me doing this because i'm like you know jumping behind barrels and whatever in the invisible world but uh just finding new ways to move and get moving when you know i would normally just sit down and eat an ice cream or something so yeah for me i've said most of the things looking forward just basically focusing on being consistent with uh both food and gym because like it's it doesn't have to be a huge part of my life but just something that you you do it has to be part of your life um so that's kind of what i'm focusing on for this year i'm excited to get kettlebells in the office see how that works out i'm sure i'll i'll update you all in like a month or two to see like where it's out or is it just a door shop or am i actually using them i think that's that's about stretches is one thing there's i know we want to do a podcast on stretches entirely because that's something i've always neglected um i know you are super into stretching so uh maybe we should do an entire podcast just a hasty treat on a couple uh stretches yeah i have a whole bunch listed here and since we're at the time we're at let's just make it the very next tasty treat that we do we can just move all this stuff into there uh stretching with scott here and i can add a little bit more because i've often been known as the guy who sits on the floor and stretches in the office like i think my co-workers have often been like what the actual hell is this guy doing stretching on the floor in the office and so uh you can do it people look at you funny but you can do it but we'll do a whole episode because let me tell you as somebody who has all sorts of issues or whatever through breaking or through movement or through the sheer fact that you sit down on a computer all day and work there are stretches that can make your life significantly better especially for web developers we have these issues i know i've been there sitting in a chair all day long and just come home and then sit on the couch i mean you're just sitting sitting sitting sitting i'm not talking about getting standing but there's just like little things that you can do to help your body feel better and it's going to make your development way better as well. So that's really just it.

We'll tackle this stretching stuff in another podcast. I'm super psyched for it, so let me know if you have any specific requests before this episode releases. All right, let's move on to some sick picks. Sick picks.

Things that we picked that are sick. I've got a neat one today. It's a refillable metal torch lighter. Let me explain.

We light a lot of things around it. I like the barbecue a couple times a week. We light candles all the time. That's actually the only thing.

I don't smoke cigars or anything like that, but we have all these hundreds of these crappy little barbecue lighters that stop working after a little bit of time or these little Bic lighters around, and I was actually amazed at how many you just throw out because they don't have a refill spot on them or you're not set up for it properly. So I went out and I got this. It's all metal. It's like a super high jet flame torch lighter.

And basically, does it have jet flames painted on it? Not yet. Maybe I should. But basically, it looks like a pen and it has a little clicker on it and you click it on and it just goes like just throws a flame out and lights a candle in a second.

If it's windy or anything when I'm trying to light my barbecue, that's never an issue. And you fill it refilled with butane, so it's good for the environment you're not throwing out all these plastic lighters. I probably threw out like six or seven of these dollar store barbecue lighters and we fill in. It's funny because I bought my mom something like this like 10 years ago to light their fireplace and their candles with and they still have it and they use it probably a couple times a week and Zippo makes one as well.

I thought it was so cool. So I finally got it. I'm kicking myself for not getting something like this earlier because it's just both a really good product and I think it's good for the environment you're not throwing more plastic away. I'm sorry, the one I got is called the Tech Boss Cigar.

I guess it's for cigars. Cigar lighter. I'm not using it for that. That's fun.

That's way fun. I'm going to keep it fitness related here. I have a few YouTube channels, stuff that I really like here. So one of which is going to be Fitness Splendor.

They have a YouTube channel where you can go to fitnessblender.com and there's just about a gazillion a gazillion is the technical term. It's just about a gazillion videos on different workouts and you can give your level if you're a beginner in a medium, advanced, whatever. And it's so dang good the amount of stuff they give you for free. So if you're looking for just any sort of like, oh, I want to just get moving any sort of whatever.

Fitness Splendor is the way to do it. Another one I have here is Bob and Brad the YouTube channel with 1.5 or 1.58 million subscribers. I was really surprised to find this channel the other day because I never heard of this and it's all physical therapy stuff. It's so good, especially for me.

I have a lot of issues. So this is like 60 seconds to get rid of knots in your shoulders. How to crack your own back without a chiropractor. But the one I was looking for was about sciatica, nerve pain, different stretches.

I've learned so many stretches from this. If you're looking, if you have a specific ailment, this YouTube channel is two physical therapists who are really smart and they're super funny. They're like super dorky, like very dorky personalities in the best possible way. But they are just absolutely, absolutely really great resource if you have any sort of pain.

The next one is a weightlifting channel. I follow Jeremy Ethier Ether. I don't really know. I don't think he says his name ever.

But he does a lot of like very targeted videos that are like science-based. Again, this is a big channel, 1.8 million subscribers. So he does stuff like the scientific way to grow your shoulders, the best for back exercises you could do. Stuff like that.

I absolutely really love this channel. And I find between these three channels, you get your cardio, you get your weightlifting, and then you get your pain management and physical therapy stuff. So this is three YouTube channels that I think you should check out if you are interested in fitness stuff. All right, that is it.

Thank you for tuning in and we will catch you on Monday. Peace. Peace. Head on over to syntax.fm for your full record of all of our shows.

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