The Grind

I am back in Seattle for 10-11 weeks (minus a possible 4-5 day trip to Florida for WPT) and it is time to get back onto the grind. What is the grind? For me it is playing lots of hours of poker and spending lots of hours in the gym, while maintain a healthy diet. These three things will be my primary focus over the next 10 weeks until I head off to Vegas for the WSOP. I wil be blogging here at least once per week with updates in my progress. Look for updates on my diet and exercise (food and workout logs) as well as updates on poker progress.

Why?

I find that while I am traveling I have a hard time getting on a schedule and getting in consistent workouts and hours at the table. While I am at home for a significant amount of time I just feel more productive when I set up a program like this. I feel that blogging about it will also help me stick to the workouts and diet to achieve my goals.

Nutrition

My diet while at home is going to be pretty basic. I will focus on high protein intake. I will only be intaking “quality” carbs such as brown rice, oats, and other whole grains. I will also be focusing on low fat foods and low calorie intake. Here are some of my available menu items

Breakfast – Egg Whites, oatmeal, protein shake, protein bar, hard boiled eggs, smoothies, greek yogurt.

Lunch / Dinner – Chicken , fish , Brown rice, veggies, turkey,

Snacks – Protein shakes / bars, greek yogurt, hard boiled eggs, cottage cheese

This is not everything that I will be eating, but as you can see it is just a very clean diet. Clean, lean proteins with clean carbs. Following some basic dieting rules like limiting carbs I intake later in the day. As far as supplementation goes, I plan on taking a daily multi vitamin, fish oil, and a fat burner.

Fitness

My goal is to work out 6 days a week using a 3 days on 1 day off. My rotation of workouts, at least at the beginning, will be Upper body , core and cardio, and lower body. I will be doing sets of 12-15 reps to help work some cardio into my lifting. I also plan on doing lots of plyometric exercises that will get my heart rate up while lifting. Movements such as up downs, box jumps, kettle bells etc will all incorporate cardio into my workouts. I also want to do 10-20 minutes of additional cardio at the end of every workout.

Poker

Hours, Hours, Hours. Basically the only way to describe this part of the grind. Im looking to put in 50ish hours per week at the tables. I plan on putting in more time working on my game. Towards the latter end I will put a lot of time into my tournament game to get ready for the WSOP. Will be playing my normal small-mid stakes live games 3/5nl, 2-2 and 2-5 PLO.

Goals

To be completely honest I really don’t have any hard number goals for this grind. My main goal is to follow thru everything until the end. In my workout and diet logs I want to rate each day and try to improve on my ratings throughout. In terms of fitness and nutrition, as long as I follow through on my diet and work hard in the gym my measurements will take care of themselves. I want to make small weekly goals that will help achieve everything. For example this week I was trying not to hit the snooze button.

Hopefully you guys will enjoy following my process throughout this. Feel free to comment on here with any help or suggestions on the diet and exercise.

Today I will leave you with a picture of my bracket for the NCAA Tournament. Really like this bracket and did a fair amount of research. I am really high on VCU and Florida.