Adam Wik's Blog, page 5

Dominate Your Year with the Epic Annual Review Guide

Cover of The Epic Annual Review Guide

New Years is coming up quickly and it’s that time of the year again that people begin making resolutions and goals to make themselves and their lives better. While I support people making goals and changes for the better, more often than not their efforts fail.

It’s common for folks to say “This year I’m going to get fit!” or some similar type of goal. On January 1st they get a gym membership and are excellent at keeping to their schedule for the first coup...

The Tetrapharmakos – An Ancient Cure for Modern Problems

When it comes to philosophy, I tend to gravitate toward the practical side. While I’m certainly interested in a lot of the more abstract areas it’s the parts of philosophy that I can apply to my life right now in order to improve it that I prefer to focus on.

To that end one piece of the Epicurean school that I think has added a lot to my daily life, or at least my attitudes toward it, is the Tetrapharmakos. Even though it was originally created in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, the ideas it puts...

Thoughts on Fat Pride from a Formerly Fat Fit Guy

Fat Squirrel cares little about your opinion of him.

I grew up as a fat kid.

Through the majority of my childhood I ranged from what might be considered chubby all the way up to full-blown obese in my teen years. At one point I was even inching up on the 300 pound mark. While the argument could be made that as a male my experience was less severe than what a female would have been subjected to I can still say I know what it’s like physically, psychologically, and socially to be a fat person.

My...

Willpower, Discipline, and Obedience: How to Do What You Set Out to Do

Does willpower keep the dog from eating the sausage, or obedience?

I’ve written a lot about willpower and discipline in the past because it’s a subject that fascinates me. Consider this, with the Internet it’s possible to find step-by-step instructions on how to do nearly anything. Practically anything you could ever want to do is right there, so why don’t people do it? If you’ve always wanted to speak Portuguese or play the guitar, why can’t you yet? Why aren’t you working toward that?

It’s be...

How to Calculate Your Macros Part 2 – Macronutrient Ratios

So by now you ought to know all about what macros are and how to count them and you should have gone through the first part of this two part article and figured up an estimate of how many calories you need and want to aim for per day. That means that we’re ready for the final part of the process – figuring out your specific macro ratios & amounts.

If you haven’t gone through at least the previous article to figure out your caloric needs, go do that really quick. You’ll have a much easier time...

The 80/20 Guide to Nutrition

Nutrition doesn’t have to be this complex – as long as you know what to focus on.

Nutrition is a complicated thing.

It doesn’t have to be, at least unless you really want to start getting into the energy pathways and biochemical stuff. If you’re just looking to lose weight, get a bit stronger, or just be overall healthier the nutrition knowledge required to get you there is actually pretty simple. The problem is the fitness industry in general (Yes I realize I am, de facto, a part of that indus...

3 Common Language Learning Obstacles

Facing obstacles can be painful, or it can be a fun challenge – it’s all a matter of attitude.

Learning a new language is a long and involved process and, while it can be a lot of fun most of the time, odds are you’re going to run into some major obstacles.

I always like to take the parkour view of things and think of roadblocks like these as challenges to overcome, but I do recognize that some of them can be extremely discouraging – especially when they slow or halt your progress.

I’ve put toge...

How We Learned Fluent Korean in 6 Months

Learning fluent Korean in a 6 month timeline was one of the first challenges we took on back when we started Road to Epic – it was a big success and a lot of what we learned during the experience has influenced our articles on language learning since.

Recent renewed interest in the challenge has made me realize though that I never really did a satisfactory job of outlining exactly how we did it. That was a big oversight on my part, so I’m posting this to make up for it and lay out exactly what...

How to Calculate Your Macros Part 1 – Calculating Calories

Now that you know what macros are you might be asking how to figure out exactly how many of them you need every day in order to attain your fitness goals. The beginner’s guide gave some general guidelines, but here we’ll get a little deeper into it.

The first thing we need to figure out in order to determine where your macros should be is exactly how many calories you need to be getting on average to meet your goals. (I’m assuming you know your goal, e.g. lose fat, gain muscle etc., so if you...

The Beginner’s Guide to Macros

Counting macronutrients doesn’t have to be complicated.

If you’ve been digging into information on weight loss – especially information by people more active in the fitness side of things and less in the selling diet fad books side of things – you’ve probably heard of macronutrients (macros for short because we’re lazy).

It can be bewildering at first because it’s seems like a lot more nutritional information you have to digest, but thankfully it’s not as hard as it sounds. If you have no clue...