with deep sea diver sounds

and the flowers bloom like madness in the Spring”

For the past three days I’ve felt like the poor old sob in one of my favorite Jethro Tull songs.

I just changed up my workout program and my body is suffering quite a bit. In the past I at first was doing moderate cardio with mediocre results because I lacked the drive and discipline necessary to succeed. I switched to mainly weight lifting after WPT Niagara and starting working much harder. I was upset with my appearance and results up to that point and decided to start taking things seriously. I posted in my previous blog that I’d dropped several pounds, and I’ve progressed very nicely since but it had slowed down. Lately I have gone insane with my workouts and feel physically exhausted almost all the time. This has resulted in me sleeping 10-12 hours most nights, and also getting back on schedule and going to bed at normal times which is nice.

I rarely play online poker right now, as physical fitness and diet are my main interests and I am very motivated. My current program is extremely intense and I feel I am much happier when I am following it. Most of my tilty poker sessions or emotional explosions are on days I do not exercise. I think everyone should at least casually include weight lifting as part of a healthy lifestyle. I find the most rewarding aspect of lifting, other than watching your body transform and muscles grow, is the feeling of success after working hard and seeing immediate results for your efforts, week after week, which I don’t get with poker.

I tend to train over a 3 day split, although I may make the switch to 2 in the future. Day A is chest and back, Day B is arms, day C is legs and lower back, and I do abs every day. This is the only thing I have kept consistent since I started lifting. I’ve managed to identify weak points and have been training extra to try to make up for strength differences- as a result I work my left arm 3-4 times a week. I also do random staggered sets of whatever I feel like or want to work on throughout most of my workouts.

Today I worked my arms. Arm days are pretty standard. I usually bike for 15-20 minutes before lifting, and do some light stretches and throw the weights around a little to warm up. Today I did light lateral raises and practiced holding dumbbells at arms length while I biked, taking intermittent breaks between the lifts but continuing to bike the entire time, maybe 15 minutes. I have been switching up exercises, but the main idea is to do at least 2 different types of bicep curls, barbell tricep extensions, tricep cable pulldown, shoulder dumbell presses, and lateral raises every arm day. I also usually do military press but it’s a pain in the ass because my gym doesn’t have many normal barbells so I just end up using machine which is pretty bad , or using the arm blaster barbells. I also like to mix in clean and press, and wrist curls and reverse wrist curls for forearm and barbell shrugs for trapezius, but I don’t think I need to be doing these every time at this point. My arm workouts are also a little shorter than other days and leave me with more energy, so I sometimes bike more or swim afterwards. My absolute favorite lift is one I do near the end of the workout, a forearm/bicep combo workout. I find even after 2-3 different bicep exercises I am at the point of reaching muscular exhaustion in my biceps but am not quite there, and sometimes do not have the energy or cardiovascular endurance (something I have been working on) to continue. At this point I actually up the weight of the dumbbells I am using and do a few sets at increasingly high weights doing partial reps . I hold the dumbbell out with the support of my other arm, tuck it in a little and release, and curl the weight for 1/2 a full movement and repeat until I drop the weight. This is the one exercise I do where the pain is bad but it is a great exercise that has probably been the most useful for strengthening my forearms. The biceps play a part in the first set, but after that they are already worked so much that the forearms end up doing most of the weight for the reps and I get a fantastic forearm workout, although they end up throbbing for hours afterwards. Is this bad for my tendons or arms? I don’t think it is but I could be wrong.

I’ve now lost 16 pounds since WPT Niagara and without a doubt gained a lot of muscle, which I am extremely happy with. I’ve nearly doubled some of my max lifts since I started lifting, and grown muscles I didn’t know I had. Weight loss is still the priority but they go hand in hand. I am 6″1 and weigh 201 pounds as of today, versus my high point of 217. Considering I have been eating way too much delicious lasagne and pot roast the past couple days I don’t feel bad at all.

The other part of my new program is the second, less intense workout of the day. I will bike for 1-1.5 hours and do my abs and any problem areas at this point. I am on a late schedule today but I will be doing this at about 10pm tonight. I plan on working my left arm again and just doing 5 sets of 30 situps for abs. I still have a nasty layer of fat on me especially around my stomach region so the situps are quite challenging, but not nearly as hard as they once were. When I do them at the gym I do them at a significant decline but I don’t have a situp bench at home yet so I am working with what I have and increasing reps. I also have been using a 10 pound dumbbell to hold while I do the situps to work my abs harder. I’m starting to try v-ups too but they are difficult and my form is still bad, not sure if I should be doing crunches, I just use this easy crunch machine at gym but it isn’t really the same thing, I need a lot of work on these areas. Thanks to jcarver for all of the advice.

As far as supplements, other than the normal protein stuff, I’ve been using a thermogenic called hot-rox lately, a biotest product I learned about on T-nation.com, a great resource for weight lifters that I’ve learned a lot from. It increases metabolic rate and gives me the energy burst I need to keep my workouts high energy and intense to maximize fat burn and muscle stimulation. Sorry 2p2, no steroids.

The 3+ hours of physical exercise every day that this new program demands will be very stressful, but I feel if I keep a positive mind and work very hard I will succeed. My friends tell me I will quit after 3 days max, this is the 2nd one =)

I am also considering implementing a lot more stretches into my daily schedule, possibly early in the morning along with a little cardio. Maybe I will move the 2nd workout to before the first and just do the extra left arm work when I go to the gym or later in the day, I don’t know. Regardless, I think improving flexibility has to be a good thing. I was reading up on Bruce Lee yesterday, and wow what an amazing person. Bruce Lee was not only a philosopher, an actor, and an incredible martial artist, but possibly the strongest people in the world pound for pound, despite only weighing 160 pounds. I don’t know if everything I read was true, but wow. Check out the Wikipedia article if you haven’t read it, quite amazing. Bruce Lee would do extensive cardio and stretching in the morning, and break for a few hours before lifting and biking. As far as weight lifting, despite being a small man with “small” arms, Bruce Lee would curl 80 pound dumbbells over multiple sets with 8-12 repetitions in his daily workout, and could hold a 125 dumbbell out in front of him with one arm. Bruce Lee’s entire life was about discipline and maximizing his physical potential. I find him to be very inspirational.

as far as poker, I won’t be playing until this Sunday. There is a $1m guarantee $1k buy in on PokerStars I am looking forward to playing. I doubt I will bother with any other tournaments, but might open up some cash tables on the side. I will make sure to post some HHs from those on here. The main poker event I am looking forward to is the $100k buy in NLHE tournament in Australia and the $10k main event, and I won’t be letting anything else distract me.

capture the dream.

-Jeff

I’ve been playing a lot of PLO lately and have been happy with my results. The game is very swingy but I believe I have a very good feel of heads up play and will continue playing most takers HU at 10-20 to 50-100 and hopefully will continue to show good results. My 6-max game is a lot sloppy as I feel slightly uncomfortable with my play in the first 2 seats. I nearly always open limp utg except in some short stack situations, but I think my open limp range may need some reworking. I also am uncertain about sizing open raises in the hijak, although I am happy opening for a pot-sized raise in CO or button with some exceptions. Would love to hear input from regular players on this.

If anyone who plays higher PLO regularly and has some experience wants to talk strategy, shoot me on a pm on 2p2 or p5s!

My introductory entry didn’t have much as far as content, so I’m going to use this opportunity to bring you guys up to speed about what I’ve been doing the past several months.

For those unfamiliar I went on a huge rush early in 2007 in the nosebleed FTP NL games at the same time as I went on a big downswing on PokerStars cash games. I think I have lost around $100k in the Stars games this year, but at my peak on Full Tilt was up well over a million. I had one very bad day months ago where I went from being up over $400k to down $250k and that night I cashed out nearly all of my FTP roll and left myself under $60k online.

I’ve struggled online since then. I’ve payed a lot of live buy-ins online for myself and backees and have dropped a good amount in the nosebleeds taking shots and playing and stupid times, so I have only gotten my online roll back over $200k a few times in that time period and never hit a big rush.

I did a mid limits challenge months ago where I wanted to win 100 buy ins at 5-10 and work my way up the limits. I crushed 5-10 winning over $75k in 25k hands or something, but I have not played much 10-20 since and have probably made only 20-30 buy ins there.

I was traveling a lot at the end of the summer and beginning of this fall, and went to Barcelona, London, Aruba, and Niagara over a period of under 2 months.  I final tabled the WPT in Niagara but ran bad from 7 players onward and only managed 6th place for $183k and a nice tv final table finish. This was my second significant live score and my biggest yet, the former biggest being a win in the Johnny Chan Classic $1k 6-max NL for $84k in Vancouver. Canada seems to be a lucky place for me.

I’ve basically been on a poker break since then, playing on and off. The break has been really good for me and a nice change of pace. I found I weighed 218 pounds after my London trip. That’s not very overweight for a 6′1, big boned guy like me, but I just felt unfit and wanted to change it. I was working out on and off prior to the big trip but I wasn’t doing a great job. I’ve completely turned that around recently. Since Niagara I’ve been taking my workouts much more seriously and have shown great results. I’ve lost over 10 pounds and have gained a ton of muscle weight. Even though I have a long way to go i feel a lot fitter and happier.

I went to Turning Stone last week to relax and have fun, but it was a really shitty trip. I’ll write about that later, some funny stuff happened. I didn’t work out the entire trip and as of this morning hadn’t worked out for 5 or 6 days. I had been pretty pissed over nothing for a few days, but I hit the gym today and I feel a lot better. I guess its become a more important part of my routine than I realized, if not going makes me emotionally unbalanced, lol. I mostly did arms and shoulders today and had one of my best workouts since I started lifting. Maybe my body needed a break? I had been lifting intensely 5-6 days a week prior to the Turning Stone trip, and was really tearing myself up. I had been having the problem of my workouts being low energy, so maybe this is a sign of good things to come.

I’ll talk about my routines in future blogs and keep track of progress. Most of my lifting program is from Arnold Schwarzennegar’s Encylopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (the updated one thats like 700 pages). I don’t have much experience with fitness books but imo its a great book and I learned a lot from reading it.

I took a shot at some high stakes today and it went well. I sat in a 200-400 6m game with position on a psycho but was stacked the first hand with AK. I probably misplayed the hand but wasn’t too unhappy with being down $40k and decided to keep playing as long as the game was good. I didn’t make any more money and quit when the psycho player left.

There weren’t any other games going but I decided to keep rolling high and played Jman (OMGClayAiken) in some 200-400 HU. I probably wouldn’t have done it but my friend Ansky
and I were talking HU NL the night before and he noted that he thought I would be a good match with Jman and that my game would do well against his, although I had not previously played him.

I checked all my PT stats and other info on Jman’s HU game and sat down to play him. Overall I feel I played tight but well . There was one interesting hand where I check-raised the flop with J10o on a K56 2 spade flop and jman called my raise and bet on 9 turn with 86o. The river was a very bad 9 and I checked and gave up the $35k pot. I may or may not have misplayed this but overall I played a good match and made something like $70k with very few showdowns. Near the end of the match I realized I was running out of time to go to the gym and still make the 9pm tournaments. Jman was also starting to 3-bet me a lot, which normally I welcome, but considering the stakes I felt I did not want to sweat the variance of the 3-bet game so I quit. Unfortunately I lost track of time at the gym and made it home at 9:01 to just miss the FTP $100r 6-max =/

I’m going to post tons of more stuff including some pictures from old tournaments in the upcoming blogs, as well as my plans the next few months and some fun hands for discussion and analysis.

GIFAFI,

-AJ

For those unfamiliar with me, I’m a 19 year old high school graduate. I’ve lived all over the country and have lived in MA for the past four years. I’m a professional poker player who is taking time off between high school and college to travel the world and play poker.

I’m going to try to update this blog regularly with pictures, graphs, and non poker related stuff too. I quit my last blog over a year ago and have hundreds of pictures from my poker trips since, so I’ll write some short trip reports and get those up. There should be plenty of poker content and hand histories and analysis and updates on my poker results and business ventures. I’ve recently become really obsessed with lifting and physical fitness, so I also plan on using this blog as a log to keep track of my workouts and daily routine.

-Jeff