Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Ive been trying to get back on my feet after having COVID and pneumonia. Pushing myself pretty hard. Doing a minimum of 6kms a day on the bike and up to 30kms on some days, pain being the limiting factor. I was doing the below workout two times a week and have had to separate things up to a two day split with trying to do legs as many times as possible. I cant do much unless I can get this leg to work properly or atleast to a level I can adapt to. The lung capacity is still too low to get back on the road to finish off my training courses. Im either too tired or in pain by the end of the day to concentrate on much else. After loosing 10 kilo I was doing 2 kilo bicep curls and after four months have finally gotten up to 6 kilo. I was doing 9 kilo curls before the Tassi trip. Ive lost a lot of lung capacity and conditioning. Getting back to a decent level of fitness has been my main priority over the last few months and will be for the next year if I want to get back into the field. Besides I cant get serious about looking for a rescue another staffy if I cant walk far enough to exercise a dog.
Workout Routine (Reverse Drop Sets)
Day 1 Chest and Shoulders
Chest
Dumb Bell Coffin Press
Machine Chest Press
Cable Pull Upper and Lower
Shoulders
Front Raise
Reverse Flys
Shrugs
Barbell Upright Row
Seated Shoulder Press
Rotator Cup Cable Side pull
Day 2 Legs and ABS
Leg Press
Leg Extension
Hamstring Curl
Calf Raise
ABS
Side Cable Bend
Cable Crunches
Day 3 Back, Triceps and Biceps
Back
Seated Row
Lat Pull down
Machine Rear Deltoid Row
Dumb Bell One Arm Row
Triceps
Cable Pushdown
Cable Kickback
Overhead Cable
Biceps
Concentration Curl
Alternating Hammer, wrist up, wrist down , partials
We live in a time where you can be in the name of fairness you can’t share the stories you write for my news publication on social media. We live in a time in which in the name of the common good you can be kicked out of your bank and online payment system simply for expressing the wrong political views. We live in a time in which in the name of social justice you can commit a serious crime but get a more lenient sentence if you happen to be the right skin color. We live in a time in which in the name of safety you can be arrested for exercising your right to peaceful protest if you happen to be protesting the wrong thing of course.
I came across the below speech and thought of how much Australia had become like this. However the Australian Government is just better at hiding what laws they are instigating.
Don’t Forget What Happened During the Plague (Because you cant mention the C Word) Since COVID the Cuntry has never been the same!
Just a quick idea of laws and acts brought into parliment concerning freedom of assembly, covid 19 breaches in human rights, Communications Legislation, anti terrorism laws such as consorting laws, I still havent looked into banking within this country.
Freedom of assembly
New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria adopted new laws carrying large fines and prison sentences for participating in unauthorized protests.
In August, police in New South Wales arrested 34 peaceful protesters and a legal observer at a demonstration in Sydney against government inaction on climate change. Twenty-one people were charged under the Roads and Crimes Legislation Amendment Act 2022 and faced a two-year prison sentence or a fine of up to AUD 22,000 (approximately USD 14,170) if convicted.
Covid-19
Australia has restricted the rights of its own citizens to enter and leave their own country.
Strict arrival quotas due to limited quarantine facilities left more than 43,000 Australian citizens stranded abroad.
From March 2020 to November 2021, Australia banned its citizens from leaving the country as a public health measure during the Covid-19 pandemic, unless they met strict criteria. In August 2021, the ban was expanded to include Australians who normally live abroad. This punitive approach to travel left tens of thousands of Australian families separated from their loved ones.
After a spike in Covid-19 cases in India in May, the Australian government announced a temporary measure of banning Australians who had been in India from entering Australia. Those who disobeyed could face fines of up to AU$66,000 (US$56,000) or five years in prison. No bans on citizens were put in place following similar spikes in 2020 in the US and UK.
Freedom of Expression
Human Rights Watch research found that Australian universities are failing to protect the academic freedom of students from China and of academics who criticize the Chinese Communist Party, leaving them vulnerable to harassment and intimidation by Chinese government supporters. Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia alter their behavior and self-censor to avoid threats and harassment from fellow classmates and being “reported on” by them to authorities back home.
A new regulation was introduced into parliament in August that would make it easier to deregister nongovernmental organizations if they promote protests in which minor offenses occur.
A bill to create new police powers to conduct online surveillance of criminal suspects and take over their accounts was passed by parliament in August, despite the legislation failing to implement safeguards recommended by a parliamentary committee.
A number of rights have been restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic. They include:
The right to freedom of association: With the virus being air-borne and aggressively transmitted in groups, social distancing is key to limiting the spread. Restrictions on association with other people have been introduced worldwide during the pandemic. Restrictions have ranged from total bans on associating with anyone outside your household to only being allowed to gather in groups of limited size for purposes like weddings, funerals, and work.
The right to peaceful assembly: Protests involve large groups of people meeting together and so have been restricted during the pandemic for similar reasons. Rights to protest and freedom of expression can be exercised in other ways – such as online – and have not been completely restricted.
The right to liberty of movement: This applies to moving between states in Australia as well as to the freedom to leave a country (including Australia). Border restrictions are explicitly recognised in international law as a right that may be lawfully restricted during a public emergency.
The right to family reunification: This includes a right to reunification across borders, but is similarly recognised in international law as a right that may be lawfully restricted in a time of public emergency.
The right to enter your own country: International law provides that people should not be arbitrarily deprived of this right. Again, it is a right that may be lawfully restricted in a time of public emergency.
The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is now in the public consultation stage.
No other nation can match the volume of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws. Their sheer scope is staggering. They include:
control orders, which allow courts to impose a wide range of restrictions and obligations on people to prevent future wrongdoing. They can mandate curfews, limits on phone or internet usage and electronic monitoring
preventative detention orders, which allow police to detain people secretly for up to two weeks, either to prevent an attack or protect evidence relating to a recent one
mandatory retention of all Australians’ metadata for two years and access by enforcement agencies without a warrant
a power for the home affairs minister to strip dual citizens involved in terrorism of their Australian citizenship.
Many of these schemes are unprecedented in Australian law, outstripping even our historical wartime powers.
I had a particularly bad day with pain and was offered a beer which eventually turned into six, I rarely touch alcohol now. I had asked my house mate if he had ever accepted being in a wheel chair. He had been in it since he was 17 from a vehicle accident and was now 35. He had not. He did not like remembering or being reminded, or even seeing other people in a chair. This was important to me as a mirror to understand my own health problems. Ive had to learn how to walk three times now, its been 18 months since the severed quad tendon and still cant walk distance. Some days on the bike I have to force myself through the pain.
I had to ask myself if I had ever accepted my limitations and I think not, its those limitations that make me push myself more. Three you tube clips made me ask these questions. The first from Frogman Tactical that said “Train at the pace you can move at, embrace the burdens you have”. The second was I reached out to Ryan Humiston to try and get a work out routine for rehab. Its been four months at the gym and Im finally starting to build muscle again after loosing ten kilo to covid, but I want to take it to a different level now than I ever have before. Then thirdly after Ryans talk on how to become motivated i watched the link to Phil Hansen Embrace the shake where he talked about needing to be limited to become limitless.
Limited to become limitless! So in my life Ive crushed four discs,2 back operations, broken my sternum 3 times, had 2 bilateral lung transplants, 12 years of my life on an oxygen bottle, throat cancer, right shoulder cancer,right shoulder dislocations a whole other story in pain, having a lump taken off my head this week, and severed my quad tendon, spent 6 months in a leg brace then 6 months of rehab trying to bend the leg again, 16 days in hospital with covid and pneumonia loosing 10 kilo of body weight and went from 9 kilo bicep curls to 2 kilo after three months of loosing my lung capacity. I’m now down to 60 percent.
Yet I’m still doing 2.5 hours at the gym twice a week and between 6 and 15 kms on the bike each day and fitter than most people I know. I was training in more than 5 different martial arts after my last transplant. My limitations make me limitless!
The challenge to any of you out there that are trying to prepare yourself to educate yourself to be a better protector and someone that can render Aid to other people I want to challenge you not just to take anything you see off social media take it at face value and start implementing that right away take some time to dig into this and figure out are there other people that are doing this as well is this just one person’s idea of what is a good thing to do or am I collectively taking a bunch of data from a lot of people and saying yes it seems that this trend is consistent among a lot of people and something that is applicable to where I am right now and the setting that I am working in so not only do we have to make sure that the data we’re getting is good solid data from a majority of people that are all validating this data but then we have to make sure that this applies in the specific area that we plan to be using it and that’s kind of what we’re talking about.
Tales of an Empty Cabin by Grey Owl. Ive only finished his collected works last month and was told this book was his best. I couldn’t find a copy under $100 here in Australia and even those I would have to import. However I did find a downloaded version. All 388 pages worth.
Aesop’s Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. I never realized that many of the story’s growing up like an Ant and a Grasshopper, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Tortoise and Hare, etc were all from the same author. A slave from ancient Greece.
I was never interested in school. Found it boring. It wasn’t till after I left that I became interested in learning and developed an interest in history after I became ill. Particularly eras in the 1800s Americas. I stumbled across a channel called The Woodland Escape and have become addicted to learning about simple things for example as to why coffee and tea were preferred in the colony days.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Song of Myself, Walt Whitman 1819 –1892 from Leaves of Grass
“We can learn from the past, but we cannot change it. We can prepare for the future and influence it, but we cannot control it. Life is informed, somewhat, by past and future, but it’s lived now.
What’s important is your actions and your state of being in this moment, because this moment is all you have.
Just as you cannot control anybody outside yourself, you also cannot act on anything outside the present moment.
All it means that all that’s necessary for you to begin to live with more intention is to claim this one moment, right now, as your own.
You only have to live, choose, decide, be, in this one moment.”
I was reminded of this the other day when I was chatting to a mate while having a break and becoming increasingly frustrated over working on my van. He said to me, I quote “A wise man once said to me were f%^ked, time doesn’t matter!”
Several months ago I had said these exact words to him, being new to chronic illness and having a bad day of trying to do something that was taking him longer than it should have. After 20 years of ill health and injuries I developed a philosophy of time doesn’t matter. Its about enjoying what your doing and having a productive day.
I had spent 3 hours building batons for pantry shelving that should have taken 30 minutes.Crawling around on my backside like a dog with worms inside a cupboard space the size of a suit case not being able to breath well or bend my leg to turn around.
The whole job took me 4 hours, out of breath and not concentrating well to build my pantry. A whole other day to install a piece of timber, router out the bottom of the 90×45 with a drill and spade bits along with chisels. Having no router in order to have a working fridge. Just trying to figure out how to mount it in. The medications I’m on are causing more problems with my mind. Only two weeks left of the course.
He had repeated to me “Were f&*ked time doesn’t matter !” at just the right moment to remind me that I’m on disability WTF else will I be doing with my day. Drinking piss and watching bad free to air TV. So what if it takes me 4 hours to do a 30 minute job. The pain and the frustration melted away leaving me feeling productive.
The next day I lifted the banana boxes out of the pantry. I call it my banana box pantry as it has no doors and I contain everything with two banana boxes I can lift out when driving. Reached for the tin of coffee and made a cuppa with cold milk for the first time in my van and it felt like a home and not like I was roughing it as a homeless person slogging it out trying to build a van while living in it and tripping over boxes of food on the floor.
I sat outside in the sun on my folding chair and for the first time felt at peace since my staffy passed away. The feeling only lasted for half of the cup of coffee before I had to get up and load firewood into the house. I still cant sit for very long, my mind stays busy all the time.
Several days later I had purchased a cheap 8×5 trailer that was in kit form. I asked the owner of the company if he needed a hand putting it together. Four hours of work later I hobbled out of there now knowing how to put a trailer together but barely being able to walk to the van. We finished it off the next day with the roofing frame work for the canvas. I thought Id finished threading wire through chassis rails after the van but it seemed not to be. I don’t think the owner understood. Many don’t, when your a workaholic and cant work you begin to enjoy what your doing with your hands again when money isn’t involved. You jump at any opportunity to work and do atleast something with your day.
A mate “Dave’ sent me the following podcast. It goes for 45 minutes. I haven’t really been a podcast fan but it was 45 minutes worth spending listening to DJ Hookie’s experiences when loosing both arms and legs. His time in ICU and rehab brings back many memories for me. The term “Shutter Island” was a good description of rehab.
On dis-mornings bike ride, it suddenly felt very quite. Which was out of the ordinary for that particular area. Bird life was usually every where. I started looking around for the source, feeling very out of place at the moment in time. There on a tree about 30 meters in front of me was a hawk. I stopped to take a few quick pictures and was going to stop and take more on the way back through instead of taking my normal route and try and measure the length of the cone of silence that all the other birds presented with knowing a raptor was in the immediate vicinity. I named him Maxwell Smart. Max wasn’t there on the return, however there were moments of intense quietness through the pathway where he must have been circling overhead. I hadn’t seen a raptor in over 12 months.
I keep meaning to purchase a copy of The Peregrine by J A Baker.
