The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I had my first two olympic wrestling classes this monday and tuesday, and it quickly became obvious to me that this was the sport I was born for, I immediately loved it. Wrestling-only gyms for adults are really rare, given that basically everyone who becomes good at it starts out in high-school (or earlier) and continues on to college, but I was lucky to find one that offered classes. This is the first sport that truly resonated with me on an instinctual level, even more so than weight-lifting. Winning a contest of literal physical dominance against another dude feels waaay better than winning at any other sport that I can remember playing in school.
The class was generally structured in 3 phases: warmup, then technique drills where you pair up and take turns practising a few techniques the instructor shows you, and then sparring at something close to 100% effort, trying to get another person to fall on their back.
I was surprised on 2 fronts, first, being physically bigger and stronger is an unbelievable advantage. I knew that already, of course, but the sheer magnitude of it surprised me. I'm 206lbs, 5'10 at 22% body fat, and I was sparring with a new guy of the same height, but 160lbs, and the difference was truly unbelievable, it was essentially trivial for me to overpower him. Physical clashes between adult males are so rare in daily life that I just hadn't really realised at a visceral level how much difference weight and muscles make, but it's truly enormous.
The second surprise was the effectiveness of technique against people who don't know it. One guy weighed 150lbs, but had been taking wrestling classes for a few years, and I was powerless against him. Though he did tell me that he needed to have perfect technique in order to take me down, anything less than perfection and my strength can effectively play defence.
This morning I've counted 5 bruises and 3 scratches on my body, my ribs hurt, my neck is sore, and both my shoulders muscles are painful, but I've never been this happy about any other sport.
Hey man, I'm glad you found something you like.
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