The Athlete

The honest headline isn't the body — it's the people. Sport is how I walk into a new city and not be alone in it: badminton, volleyball, soccer, a trail. The body project — versioned workout plans, a hypertrophy tier-list, a delta-tracking method that turned into an app — is real, and it's the same building engine pointed at myself. But the courts came first, and they're the reason any of this matters.

Sport is how I make friends

When I landed in Japan I didn't know anyone, so I did the only thing that has ever reliably worked for me: I joined the meetups. Badminton, volleyball, hiking. You don't have to be charming on a court — you just have to show up, sweat with people, and lose a few games. By the end of three months I had a hundred-ish acquaintances and twenty people I'd call friends, and almost every one of those threads started on a court or a trail, not at a bar. Sport is the cheat code for the part of socializing I find hardest: it gives you a shared task, a reason to be standing next to a stranger, and a clean excuse to come back next week. The small talk takes care of itself once you've both chased the same ball.

That's not incidental, it's the design. When I score a new city to live in, access to sports is a literal line on the rubric — a standing scene I can plug into, in English, the week I arrive. It sits right next to "is there a hiking scene nearby," because those are the two cheapest ways I know to convert a lonely first month into a found family. A gym is a place you go alone. A pickup soccer game is a place you go alone once, and then you have a team. I'd rather have the team.

So read this whole page through that lens. The lifting and the longevity targets and the tier-lists are real and I'll get to them, but the load-bearing fact is that sport is my fastest, most repeatable on-ramp to the thing I actually care about — which is connection. My deepest fear is the cliché one: no real friends at forty. A standing weekly game is the most reliable hedge I've found against it. The body is a build. The friendships are the point.

Soccer — the one I actually train

Soccer is the one I treat like a craft. It's a fixed twice-a-week pillar, not a casual kickabout: I play organized pickup at a stadium with pennies and teams, and I keep a gear checklist so dumb and specific it's funny — water bottle and two electrolyte tabs, shin guards (wear at stadium), chafing cream if it's warm, and "CLIP TOENAILS" in capitals, because I learned that one the hard way.

The part I'm a little proud of is the solo session I built for myself: a 45-minute plan with a warmup, ball-mastery work (toe taps, foundations, inside-outside touches, sole rolls, V-pulls), moving turns (sole pullback, drag-back), passing and first touch, and only five minutes of light shooting at the end. The coaching notes I wrote for myself are the most me thing about it:

“prioritize control and intention over speed”— my own soccer training notes

That single line is basically how I try to do everything. Keep the touch frequency high and the intensity light-to-medium so my technique doesn't fall apart when I'm tired; use both feet; avoid the trap of grinding until I'm gassed and grooving sloppy mechanics into muscle memory; practice on flat concrete and earn the turf. It's a feedback loop with a ball at my feet instead of a codebase on my screen — and, characteristically, I train hip flexors separately for it (90/90 switches, reverse Nordics, Copenhagen planks, box jumps) because the limiting factor on a turn is rarely the foot, it's the hip.

Soccer is also the secret reason I do any cardio at all — which gets me to my least popular opinion.

I don't like running (and I have receipts)

People assume "fitness guy" means "runner." I am not a runner. I've reasoned myself into doing it instrumentally, and my private notes are blunt about how grudging that is:

“Running is still shit? what does being able to do 1hr of a run help you with in life… better at soccer.”— my fitness goals doc, talking myself into cardio

That's the whole deal. Running is hard on the knees, biking is better for the long game, and the only payoff I genuinely care about is being able to last ninety minutes on a soccer pitch without my lungs quitting on me. So my cardio is sport-first: soccer, badminton, sprint intervals (eight rounds of thirty-on, thirty-off), and — yes — Beat Saber, which I count as cardio because it is cardio, and which lives in my calorie math as a real logged line, not a toy. My cardio base exists to serve the sports. The sports exist to serve the friendships. It's loops all the way down.

Badminton — worst to best in a month

Badminton is the cleanest example of my favorite trick: pick a skill, go all-in for a sprint, and see how far the curve bends. In Japan I went from genuinely bad to genuinely decent in about a month of stupid volume. The numbers from those days still make me laugh:

“playing 3 hours of badminton after 3 hours at the gym one day, then 3 hours of volleyball the next.”— my Japan log, Day 1

After that sprint I started telling people I thought I could train to a competitive level inside a year:

“Picked up badminton and trained seriously enough that I'm on track to compete at state level within a year.”— from the notes

I want to be honest about the shape of that claim, because growth-mindset cuts both ways. That's a projection I made on the back of a hot month, not a rank I've actually earned — I haven't trained a year, and I haven't competed. I keep it here because it's exactly the kind of swing I make: insight and ambition tend to outrun my follow-through, and the gap between "I could" and "I did" is the most honest thing about me. Badminton's a beautiful sprint. Whether it becomes a season is still an open question.

Rocket League — Grand Champion, with a small regret

I hit Grand Champion in Rocket League. By the numbers it's the most concretely "competitive" thing on this page, and I'm including it with a caveat that's more interesting than the rank itself:

“hit Grand Champion in Rocket League along the way, because apparently even my leisure has to be optimized.”— from the notes

That line is the truest one here. The rank is real, but so is the rueful feeling underneath it — that I took the one thing that was supposed to be pure play and turned it into another grind to be optimized. It's a pattern I'm trying to watch in myself: when even the fun becomes a ladder to climb, something's leaking. I love the game; I'm slightly suspicious of the part of me that needed to win at it. (There's more on what games actually mean to me on the Games page — Rocket League is also a piece of design I've studied, not just a number on a leaderboard.)

Volleyball, hiking, and the rotation

Soccer and badminton get the most words because they're the ones I train, but the actual texture of my weeks is a rotation, and the rest of it is squarely about company. Volleyball is the third court sport — a three-hour-day kind of thing when I'm somewhere with a regular meetup, never a solo grind, always a group. Hiking is the outdoor version of the same instinct: it's on my city rubric right alongside the sports, it was one of my Japan meetup staples, and it's produced some of my favorite disaster stories.

The Yosemite one is the canonical example. Seven days, a cabin, a group of friends, and a plan I'd built obsessively around beating the dark to the cabin on the first night — which is very on-brand for me, the guy who turns a hiking trip into a logistics project. It went gloriously sideways: a friend fell flat off an eight-foot drop, another sliced both palms open on a careless jump, rain forced a retreat, and a parking saga blocked traffic in a way I'm still a little proud of. By night it became board games and The Holdovers on a laptop. Hike by day, games by night, everyone slightly injured — that's the kind of week I'm optimizing the whole rest of this page to be able to have more of.

The body, run like a build

Here's where the maker brain shows up most nakedly. I have versioned workout plans — literally 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 — because I iterate my own training the way I iterate software, and the version numbers aren't a bit, they're the honest log of a body and a program getting more sophisticated together.

• Workout Plan 1.0 — a beginner full-body split, light loads, stretch-heavy. The "I'm starting" version.
• 2.0 — a body-part split with brutally honest self-notes in the margins (“BAD FORM, too tired,” “can't do properly (SKIPPED)”). Failure logged, not hidden.
• 3.0 — the current one: an Upper/Lower split plus a dedicated Cardio & Abs day, supersets specified, per-set rep schemes, a weekly volume table (target sets per muscle group), and a PR log I level up like a character sheet.

The detail I like best is that the training week ends, deliberately, on "Sports: Badminton / Soccer." Sport isn't a reward bolted onto the lifting — it's baked into the program as the point of all the strength. I also keep travel fallbacks (a backpack-loaded squat-and-row home workout, a no-gym HIIT circuit) so the routine survives a relocation, and when I was last in Nagpur I genuinely built a comparison spreadsheet of five local gyms rated on equipment, AC, crowd, and cost — because of course I evaluate gyms the same way I evaluate cities.

And because I can't research anything halfway, the why underneath the plans is its own artifact: a four-tier, order-of-magnitude ranking of what actually drives muscle growth. Tier 1 is the stuff that moves the needle most (progressive overload, eating enough, protein at 1.6–2.2 g/kg, plain consistency); tier 2 is sleep and program design and cortisol; tier 3 is the small-but-real levers (creatine, sauna); tier 4 is the rounding error everyone argues about online (mind-muscle connection, massage). It's the same move as everything I build — find the real bottleneck, rank by leverage, ignore the noise — just pointed at my own arms. The thing I find genuinely funny is that the boring tier-1 levers are the ones nobody wants to hear about; everyone's looking for the secret in tier four. The discipline isn't knowing the science. It's refusing to be interesting about it.

I'll also cop to the obvious counterweight: I level up my workout like a character sheet, with PR receipts logged like quest rewards, and the part of me that does that is the same part that hit Grand Champion "because even my leisure has to be optimized." Gamifying my own body is what makes me consistent. It's also exactly the thing I have to keep an eye on — which I'll get to.

The clearest crossover between the body project and the Maker is a weight-loss bug I debugged with the wrong degree:

“I decided to use my Computer Science degree to debug my weight loss.”— the most honest sentence I've written

I'd lost a real amount of weight over a couple of years — early easy wins, then a year of lifting and tracking that added muscle and stripped fat — and then I plateaued hard. The problem wasn't willpower, it was signal. Daily fat loss is tiny next to a few pounds of water-and-food noise, so every weigh-in felt like a coin flip instead of feedback. The fix was a reframe straight out of debugging:

“I wasn't tracking my weight — I was tracking my delta.”— from the weight-loss feedback-loop notes

Track the gap between a daily target line and the actual number, and suddenly every morning is a clear instruction instead of a verdict. That method became Weave, the minimalist weight tracker — my mom and I were the first test subjects, and the pitch was literally that. The deepest design problem in the app turned out to be the one I knew best from the inside: the falling-behind / reset spiral, the way one bad week makes you want to quit the whole thing. Weave's entire UX is built to keep you from rage-quitting your own progress. Which is to say the hardest feature to build was the one that solves a problem I've lived. The body problem didn't stay a body problem. It turned into a product. That's the whole throughline of this page: research the gap, build the system, iterate, and sometimes ship the thing.

Longevity is the long game

The part of all this that I take most seriously, and find least glamorous, is the long game. I'm not chasing a beach-body number; I'm chasing being strong and sharp at seventy. So I keep a longevity protocol cribbed mostly from Peter Attia's Outlive, with targets tighter than any GP will hand you on a routine visit: ApoB under 60, a VO2 max in the top decile for my age (the single biggest predictor of all-cause mortality), HbA1c under 5.4, blood pressure around 110/70, and sleep measured for architecture, not just hours. I've read past the basics too — into the frontier stuff like senolytics and epigenetic reprogramming — and reasoned my way to "not yet" on things like microdosing GLP-1s, because the natural route preserves muscle better and I'd rather wait. My one-line summary of the whole philosophy:

“It's not bro-science, it's just doing the standard stuff with much tighter targets than your GP cares about.”— my longevity notes, on Attia's Outlive

VO2 max is the one I obsess over most — it's the "chi" factor behind every kind of endurance, and conveniently it's also what lets me run around a soccer pitch for ninety minutes. Even the longevity math loops back to the sports. The other targets are the unsexy ones a routine checkup glosses over: a fasting insulin under 5, visceral fat near zero on an actual DEXA scan rather than a BMI guess, blood markers checked early enough to act on instead of after something's gone wrong. None of it is exotic. It's just the standard playbook run with a longer time horizon than most people bother with, because the version of me I'm actually building for is the seventy-year-old who can still get picked for the team.

The guardrail

I'd rather name this than have you find it: the same drive that makes me consistent can tip into treating my body like a system to win, so I keep this discipline deliberately pointed at care, not punishment. The most important line on this whole page isn't a PR or a rank. It's the rule I keep:

“abs are a bonus, not a permission slip to exist.”— my own guardrail

That's the goal: discipline as care, not punishment. I out-built a rough stretch of my life by liking myself and getting interested in being healthy, and the work only stays good as long as it's pointed at being able to do more — last on the pitch, hike longer, show up for people — and not at deserving to take up space. Health is the long game precisely because the short game can hurt you while it feels productive.

What's next

If sport is how you meet people too — or you've got a standing soccer game that needs one more — say hi. I'll bring the electrolyte tabs and, if you remind me, the chafing cream.