[3/28-4/3] 2026 Goal Progress
Health
Personal Training Session #11
Went to my 11th session.
I've been focusing on the Big 3 lifts. For bench press, 65kg for 2 reps was my limit. I can do 60kg for 5 reps and 50kg for 5 reps. So my max is now 65kg.
For deadlifts, I continued with 90kg from last week. But this time I lowered the starting height from 18cm to 16cm, pulling from a lower position—8 reps for 2 sets. It felt pretty much at my limit, so 90kg is probably my ceiling for now.
Since I pushed hard on deadlifts, I went easy on my lower back and kept squats at 40kg for 10 reps, 3 sets. Still can't load up the weight on squats yet.
The Body Changes Are Real
My physique is looking better. I honestly think so when I look in the mirror.
But what's even bigger is that my chronic headaches have almost completely disappeared. My neck doesn't hurt when I carry my kid anymore. I've built up stamina, so I don't get mentally exhausted when I want to do something.
My mental state has changed too. I used to feel vague anxiety a lot, but now it's almost gone. I can maintain my mood at a level slightly above baseline. I've become more positive.
My weight went from 68kg when I started training to 73.5kg now. Body fat percentage hasn't changed, so it must be muscle gains.
I'm hungry all the time now. Like, right now too. I'm eating way more.
Home Training and Creatine
I'm also doing dumbbell presses at home outside of personal training. 22kg × 2 for 10 reps in the first set, then I get wobbly at 9 reps in the second set so I stop there, and do a third set if I have energy left.
I also started taking creatine, which was recommended to me a while ago. Only 3 days in, so no effects yet.
Nasal Irrigation for the Win
It's peak pollen season, but nasal irrigation is incredibly effective. I want to recommend it to everyone.
Sleep and Daily Rhythm
This is a challenge.
I used to wake up at 4-5am, but lately it's been 8-9am. Mornings have been hectic.
The reason is simply that I'm going to bed late. I got hooked on Netflix survival reality shows and end up watching "just a little bit." (Though this ties into English learning later.)
I'm also inconsistent with lunch—some days I eat, some days I don't. When I power through work in the morning, the good lunch spots nearby close before I know it. Not great.
Work
Team AI Hands-on Sessions Are Heating Up
We're doing weekly hands-on sessions about the company's direction. As we keep going, communication between teams has been increasing.
One team member has absolutely mastered Claude Code, and I went to observe. What impressed me was the design philosophy of defining agent roles, normalizing skills, and distributing them across markdown files.
On top of that, they set up an orchestrator (conductor) agent, and humans always communicate through it. The conductor calls the necessary agents, and each agent calls the skills it needs to implement or work on tasks. Pretty impressive stuff.
Everyone's also started using cmux. I've graduated from iTerm2 and moved to cmux. I'm used to it now. Currently the only differences are the feel and notifications when AI work is done, but there should be more features to catch up on.
Library Stripping as a Strategy
Library quality issues (vulnerabilities) have been happening quite frequently lately. We're conscious about regular monitoring, pnpm settings, and version pinning, but what we're actively doing is library stripping.
Since AI can implement things blazingly fast, we strip out libraries and implement only the parts we use as utility methods ourselves. As long as Node.js doesn't get some weird vulnerable version baked in, we should be pretty safe.
We've also proposed a vulnerability news monitoring workflow and are working on it.
Parallel Execution: Starting the Day with PR Reviews
I'm having AI implement things aggressively, and one-shot LGTMs are stacking up. But when I'm working on one thing, I can only do one thing.
I'm thinking about using worktrees, but ideally I want to fire off all my assigned tasks in parallel at the start of the day and begin work with PR reviews. I know how to do it, so I just need to actually do it.
Money
NISA and US Stocks
NISA is executing the contributions I planned last month, and I've already used up this year's growth investment quota. Just watching now.
But US stocks are unstable due to geopolitical risks (war issues). I'm expecting things to resolve within the year, so I'm thinking of taking profits when there's a good bump.
I'm thinking of writing a paid article about wealth building, but I'm still a noob at it. Need to build up more results before publishing.
92 Days Straight on Duolingo
92 consecutive days of learning. I feel like I've gotten pretty decent at everyday English conversation.
But yesterday's interview absolutely destroyed me.
A tech company I really admire overseas asked me to do a user interview, all in English. I thought, "Time to show off my Duolingo gains," but while I could understand what they were saying, I couldn't fire back at their pace. I ended up reading English sentences through Google Translate.
When you think about working or living abroad, you really need to go back and forth quickly. Learning by doing is probably the fastest way to improve. It was great motivation.
Taking Action to Learn English
I have quite a few English speakers around me, so I reached out to all of them asking, "How did you learn to speak English?" Got tons of good info, so I'm trying things out.
- Watch the Netflix reality shows I'm hooked on with English subtitles
- Friends was recommended but Episode 1 was crazy hard (fast, lots of slang, lots of jokes)
- Increase input and shadow more
- Since there are lots of foreign tourists where I live, muster up the courage to say "May I help you?"
That last one takes serious guts. But I'm going for it.
Wrapping Up
Looking back at 2025, I wanted to do a lot of things in 2026. I'm slowly taking baby steps and trying various things.
Training and English in particular have become really habitual. Because they became habits, I've been able to maintain new habits for 2 weeks too. I used to be a serial quitter, but I've grown so much.
"Muscles don't lie," as Testosterone-san says, and I can feel this firsthand.
Continuing next week. Using AI to boost work efficiency, increase my free time, and spend it on technologies I want to learn, knowledge that contributes to the company, and hobbies.
I'm going to create my ideal work-life balance myself.