Self MOT

New Year’s resolutions are rubbish. No one sticks to them, and they generally do very little good. The problem is we should be making resolutions every day and we should be changing concrete useful things about ourselves to make ourselves perform and function more efficiently. The concept of the Resolution is outmoded and outdated. We proudly introduce the Self MOT.

With it coming up to New Year, people will likely be thinking harder about ways they can improve themselves. Normally this means they’ll be planning on quitting smoking, starting a training routine, being more confident, drinking less, going out more, getting a partner, or something else abstract or non-ambitious like that. Here at the Biomatrix.Net however, we’re of the opinion that self-improvement shouldn’t be an annual occasion but something we’re continuously working on. At the same time, we’ve always focussed less on these kinds of superficial changes and more on improving yourself in ways that will take you above your peers. We’re not so interested in improving our hygiene, or our people skills in order to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Here at the Biomatrix we’re more interested in improving the size of our biceps so that we can perform fantastic feats of gymnastic ability; learning to leap across chasms, bench giant amounts, think at twice the speed. Finding a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or getting over a social nervousness is a base-level ambition; that’s how you should start off not an ambitious way to improve yourself. If you think about it, it’s that kind of attitude that could have left you feeling unconfident in the first place. Of course work on those things too, but do it all year round, and at the same time work on yourself in more meaningful ways. The success in relationships and business will come as a result of how you now carry yourself and are massively more successful in general. Have some ambition, some self belief, and take yourself up and above the rest. As in don’t just work on your confidence, make yourself faster, smarter and stronger so that you’re naturally more confident. Learn skills, improve your body, improve your mind and set ambitious goals. Shoot for the stars and do it all the time. Furthermore, do this all year round rather than having a half-arsed attempt during the first months of January.

So a good New Year’s resolution for a lot of people is to stop making pansy-ish, lame New Year’s resolutions. Instead you should be setting yourself goals throughout the months and planning ways you can improve yourself and your situation throughout the course of the next few years. What can you change about yourself that will make you perform better, be more productive, be more physically imposing and impressive? How can you achieve these goals over a certain amount of time? I will call the Self MOT. Here you will make a detailed assessment of yourself, and of your achievements and write down notes about anything that’s lacking in either your life, or in your own capabilities. Decide what’s pressing and what isn’t, and look for things you can change about yourself that will change your circumstances and potential. As Jackie Chan says – don’t let your circumstances control you; control your circumstances. It may not be New Year, in fact it probably isn’t as this is going live around the first half of December, but you can start this right away – what’s the point of waiting half a month before you start making positive change?

Take a sheet of paper. Now rate yourself on the following factors and answer the following points:

Strength:

Measurements (biceps, chest etc):

Speed:

Intelligence:

Productivity:

Looks:

Agility:

Knowledge:

Areas of expertise:

Areas lacking:

Emotional Stability/Control:

Happiness:

Health:

Weaknesses:

Skills (list):

Finances:

Assets:

Relationships:

Spare Time:

Areas of concern:

Goals:

Ambitions:

Now fill these out and use the answers on each element to inform your answers in others. For example if you’re not happy then fill in goals and ambitions that will help improve your happiness, and fill out areas of concern that are causing you to be unhappy. Make and answer more items if appropriate.

With this done you should find you can now identify more accurately areas of weakness and problems and faults. So follow this up with a ‘four year plan’ that can help you fix each of these issues. This might involve elements such as increasing the size of your biceps or the strength of your bench press, along with increasing productivity and salary through getting a new job or improving your business. Ensure your larger plans are made up of smaller ones and set targets throughout the year. Spend large amounts of time focussing on problem areas and goals and know that there’s no problem you can’t solve given enough thought, no matter how abstract or how large – even if it takes a few days. You may find you also need to adapt the plan over time, and may choose to ‘internalise it’, so that you can adapt it to changing events without having to write it out. So long as you have a plan, active goals, and are aware of the problems in your life and in your performance; you will be able to keep moving forwards and keep improving to ensure you get the most out of life.

New Stuff at The Biomatrix and Friends

The Biomatrix as you know, is more than a mere website, it is a living breathing organism. It is in the shape of an octapus too, and like any good organism, it has tendrils which it is now extending throughout the internet. Oh and also... it evolves...

As a result there is now an awesome search bar on the front page bellow the new videos that will enable to you search the biomatrix for related subjects. Want to improve your pecs? Type 'pecs' and press enter. It's brilliant!

But it won't only show you results from the Biomatrix, but the whole of the NQR Network. NQR Network, you repeat irritatingly, what is that? Well it's the new conglomerate of new related sites from the producers of the Biomatrix, and that includes first of all: www.psychological-warfare.com - our brand new website! For everything you need to know about outsmarting your opponents using psychology.

Finally, as though all that wasn't enough you can now follow NQR on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NotQuiteReality

So go and do those things!

Action Hero Song

If you like the Action Hero advert from Channel Five on the front page of the Biomatrix then good news - you can download the mp3 for free from HERE!

The Expendables Trailer

Here at the Biomatrix we've been following the Expendables development rather eagerly - it's looking to be one of the most action filled films ever made and represents many of the Biomatrix's priniciples - training to make yourself the best you can be. Stallone's physique for 63 is actually insane, and any film that finally unites Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger has to be worth the price of admission.

Can You Survive on JUST Supplements?

Being a ridiculously big Rocky fan I have the 36 Maffia song from Rocky Balboa on many of my workout playlists. I like to sing along and pretend it's me giving the threats like 'you'll be drinking fried chicken through a crazy straw' etc which helps motivate me during a workout (I always imagined they deserved it though...). As it turned out however it was I who was to end up drinking fried chicken through a crazy straw after getting beaten up in Bournemouth (In my defence though I was drunk, outnumbered and apparently still took an abnormal number of hits to the face seemingly with a knuckle duster without falling over or going unconscious). I literally had fried chicken in one straw and the vegetables in another. The straw wasn't technically a crazy straw but it was crazy in that it was a Halloween straw with a skeleton on it. That's pretty crazy right?? I mean why would a skeleton be on a straw?

So anyway, that wasn't particularly nice and was tough work to suck through a straw. So I moved on to complan. That actually is quite nice - I had the banana one and that's nice anyway. In fact it was just like a protein shake... which got me thinking; why wasn't I having one of those instead? This was the perfect opportunity to get some hyper lean muscle - for Rocky 3 Stallone allegedly lived off just protein shakes and burned toast - why couldn't I? I would turn this unfavourable situation around and make my lack of mouth the catalyst for a great new bodylab experiment - I would live off of just supplements.

Of course though protein shakes only really contain one essential aspect of our diet - that being protein, and as I advise elsewhere on this site you need every aspect of your diet to stay healthy. So I decided that to do this properly I'd need some more supplements and training foods. Namely Berroca - for every vitamin and mineral I wasn't getting from vegetables (and everything my body needed to repair itself), Omega 3 for fats, and Lucozade for energy. I now had my carbs, my minerals and vitamins, essential fatty acids and my proteins. The only thing I was missing here was fibre but of course the prospect of a 'drinkable' fibre doesn't make any sense.

This meant I was getting high concentrated quanities of everything my body needed without anything extra, and all readily available for its biological purpose. As you might imagine then this lead to a rather more ripped physique pretty quickly and surprisingly on this meagre amount I wasn't too hungry either (though my apetite had been somewhat ruined). It doesn't sound healthy, but as a diet it's certainly preferable to the Atkins or some shit like that and I can't see anything immediately wrong with it. For bodybuilders looking to cut before a competition... why not?

At the same time I started to suspect that supplying my body with concentrated vitamin E and protein could help it to heal the scarring and broken bone, and that I could help this with other supplements. For that reason I added GABA to the mix to give myself extra growth hormone that my body could use to heal the wound and added vitamin E cream to my face at the advice of the doctors. Vitamin C I suspect helped fight infection (along with the antibiotics) too.

Oh and I took one other supplement for the swelling 'Arnica'... which is a 'Homeopathic Remedy' - read as bullshit. I can't believe a Nurse recommended it to me, but it's a substance claims to be so diluted by sugar that if there was just one particle in the observable universe it wouldn't be that diulted by all of the others. This only goes to prove a) that it has nothing in it b) that homeopaths are liars and c) you should always research anything before you start taking it - even if it was prescribed to you.

So I got a lot more ripped from this extreme diet, how did the supplements do at helping the healing? Well the Arnica unsurprisingly will have done nothing (my friend purposefully overdosed on them to demonstrate their lack of active ingredients and surprise surprise was fine), but the rest might have. In theory extra protein and growth hormone should have aided the healing and in fact both my cheek bone and my sewn up lip are showing more signs of recovery than the hospital staff predicted... It could be that my weird science worked, or just that I'm magic. Either is possible.

In the future I hope we'll have access to extracellular matrix for healing wounds, which has shown to be able to grow back the tips of fingers. Until then, other transhuman/bodybuilding methods might be able to help. As a way to get super lean fast then eating just supplements works well too; and until I can get KFC in a curly straw that will be my new liquid meals plan.

Report From The Trenches..

This site is focussed on self improvement with a heavy emphasis on training, and that includes martial arts and combat training. I practice what I preach and so can personally 'road test' what I learn. So how did my training hold up when I was set upon by 4 drugged up thugs?

I'm going to honest... it held up badly. For a rough idea of how badly, yesterday I drank my roast dinner through a straw and today I don't talk; I squeek like Sweep from Sooty and Sweep. So not perfect but in my defence I was rather drunk and the weird thing it I didn't try to fight back, or run, but instead just stood there getting hit in the face. And making what I thought were funny jokes.

So in terms of endurance I did well, and I think they were impressed that it took about seven punches to make me fall over and that I didn't seem to react at all. Thing was that at no point did it hurt, and still doesn't, which meant that rather than run I just stood there saying 'have you hit me? It feels like maybe you did?' followed by 'Stop hitting me!'. I thought it was funny. It wasn't really in retrospect... Kept my honour though...

The thing that annoys me is that I didn't try and fight. If I'd tried I'd almost definitely have still lost (while four were attacking me a lot more were after my friends... who survived scot free damn them!) and maybe have got hurt worse, but I reckon I could have taken two down. Which would have been a much cooler story. This took aboutThe problem was that they gave no warning that they were going to attack like they normally do and caught me completely off guard. After following us the main guy said 'Why you lippin' us?' when I said 'we weren't', I got hit straight in the face. From there I just stood there, for a good two minutes, asking Craig to inspect my eye before getting hit again. And again and again. It wasn't until I went down that my alcohol-addled brain realised it was time to flee and I rolled, yes rolled, away...

Though the extent of the damage may have been partly my fault for innactin. This demonstrates how you can't really prepare for that sort of thing. I couldn't attack him pre-emptively as then I'd have been the first to attack in a situation where he may well have then left us alone, and even getting into a stance could provoke a reaction. If you read my book you'll see the 'step back hands up' technique which would have been very useful. I need to carry that with me everywhere... It also supports my theory that the psychological element is pretty much key in a fight and is the one thing they don't really teach in Martial Arts (being why they're essentially useless). I'll work on it.

At the same time though the real moral of this story is 'get less drunk'. Craig managed to dodge them, and I would have been able to do the same (they were rubbish punches) which would have been great. No matter how good my reactions were normally though they weren't going to work great with that much alcohol in me... So it's key to always be ready. Drinking alcohol is fun, but I should stop at the point where my reactions have become useless.

Anyway what matters now that I'm sober is how I'm going to deal with the situation. I'm seeing it as a learning curve and am going to use the recuperation time to hopefully come back better and work on some new projects. When Green Arrow got beaten to a pulp he went in for training so it wouldn't happen again, when a Saijan gets the crap beaten out of him he comes back stronger, and when Iron Man gets busted he makes a new suit of armour. So that's what I'll be doing, and as I can't eat I'll also be using the time to try surviving on just supplements, you can read how that goes right here. Stay tuned! I'll be back...

Adam Sinicki Disassembled

When writing the equivalent of a novel a week started to get a little too much for my primitive brain to handle I started to put on my Transhuman cap and start thinking of ways to squeeze every last bit of potential out of my grey matter…

As I write this I am in chilling in Rome with a mug of tea and a bowl of ‘Cao Flakes’ (petali di grano di cocao!). This is far and away however from the pace of life I’ve been experiencing lately however (although a stressful search to find the keys that unlocked my suitcase was more familiar), where I have been working from home to earn a living as a full-time freelance writer.
For anyone who’s ever tried working from will know that it’s harder and more stressful than you might think. Yes you can get up whenever you want and listen to Elo while working if you so choose (or watch Jeremy Kyle), but that’s precisely the problem - you have to be self motivated and highly disciplined all the time. This is even more the case as you get paid for exactly the amount of work you do. If you work in an office for example and you check Facebook, you’re technically still being paid; being paid to check Facebook. If you check Facebook and you’re self employed however, that means you’ll get less work done that day and you’ll have less to sell.
This means that if you work for a regular type of profit you can’t afford to take breaks. At all. I write 3 500 word articles an hour, and I get paid $21 dollars for that. That’s around £11 and that’s what I need to earn to survive. Most people simply wouldn’t want to do that as it requires me to pump out those 3 articles regardless of how tired or distracted I am and with no breaks in between. Those 1,500 words an hour equate to 12,000 words a day and 60,000 words a week - which is roughly the size of a novel (the worst novel in the world but a novel nonetheless). A novel a week. Every week. Then on top of that try to run this website and work on my own projects that will hopefully one day set me free of this crazy vicious cycle. And then I workout, go out with friends, date my girlfriend, keep up with family and house hunt too. So apologies if I’m occasionally slow updating the Biomatrix every now and then…
Perhaps unsurprisingly a novel a week is pretty much reaching the maximum output that my brain is capable of, and interestingly I’ve lately been suffering headaches, stress and fatigue (cool huh?). It’s given me an opportunity to test the maximum capability of my brain. Granted this wasn’t helped by my concussing myself using a makeshift grappling hook which is actually still a cause for concern... Or by my contracting Swine Flu (and still managing to do a workout - huzzah!). It’s meant the last couple of weeks have kind of run parallel to Tony Stark’s again where he’s deleted his mind and slowly losing the plot. I’ve grown my moustache again too…
I’m interested in this for several reasons - firstly because going past the point of comfort is how you go about training - so potentially my brain could start to find this kind of high-intensity writing easy (I’m also learning more than you could ever want to know about plumbing, pest control, various medicines, locksmithing, and gardening). So it’ll be interesting to see whether my productivity starts to go up - if it does it could reach pretty impressive levels. So far I’ve noticed nothing but it‘s early days.
At the same time though it gives me the opportunity to test other ways of increasing that output potential, namely through nootropics and other techniques. Once I reach a certain point procrastination becomes unavoidable. It’s not me just putting off something I no longer want to do; it’s my brain actively being unable to concentrate on one subject matter due to lack of energy. This told me that the first thing I needed to increase was energy and concentration and the best way I knew to do that was with a drug I’ve written about on this site before called Guarana. It’s nothing particularly new and it’s in all of the various energy enhancing sports drinks etc, but taken plain there’s really not much that beats it in my opinion and it makes a great boost about mid-way through my day when I start to lag by just subtle increasing my ability to focus on a single task. Hopefully soon I can look into some of the many other brain enhancers such as modivil - though in the UK these are expensive and hard to come by so there‘s definitely space on the market for something else.
I do also find however that taking my creatine helps, and leaves me just a little less lethargic at the end of the day. I’m not the first to suggest that it has anisotropic properties and it seems that the brain can benefit from the extra energy too. NO2 also helps with blood flow to the brain and helps me feel a little ‘fresher’ if this makes any sense, but don’t take it if you suspect you have a suppressed fracture on your temple… Of course caffeine and bananas are also useful mainstays.
On this site I’ve also long been an advocate of investing in technology to help the cause too and ‘augmenting’ yourself with increased capabilities. So I took my own advice for a change and invested in the ‘Eee PC’, a computer so small that I can work on trains and buses and carry it around easily with me in my beautiful new leather man bag. The laptop screen is only 7” so it really is small enough to tuck away in a bag and to forget it’s even there but at the same time the keyboard is just large enough to type on quickly (roughly my thinking speed actually so there‘s never any reason to pause when typing). This has massively increased my productivity, but also in ways I didn’t expect - such as the fact that the screen is too small to browse the web and so procrastinate and the fact that I can now multitask more easily - even typing articles while using the other computer to chat on MSN.
This further inspired me to find other ways to multitask and make use of the rest of my time. Using hands-free I can easily chat on the phone while typing, but I decided to take this one step further and start dictating articles to my sister while driving. As I often drive to Oxford and Guildford that makes good use of a lot of otherwise wasted hours. I also realised I could go old school and jot notes on a pad to type up when I get back. By carrying a pad of a paper and a pen then I have access to productivity tools even when I can’t take the mini laptop. This means that when I come round to typing my brain gets a rest.
Finally the last productivity ’trick’ is to make sure you get enough sleep. Having tried to write hung over or on minimal sleep I’ve realised just how important that is. Eight hours really is the minimum if you want to get the best performance out of your nonce so check out the article on this site about maximising your sleep.
Obviously the chances are that you won’t need to go to these lengths to push your brain unless you’re some kind of CEO who attends night-school, but it should be interesting nonetheless to see just how much performance you can get out of your neurons and if you do decide to get a little extra tutelage then you’ll be prepared.