Daily Training Through the End of 2025 (Started 2025/04)

Introduction and Goal

Last year, I had too much on my plate while also dealing with the anxiety of preparing for a national examination. I seriously overworked myself, and my body ended up developing a major problem.

In one sense, it was not necessarily disastrous, but it did make me realize that I could no longer stay up all night and eat recklessly with the fearlessness I had when I was younger. At that point, I asked a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and a dietitian for help and began a whole series of efforts to get my health back in order.

That process included taking supplements and Chinese medicine, sleeping more, and reducing my workload. I even began paying more attention to balanced meals and eating more vegetables.

Of course, I still eat chaotically sometimes XDDDD. But I now have a generally better direction for my diet, and when I do eat that way, I can clearly recognize what I am feeling and why I want that food at that moment.

Most of the time, it happens because something troublesome has come up at work and I want to eat something that will make me feel a little better.

I think the self-awareness of understanding why I want a particular food and what I am feeling in that moment is a very important kind of progress.

By the end of last year, I had also finally realized that I might truly be unsuited to making law my career. (Maybe I will write a separate post about that someday.) After deciding to set the national examination aside for the time being, I focused more fully on escape rooms, and the room we had spent so long preparing finally began its trial run at the end of February 2025.

Here is a tiny bit of promotion for our escape room:

Mijing Entertainment Studio Escape Room—Yating

Ours is a deeply immersive, story-driven room. Some players have recently described it as a ‘family-friendly’ room (?), so if you are interested, book a game and come play with me!

After the room opened, we were still extremely busy adjusting things and managing operations. By the time everything had stabilized a little and part-time staff had joined us, it was already sometime in April.

I gradually shifted some of my work back toward LearnMore’s online courses and career interviews, which gave me a little more time to use for myself. Truly something worth celebrating.

Although I had continued training myself to cycle between Neihu and different places, I had never exercised with a clear goal or plan. Once things began slowing down in April, I decided it was a good time to start exercising systematically too.

Right at the beginning, however, I ran into a question: ‘What should I set as my exercise goal?’

By nature, I am a very lazy person. The one thing I am comparatively diligent about is commuting by bicycle, mainly because I dislike being packed in with other people on public transit. Exercise has therefore never really been on my life to-do list.

Every so often I would feel newly motivated and decide to start exercising, but after two days I would think it was too much trouble, give up, and stop.

Then one opportunity appeared. Around that time, I was wildly obsessed with the Solo Leveling novels. While thinking about how to set an exercise goal, I suddenly remembered the daily quest in the story.

As the hunter completes daily training quests, he earns stat points and grows stronger. That actually feels a lot like how training every day can gradually build up your own physical abilities.

The daily quest includes a 10-kilometer run, plus 100 sit-ups, 100 push-ups, and 100 squats. Honestly, at first I had no idea whether this was even a goal a human being could reach.

(After all, it comes from One-Punch Man and Solo Leveling. Using it as a goal seems a little unrealistic.)

So I specifically searched online to see whether anyone had made short videos of themselves completing the daily quest for attention while Solo Leveling was trending on Netflix. It turned out that people really had.

But they were fitness coaches or other people who already trained regularly—people whose lives were practically centered on physical training.

‘Then there should be no problem with using this daily quest as my exercise goal, right?’ At least it looked like some humans could do it.

And that was how I began this daily exercise challenge, planned to last for more than half a year.

It is a little embarrassing to admit, but this really does look like a burst of chuunibyou was what finally made me decide to exercise. What an origin story.

My Starting Point: Fitness and Exercise Habits

Basically, I did not have any particularly consistent exercise habits before this. At most, after researching how to cycle up and down bridges, I developed a personal interest in using a bicycle for long-distance commuting.

A friend recommended that I join the challenge rides and leisure rides in a cycling app, but I often forgot to start the app after entering the riverside paths. I missed the records for several months in a row, and eventually used the app only to ‘check whether the riverside path is suitable for riding right now.’

My longest current bicycle commute runs from Jing’an MRT Station all the way back to Gangqian MRT Station, a ride of almost two hours. For a while, my rule for this kind of commute was: ‘If I am not in a hurry and it is not raining, I should generally commute by bicycle.’ I eventually became very accustomed to that amount of riding.

My weekly record was commuting by bicycle five days in a row, though not every trip was a round trip from Jing’an. That was roughly my level of activity.

A work partner told me this was low-intensity exercise that consumed a great deal of time—in other words, a little inefficient.

But I wanted to travel and enjoy the scenery while I rode, so at the time I decided to ignore that opinion XDDDD.

You can see the routes in several of my other posts:

Conquering the Route Between Zhonghe/Yonghe and Taipei—Huazhong Bridge

Conquering the Route Between Neihu and Downtown Taipei—Zhongshan Bridge

Conquering the Route Between Neihu and Downtown Taipei—Dazhi Bridge

Conquering the Route Between Neihu and Downtown Taipei—MacArthur Bridge No. 1

Most of the time, however, I never deliberately managed my pace. I rode very slowly and leisurely, and sometimes even got off and pushed the bicycle uphill. These rides were useful for building a little stamina and seeing the scenery, but they did not offer much beyond that.

As for common leg and core training, I had essentially abandoned it after I stopped going to the gym. My muscular endurance was probably nonexistent—basically zero.

Friends occasionally invited me to play ball sports, but because I am socially anxious, I usually declined. That meant I had none of the full-body exercise that volleyball, badminton, or even table tennis could have provided.

Most of the time I told myself, ‘I am genuinely too busy and do not have time!’ But only I knew that I was not actually so busy that exercise was impossible.

Sometimes the truth was simply that I was too lazy to change clothes, too lazy to take out the yoga mat, or armed with some other equally terrible excuse.

Although supplements and Chinese medicine had helped me adjust my health gradually, my traditional Chinese medicine doctor still often criticized my lack of stamina. I felt that it was probably closely related to my complete lack of exercise.

When I later confirmed this and described my activity level, the doctor looked at me with complete disbelief XDDDD—as if wondering how I had managed to live this many years without exercising at all.

All that neglect meant that, at the start of this exercise plan, my body-composition readings were astonishingly high XDD. I would never have realized the seriousness without measuring them. These were only readings from standing on a home scale, though; perhaps I will have a more formal measurement done later.

In the spirit of honestly facing my physical condition, here is a brief record of my starting numbers:

Weight: 60.4 kg

Body mass index (BMI): 23.6 (still in the healthy range, but getting close to overweight)

Body fat percentage: 30.9% (also still in the normal range, but getting close to obesity)

Muscle mass: 39.3 kg

Visceral fat: 5.5 (which seems to be within the normal range)

Body water percentage: 51.6%

Basal metabolic rate (BMR): 1,243 kcal/day

Taken together, these numbers give the impression that I am currently still healthy and within the normal ranges, but may be heading toward obesity (dead-eyed stare). Fortunately, we are about to start exercising!

Designing the Training Plan

Although my aim was eventually to complete the ‘daily quest from Solo Leveling,’ whether that quest is actually reasonable deserves some skepticism.

It looks wonderfully exciting in the anime, but could someone who barely exercises really reach that level of fitness? How long would it take? Those were things I needed to confirm first.

Even the amount of time I would have to spend each day involved several competing factors.

My first priority, then, was to find out whether the daily quest made sense as well-rounded training for the entire body, without neglecting anything important.

I know quite a few fitness coaches and people in related fields. But saying to them directly, ‘I want the fitness to complete Solo Leveling’s daily quest every day!’ would have been a little embarrassing, and I suspected they might think I had lost my mind.

In the end, I decided to let Copilot play the role of the fitness coach who would help me plan my training.

At the beginning, I first assigned Copilot a role. My initial prompt asked it to act as both a professional fitness coach and a registered dietitian who had passed the national examination, and then I began the rest of the discussion.

I first discussed the workload of the daily quest with the AI, along with how the training process should be adjusted if I wanted to build a body capable of completing it.

The AI’s advice can be summarized in the following points:

1. Solo Leveling’s daily workout tests well-rounded physical ability and fitness: It involves strength, endurance, and overall conditioning, and may use nearly every major muscle group. Because the total workload is so large, stamina is the greatest limitation and obstacle. (In my own case, ‘time’ may be another major limitation and obstacle = =.)

2. Beginners should train progressively: Early training can begin with smaller goals. The running portion, for example, can start at two kilometers and gradually increase. Different workouts should first strengthen different muscles instead of jumping straight into push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.

3. Rest days are necessary: This should not be daily training. The muscles need appropriate time to relax, with at least one or two rest days each week. (After all, real life has no potion that instantly removes fatigue.)

4. Different types of exercise can be combined to avoid fatigue: Train different things on different days—for example, muscular endurance on some days and cardiovascular fitness on others. Low-intensity sessions can also help avoid fatigue from overtraining. (This advice later helped enormously. Early on, the muscles I trained often could not function normally the next day; fortunately, the next day targeted something else instead of repeating the same work.)

Because my daily workload was still enormous, I could probably devote only about one to two hours to exercise each day.

I also occasionally needed to cover shifts at the escape room, had a fixed weekly trip to Zhonghe/Yonghe to teach, and could not really go to a gym during the first half of 2025, among other limitations.

After discussing it with the AI, I decided to begin the full training plan in April 2025 and aim to reach that level of performance and fitness by December 31, 2025. Overall, the plan would last more than half a year, which was quite a long timeline.

Once the overall training period was settled, the next step was to tell the AI how to arrange my training from April through December. In addition to assigning its role and describing my current physical condition and abilities, I added details about my workload, tutoring schedule, and the various restrictions on when I could enter a gym.

I asked it to work within the following restrictions, set a goal for each month, and arrange daily exercise and rest in weekly cycles:

1. If the plan includes core or muscular-endurance training, it should primarily use workouts from the Nike Training app and specify what type of workout I should choose. Any gym sessions should be scheduled for September or later.

2. In April and May, I can spend only one to two hours per day exercising.

3. Please arrange the training one week at a time and gradually increase the intensity.

4. The schedule must include both training and rest days. Any bicycle ride must last at least one hour; longer rides of more than ninety minutes should be scheduled on Saturdays.

5. Please include a rainy-day alternative in case a scheduled bicycle ride is disrupted by rain, so I can switch plans easily.

6. Please explain each month’s goals and training schedule, along with the plan for each week.

7. Cardio can be done through the Nintendo Switch games Fitness Boxing or Ring Fit Adventure instead of relying only on cycling, adding more variety to the exercise.

8. Based on this training volume, please plan daily bedtimes and wake-up times to ensure sufficient rest, keeping in mind that work prevents me from going to bed before midnight.

9. During periods when I cannot go to the gym, please provide training methods that require no equipment.

These restrictions sounded so troublesome that I would have felt terrible asking a real person for advice. I could only rely on AI (covers face).

With those constraints and the AI’s role established, it first divided the period from April through December into the following monthly goals:

April

Goal: Establish a consistent exercise habit and develop basic muscular endurance and cardiovascular fitness.

Plan: Core training, leg-endurance training, short runs of two to three kilometers, and bicycle rides of at least one hour. The main workouts would be beginner sessions from Nike Training.

May

Goal: Increase training intensity, advance core and endurance work to intermediate sessions, and extend running distance to five kilometers.

Plan: Add short, efficient HIIT sessions, progressively strengthen muscular endurance, and maintain at least two cardio sessions per week.

June

Goal: Consistently complete weekly endurance training, extend running distance to six kilometers, and reach fifty squats and fifty push-ups.

Plan: Increase the difficulty of leg and core training and complete one challenge workout each week, such as a full-body endurance session.

July–September

Goal: Run at least seven kilometers consistently, add mixed endurance and high-intensity training each week, and improve full-body coordination.

Plan: Extend bicycle rides to two hours, advance core training to a higher level, and challenge myself to reach seventy-five push-ups and seventy-five squats each week.

October–December

Goal: Complete a 10-kilometer run plus 100 squats, 100 push-ups, and 100 sit-ups each day.

Plan: Combine high-intensity interval training with endurance work, while continuing weekend bicycle rides.

As a J-type planner, I completely understand that plans sometimes fail to keep up with reality. I therefore treated these monthly goals as ideals for the time being. (And of course something unexpected happened later XDDDD.)

I might still need to adjust the plan as work and my physical condition changed. With those goals in place, I asked it to create an April schedule in weekly cycles, showing what I should do each day and providing rainy-day alternatives for outdoor activities.

That gave me a complete first month: what to do each day, the recommended duration, and the rainy-day alternative.

And for a J-type planner, once you have a table like this, all you need to do is follow it—problem solved!

To force myself to follow the schedule, I moved exercise almost all the way to the top of my priority list.

Fortunately, I usually finish tasks one or two weeks early, so adding these exercise sessions at short notice did not completely overwhelm me.

Because of my requirements, the schedule assigned different kinds of Nike Training workouts. I only needed to add the matching workout plans to my list.

I find Nike Training to be a very convenient app. It offers a huge range of workouts, with or without equipment, and lets you choose sessions for a specific body area or for the whole body.

Every workout has detailed videos, including multiple camera angles for each movement. During the workout, spoken prompts remind you to perform the movements properly and offer encouragement from time to time. It feels like having an instructor right beside you in an aerobics class XDDDD.

This is an exercise app I genuinely recommend, and most importantly, it is free XDDD.

With Ring Fit Adventure, meanwhile, I simply play for the full duration it asks of me. I do give myself one extra rule: I try to equip my character with skills that train different parts of the body, instead of fighting every monster with only blue skills or only red ones.

For cycling, I coordinate the schedule with my tutoring days. I deliberately arrange errands or tutoring on the same day so that I can ride a longer distance.

Combining commuting with exercise still lets me enjoy the scenery during an otherwise boring workout, which gives me more motivation to complete the plan.

For long runs, I use the track at a school near my home. I do not need to carry much, and running on a polyurethane track is a little easier on my body.

Not every workout Copilot planned exists in Nike Training, so I choose plans that target the area it requested. When necessary, I even combine several workout plans to meet Copilot’s requirement.

The Nutrition Side

For the dietary side, I discussed the overall direction with my dietitian friend, Aibo. Although Aibo specializes in nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood, she also gave me a great deal of practical advice about sports nutrition.

Here is her online dietitian profile for anyone who would like to consult her about sports nutrition or supplements.

Aibo’s Fitlo dietitian profile

Because the primary goal of this exercise plan is health rather than weight loss, I did not deliberately adopt an intermittent-fasting plan. Basically, I eat when I am hungry and do not force myself to eat when I am not.

I am already spending extra time exercising and forcing myself to work out. If I also had to suppress the urge whenever there was something special I genuinely wanted to eat, that would feel terribly unhealthy XDDD.

For the sake of my mood—and to make myself more willing to stick to the plan—I did not deliberately suppress cravings during this period.

When choosing food, however, I tried to pick meals with plenty of vegetables, a balanced amount of protein and healthier fats, and not too much refined starch.

One thing worth mentioning is that although I deliberately reduced my sugar intake, I made an exception within thirty minutes to an hour after exercise. Following my dietitian’s advice, I would have a sweet high-protein drink. The one I currently found at 7-Eleven is shown below.

This Super Protein drink comes in coffee and chocolate flavors. I think the chocolate tastes better, but it is often sold out QQQQQ, so I occasionally settle for coffee.

As for supplements, I continued taking the same kinds that my dietitian and I had already discussed. This depends on each person’s physical condition, so if you need to discuss supplements, I recommend speaking directly with Aibo too!

I have not changed my supplements specifically for this exercise plan. It is also possible that my dietitian had already taken this into account. In any case, if you have concerns, ask a dietitian directly.

How the Plan Went at the Start

Even though I am a J-type planner, I had never followed a formal exercise schedule before. Honestly, I had very little confidence in myself the first time I tried it.

‘I will probably do this for a few days, get lazy, and stop, I think XDDD.’ That was what I thought at the beginning.

To my surprise, during the week spanning late March and early April, I followed the schedule seriously and completed the entire week.

At first, exercising every day felt very unfamiliar. After a workout—especially one involving my core and legs—I would usually collapse on the floor for about ten minutes and be unable to get up.

The parts I had trained would also be impossibly sore the next day. I could not bend or use them normally at all.

For example, during the first few weeks, I basically could not bend over to pick things up on the day after core training Orz. I had to squat down instead.

If I needed to record a podcast the same day or the next day and had to travel from home to Wanhua, I would feel that life was unbearably difficult and I wanted to die.

By the second week, though, things had improved a tiny bit. Instead of lying down for ten minutes after a workout, I only needed five.

The training also made it obvious which parts of my body were truly hopeless. It felt like using an exam to reveal exactly what you had failed to learn.

In Nike Training’s quick core workout, there are frequent sit-ups: full sit-ups, then modified versions, and later bent-knee sit-ups with the left and right legs separately. At first, by the end of the session I could only lie on the floor, completely unable to perform the movement it demanded.

By the second week, there were still some movements I could not do at all while lying there, but the number of movements I could complete had increased.

My running also progressed until I could finish two to three kilometers in under twenty minutes. I did not feel unwell while running; instead, it felt refreshing.

I could feel clear progress after only two weeks. At a regular follow-up visit, my traditional Chinese medicine doctor finally commented, ‘Your stamina is slowly coming back.’ It was incredibly encouraging!

Then came my complete miscalculation. One Saturday, after finishing class at Chachun, I was supposed to do a long bicycle ride. I looked at the sky and had a bad feeling that it might rain.

But because I could feel the results of my progress, I thought I still had to follow the schedule. Despite the risk of getting caught in the rain, I chose to start the long ride anyway.

Sure enough, after crossing Huazhong Bridge I ran into heavy rain. I switched to a bus home after riding for more than an hour, but I had already been soaked and could not go straight home to dry off and blow-dry my hair. As a result, I became seriously ill during the third week.

That entire week of exercise was wiped out. I could not do any of it. Only after more than a week of recovery was I finally able to restart the plan in late April and early May.

Apparently I can no longer be as fearless as I was as a child and assume that getting soaked does not matter XDDDD. To be fair, Copilot had specifically prepared rainy-day alternatives for me.

It was stubbornness, I suppose. I had kept going perfectly for almost two weeks, and stopping felt like throwing all that work away.

The lesson is that you really cannot be too stubborn about these things!

Fortunately, at the very beginning I had asked Copilot to plan only April. The setback pushed everything back by a full month, but it also gave me two ideas: ‘I should document the whole process on my blog’ and ‘I need to measure my body data during the plan.’

That is how this post—and the body measurements above—came to exist.

Yes, I actually took those measurements only at the end of April. When I first began the plan, I intended to judge its success or failure solely by whether I could complete the daily quest at the end XDDD.

In short, my fearlessness broke the plan once almost as soon as it began. After that, whenever I saw rain or thought it was about to rain, I generally switched to the rainy-day alternative so that my physical condition would not interrupt the exercise plan again.

When I restarted, I assumed that after a week without training, I would have to begin everything from scratch. Right?

To my surprise, when I resumed leg and core training in late April and early May, I could perform more movements, and my recovery the next day was far better than it had been at the very beginning.

‘Could this be the result of those first two weeks of training?’ I could not help wondering.

So the parts I had trained had not gone to waste at all!! That gave me another reason to keep going!

A Short Conclusion

You understand the condition of your own body better than anyone else.

Before beginning this series of plans, I often woke up every day feeling exhausted. When I walked, my body felt so heavy that it seemed as though lead weights were tied to it.

After almost three weeks of training in total, I felt a clear improvement. At the very least, I now fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow, without the same problems with light sleep—except when I wanted to scroll through manga on my phone XDDD.

Although I did not deliberately force myself to eat a particular way, I chose better food when I had options. In the end, that meant I was eating at buffet-style cafeterias almost all the time XDDDD.

The biggest change was that when I genuinely wanted to eat something questionable, I would first pour myself a glass of water and ask: ‘Why do I want this right now? Do I definitely, truly want it?’

I think this series will continue. Copilot plans one month of exercise goals at a time, so the next blog update should come when it is time to change the goal—probably at the end of May!

A friend originally asked whether I wanted to turn this series into short videos. But short videos cannot record very much. They cannot thoroughly preserve details like how I prompted and discussed the plan with the AI, my body data, or the full exercise plan.

That is why I ultimately chose to document it on the blog: to offer a more complete reference for anyone else interested in trying something similar.

I hope I can keep this exercise plan going (clenches fist). If I can bring J-type planning even to exercise, then I will truly become an extremely powerful J-type planner!