Daily Training Through the End of 2025 (First Check-in: 2025/06)

Introduction

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had some health issues, and that a bout of chūnibyō made me decide to start exercising every day.

I took the daily quest in Solo Leveling as the ultimate training goal and benchmark, hoping that by the end of 2025 I could at least reach that level of fitness.

You can read the details in this earlier post:

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

I did start the plan in early April, but then I got sick for a week and it fell apart. I restarted it in May and decided to formally record the whole process.

Before I knew it, I had kept it up for more than a month. A new month had come around, which meant it was time to adjust the workouts. So here I am, hurrying to update the series before we get halfway through June.

If I drag it out any longer, I might still adjust the plan on schedule, but the whole point of keeping a record will be lost XDDD.

My body measurements compared with before

First, of course, I want to record all my body measurements and how they compare with the last time.

To make the figures as comparable as I could, I measured at the same time of day as for the previous post, and made sure I hadn't had a huge meal the day before or anything like that.

Weight: 58.4 kg (previously 60.4 kg) → down

Body mass index (BMI): 22.8 (previously 23.6) → down

Body fat percentage: 31.3% (previously 30.9%) → up

Muscle mass: 37.8 kg (previously 39.3 kg) → down

Visceral fat: 5.0 (previously 5.5) → down

Body water percentage: 49.9% (previously 51.6%) → down

Basal metabolic rate (BMR): 1,196 kcal/day (previously 1,243 kcal/day) → down

If I look only at weight, it has clearly gone down. I can feel that there's a bit less extra flesh on me, too, and I think my shape looks better?

The number varies a little depending on when I weigh myself, but after about two months of exercising I no longer see anything over 60 kg on the scale. It tends to hover around 58 kg.

Sometimes it's even close to dropping below 58. Considering that I haven't been restricting my diet at all—and sometimes eat quite happily—I'm honestly surprised by how much my weight has fallen.

But when I saw that my body fat percentage had gone up and my muscle mass had gone down, I suddenly thought, “Wait, did some of my muscle actually turn into fat???” I was discouraged for a while, and then went straight to a dietitian friend to talk it through.

“You don't eat nearly enough protein in a day. How do you expect to build muscle?” my dietitian friend said, rather exasperated.

It seems possible that as my weight went down, I lost both muscle and fat, so the muscle mass went down even though the amount of fat did too.

That made it clear to me that I needed to pay more attention to what I ate in June. I really couldn't keep eating entirely according to my mood.

That's easy to say, of course. When work and everything else pile up, I still end up eating chaotically. What can I do? (shrug)

How the previous month's workouts actually went

For most of last month, I followed the workout plan Copilot had made for me. I only deviated when something unavoidable came up—for example, if I had to work all day and really couldn't get up early without being a wreck.

Or if I had plans in the evening and genuinely couldn't find any time to exercise. Otherwise, I pretty much followed the plan every day.

If I had to go out to record a podcast during the day, I'd also try to get home earlier so I wouldn't miss that day's workout.

Here's a little record of what happened with each kind of exercise, and some of the improvements I felt.

Ring Fit Adventure

Ring Fit is one area where I can really feel the progress. Before starting this plan, I could do maybe two short levels before the game asked if I wanted to stop for the day (and that didn't even include a Dragaux boss level—just ordinary ones).

Tired after two levels. My stamina really was that awful XDDDD.

After a month of concentrated training, though, I can sometimes finish a boss level and still go on to make a bunch of smoothies, do some in-game Gym challenges, or play other levels.

All together, playing for 30–40 minutes is no problem now. On one or two days when I had more free time and got carried away, I even exercised my way through an entire world.

When choosing skills, I try to work different parts of my body evenly. I include blue, red, yellow, and green skills and spread them out, rather than always choosing based on the monsters' weaknesses.

The result is that some levels take absolutely forever and leave me completely wiped out.

Wide squats are still ridiculously hard, though = =. I have to take a little break partway through; I can't keep doing them in one stretch.

I recently unlocked the overhead squat. It does a lot more damage, but it's also a lot more exhausting...

And seriously, how do you get a perfect guard with the ab guard? (confused) Sometimes I accidentally get beaten to death : (.

Fitness Boxing

I can basically finish a 48-minute session of Fitness Boxing on the Switch now without much trouble. Whether or not a session includes lower-body moves, I feel like I've exercised without getting too out of breath.

But perhaps because of the game format, Fitness Boxing is mostly just punching along to music. Unlike Ring Fit, there's no story, and after a while I started finding it a little boring.

It's essentially the same few moves on repeat, so I ended up boxing while watching shows. At least Boxing has helped me get through quite a few of them.

So it's an exercise I can do pretty comfortably now, but I'm a bit tired of it. That's a limitation of the game, I guess. I hope I find another workout game that's more fun.

Nike Training

The Nike Training app broadly divides workouts into endurance, mobility, and strength. Some focus on legs, some on the core, and some train the whole body.

Once Copilot had laid out my plan, I picked workouts to match the body parts and types of training it had scheduled.

I was feeling confident after the first month and thought I'd try some intermediate Nike Training sessions in May. Then an intermediate workout hit me with a special kind of burpee, and after one round I nearly expired. So I stuck with beginner-level sessions after all.

I can now finish the leg endurance workouts. My legs are still a little sore afterward, but I recover faster, and the next day no longer feels as if somebody has taken me apart and put me back together.

At the beginning, there were lots of core exercises where all I could do was collapse on the floor. By the end of May, I could do almost all of them!

My core really was incredibly weak at first, but it has gradually gotten stronger. I can now do the basic exercises without a problem.

Certain moves, like bicycle crunches, are still a bit of a stretch, though.

The core work has also made several of the “yellow skills” in Ring Fit feel much less exhausting XDDDD. A nice bonus.

As my stamina has slowly improved, I haven't had much trouble with the mobility workouts either, whether they involve jumping around or running.

The biggest problem is probably still how weak my chest and upper body are XDDDD. I can't do a full push-up at all. Even with a modified push-up, I manage only a few before collapsing and panting. Why is it so brutal?

Overall, though, compared with the time when I would finish one workout and just die on the floor, I've clearly improved a great deal.

Cycling

Cycling feels like half an improvement, because I'm already used to commuting by bike between Neihu and other parts of town. If the plan calls for just an hour of cycling, that's pretty easy for me.

Whether I'm riding from Neihu to the recording studio or to an escape room, the journey is usually over an hour anyway. Maybe all that riding has already trained me pretty well.

But right after we had planned the schedule, my tutoring session moved to Tuesdays. Tuesday then became a complicated trip: ride to a transfer point, then take the MRT to Jingan Station.

I kept up that troublesome routine for almost a month. In a way, I'm rather impressed with my own perseverance XDDDDD.

The part where I really notice a difference is the ride home from tutoring, starting at Jingan MRT Station. If I'm quick, it takes nearly two hours; if I stop for dinner or wander somewhere else, it can take about two and a half.

That's roughly twice as long as my usual bicycle commute.

At first, I had to stop and rest around Dadaocheng before I could get moving again.

Now I can basically ride all the way from Jingan Station to Gangqian Station in Neihu without stopping. I don't feel breathless or as if I'm about to die, and I can keep up a reasonably fast pace the whole way.

The bigger problem may be that I'm bored of the scenery on that ride. I can't think of anywhere farther to go in the near future, though, so I'm sticking with it.

On rainy days when I have to switch to the backup plan, I get a little fed up. Most of Copilot's rainy-day alternatives are Nike Training, and I deliberately do more, turning them into two workouts.

Then I end up absolutely exhausted XDDDD. It has rained quite a few times over these two months (it is the rainy season, after all), so at this point neither cycling nor the rainy-day workouts seems to be too much of a problem.

Running longer distances

Running was the most painful workout at first. I've never been good at running 800 meters, and I also find it kind of boring.

Later I used my Apple Watch to put the Spotify music I listen to most on my watch, and listened on my AirPods while I ran. That made running a lot more enjoyable.

It's also inconvenient to carry my phone while running, so I leave it behind. That gives me a little time offline, which is a real gift when I want a break from work.

I gradually found myself looking forward to Sunday's run. It's a chance to step away from everyday life for a little while.

But running was genuinely hard at the beginning. I couldn't settle into a rhythm of breathing in and out, and I would end up gasping.

After looking up some information and adjusting how I breathed, I could keep running without my throat feeling quite so strained.

I went from running one lap and walking one lap to running four before I needed to walk one. What a leap! Breathing!! Breathing is everything!!

My distance also grew from 2 km to 3 km. It feels like my cardiovascular endurance has improved quite a bit.

Overall, the improvements in my stamina and muscular endurance that I feel during these different workouts are far more noticeable to me than the numbers on the body-composition scale.

I even feel as if my back muscles have opened up a little, where I used to tend to hunch. My whole posture feels better.

More amusingly, I can fit back into a couple of pairs of pants that used to be too tight—and they're even a little loose now.

All I can say is that some of these changes are things you can only really feel when you're the one doing the exercise XDDDD.

The revised June workout plan and changes to my routine

After reviewing my results from May and part of April, the next step was to discuss with Copilot how to adjust the workouts for June.

Since I have tutoring on Tuesday evenings throughout June, I specifically asked Copilot not to schedule cycling on Tuesdays anymore.

I also wanted to increase the muscular-endurance work a little, add extra training for my chest and upper body, and raise the cardiovascular challenge somewhat.

I told Copilot how the April and May plan had actually gone and what I wanted to change in June, then asked it to make a plan that fit this month better.

Another interesting thing: I happened to look into my Human Design chart and felt I'd found a way of managing time that better matched my own flow of energy. So I rebuilt how I use each day, including fixed times for getting up and going to bed.

I worked that into the new workout schedule, and used Notion Calendar to manage and follow each day's plans.

Maybe I'll write another post someday about what I took from Human Design and how I've applied it to managing my time in everyday life.

After talking it over with Copilot, one notable change was that, because I emphasized how little I'd trained my chest and upper body, it scheduled push-ups every other day.

The plan starts with kneeling push-ups and gradually progresses to standard ones. I guess push-ups are the most direct way to strengthen my chest XDDDD.

It also gradually increases the long run to 4.5 km, starting from 3 km in the first week and adding a little each week.

I think it stopped short of 5 km because I said outright in my prompt that 5 km would probably kill me and asked it not to jump straight there (so it gave me 4.5 km instead.

It also extended my Ring Fit and Nike Training sessions. Based on the areas it wanted me to train, I chose the corresponding Nike Training workouts for later on (and even increased the difficulty of some of them.

There wasn't really room to make the cycling trips any more demanding, but I kept them for the aerobic exercise. There are now only two cycling days.

Overall, the plan hasn't changed dramatically; the intensity just looks a little higher across the board.

As for food, I'm now trying to take my dietitian friend's advice seriously. Besides eating more vegetables, I'm trying to get a daily amount of protein in grams roughly equal to my body weight in kilograms, whether through chicken breast, protein drinks, or other means.

The interesting thing about my daily schedule now is that I go to sleep at midnight and stop using the computer sometime after 11 p.m.

I also set aside time in the evening to learn other things, plus some me time to relax and disconnect.

My working hours have dropped by a lot, but I have more time to engage with the outside world. That, too, is a change I made based on Human Design.

A small conclusion

When I first started this plan, I didn't think I could keep it up for even three days. Yet as I write this, I've managed almost two months.

Perhaps I started at the right moment and received a particular sign: my health had been acting up, and I felt I should have the fitness and reflexes to escape if a possible future situation called for it.

That really does sound like a Manifesting Generator getting into the flow of energy, doesn't it? (laughs)

After nearly two months, I can clearly see how much my fitness has grown. A more regular routine—and making myself put work down after a certain hour—have also given me a better balance between work and life.

I can slowly see changes in how my body feels, and it takes me less time to recover.

More than anything, once I cleared some space in my schedule, I seemed to have more time to take in information and connect with people. My mental state feels much better, and I feel lighter.

At first, the numbers on the body-composition scale made me pretty sad. How could I have exercised all this time and ended up with more fat?

Then I talked with a friend, who said, “The results of exercise are subjective. If you feel a change, that's a change.” After that, I stopped fixating quite so much on the numbers on the scale. I'm trying to keep a more open mind and notice the little changes in every part of my life.

Anyway, it looks like I can keep this going! And I suppose I have to keep going, too!