What fitness or health outcome would you like step-by-step guidance for? Unlike the community challenge, the classroom serves your deepest wish for your personal fitness and health goal. The distinction is * community challenge builds rapport among us with activities that fit Path of the Dragon's ethos * classroom fulfills your deepest wishes Your vote will determine where I spend my time and energy. Where does the Path of the Dragon lead you? Please cast your vote and explain in the comment section!

What's up, Dragon Squad?! I was curious if anybody in here is an experienced faster? And if so, what kind of fasts have you done in the past, or are you currently doing right now? For me, I've taken part in juice fasting and water-only fasting, with my longest water fast going 60 hours.

10 minutes after I started streaming at 7:20am EST, Mike Pirie became the first person to join. And he brought his beautiful family! I was so glad to enjoy the stunning morning with them. Mike also popped back in around dinner time and showed me the latest update on his wife’s sourdough. It’s amazing! What I really admire is how she stuck with the process. She struggled at first but stayed patient, and eventually, they got that beautiful dome of sourdough! Although I make alternative healthy cakes like the Purple Sweet Potato Taro Protein Cake and Blueberry Chocolate Protein Cake, I haven’t tried making bread because I’ve always been intimidated by the process. Mike’s wife is leading the way. I think I’m going to try soon! Kevin Dul was the second member to join! We had a deep conversation about his community, where many troubled teenagers seek help. He’s on a powerful mission. Then Bill showed up, and we had a really nice talk! Skool was buggy, so he couldn’t turn on his video. But we had so much fun talking. He told me more about what he’s doing with his community and how he plans to bring his existing business onto Skool. He said that while his skill set works well for large corporations, what truly excites him is helping people get their first sale. Then Asha showed up! I finally met the man in a pseudo face-to-face fashion who rode his bike across a desert, surfed and got stabbed by coral reefs, and overcame drug addiction. We chatted for a bit before he went for a meditation. Later, he joined again when I was talking with Brandon. When Brandon joined, I was stoked. I got to hear some super cool personal stories. He incubated chicken eggs with his girlfriend and helped her with her business. He also told me about a time he got super sick after eating a Carolina Reaper, one of the spiciest peppers in the world. His girlfriend made him eat it. When I asked if she ate it too, he said no. And then Sir Aidan the Brave joined us, marking the most members we’ve had in a single live call so far! Brandon, Asha, Aidan, and I were all in the same room.

As a software engineer, I used to get paged for my service at night. If I'm lucky, it's a low impact outage that I can mitigate immediately. But sometimes I have to escalate, work with others for hours, and eventually hand off the incident at the end of my shift at midnight. Then when I wake up, I would have to make a tough choice. Do I still want to go to the gym when I am sleep deprived? At the time I pushed through my feeling of grogginess, went to the gym and usually ended up feeling better. Now I learned that scientific studies show that exercising actually helps offset the negative effects of sleep deprivation on brain performance and health. That means improved reaction times, better sustained attention, faster visual scanning speed and reduced anxiety. However, the exercise should not be too intense because that could drive the immune system down and make the body more vulnerable to infections. And I would not attempt heavy lifting that also requires coordinated movement. In fact it's easier to get injured while sleep deprived. Studies show that the correlation between sleep deprivation and acute injury is a strong one. Also, just because moderate exercise helps offset the negative effects of poor sleep, it would not be wise to use exercise as a way to compensate for frequent sleep loss. To sum it up, if you had one night of poor sleep, you will highly likely to benefit from some moderate exercise. Don't go for a squatting PR. Work on your perfecting lifting techniques with slightly lower weights. And if you are chronically losing sleep because your service pages you every night, you should think about switching teams!

Hey there! I’m Aaron, a full time Hypertrophy and Lifestyle Coach! I just met @Mark X and he urges me to share my wealth of knowledge! So let’s start with the basics! Building muscle can be complicated but the goal is to make it as streamlined and easy as possible! There are many factors that come in play when we work to build muscle such as what kind of programming we do, the intensity of our work and most importantly our rest! So, let’s break down what actually goes into our training and what why we are doing it this way! Why is muscle important? As exercise became more popularized throughout the years, the research and focus within fitness has only increased, bringing to light the NEED for muscle. For the average person, muscle is used to increase metabolism, bone density/health, and increased life span. Not to mention the activity of intense resistance training has shown increases within mobility, improvement of quality of daily life (carrying groceries, quality time with one's kids and daily movement), and stress management/mood control! Intensity When it comes to our intensity within our training, we must make sure we are pushing our best within the prescribed rep ranges! When we are working through an exercise, we want to make sure we are going to a degree of fatigue that makes our reps slow down involuntarily amongst our presses, pulls, extensions and curls! We also want to push close to muscular failure, or about 1-2 reps shy of no longer being able to do that certain exercise for that set! (ex. of ugly face for my rep) This is the most uncomfortable portion but an incredibly important part of our muscle building formula! (Now you do not have to look like me, but it absolutely is necessary to get a little ugly with it) Progressive Overload One of the best factors when it comes to making sure we are making PROGRESS is advancing our challenges in some way or form. Now I must mention this is to come once form is GOOD, not perfect but good; Once form is complete and you feel comfortable, then you can stack on the difficulty!