Splinter cell workout. Train like sam fisher.

Today I would like to introduce you to two magnificient realms- splinter cell game franchise and health&fitness.

First the game, this is the kind of franchise that at first seems totally boring. Why's that, because its a thief-clone or commandos-clone or the most cruel simplification - commandos-rainbow six variation. Whatever you want to call that- you are right, this game is not a fresh idea in game industry, it even uses elements as old as prince of persia (the old one... no not sands of time, the cga graphic game from the nineties). More of that, this game isn't all that realistic as we could expect from the Tom Clancy signature.

We play as Sam Fisher, an NSA operative. This is all new approach to spy games or even spy stories at all. Because Sam is not a agent like those in three days of condor or james bond. No, the idea was to create a both futurized and more realistic idea of an dirty work operative that does all clandestine work, from assasinations, surveillance to undercover ops. In short, Sam is the guy that "does it all" himself. And so, despite that the realism isn't all that realistic, it is still totally believeable, just like Jason Bourne Sam is a total man-trasher using various combat fighting systems including krav maga and swat techniques. All of them are real-life techniques which makes the game much more deeper and interesting.

To make story short, because I will make a separate article on splinter cell series, now lets get to our point.

Splinter Cell series introduce the player to parkour fitness, navy seals, krav maga and some other stuff we'll skip here. I will concentrate on fitness, trying to introduce you how to get into Sam Fisher kind of shape and psyhique. We all know that Sam Fisher was a Navy Seal, so coming from this point if you want to see what it takes, you should try typical navy seals workouts, not mentioning that you will need a really incredible pull-up and climbing abillity to get at least somewhat close to Sam Fisher. Oh my gosh where to start.

1.All of your training should include weekly :
1 Long Slow Distance workout for both running and swimming
1 Continuous High Intensity workout for both running and swimming
1 Interval workout for both running and swimming
4-5 Calisthenics Routines
4-6 Strength Training Sessions – 2-3 each for upper and lower body
4-5 Core Exercise Routines
Daily Flexibility Routines
Specific injury prevention exercises as needed

to make it short -
strenght in this case means flexing your muscles properly. That means using the weights you can lift 5-8 times max and lifting them slowly, with pauses and longer "negatives" (negative means when you pull up, you need to get down right ? Coming down/back is a negative)
endurance is core fitness and calisthenics routines. Remember, You'll won't improve much (or it will be much harder) without improving your strenght in separate exercises.
Calisthenics Bodyweight exercises like pushups, pullups, situps and their variations like dips, chinese pushups, wide/narrow pushups/pullups, knees to elbows with a chin-up, rope climb etc etc
intervals if you run it means go hard, then easy, then hard then easy again.
Core fitness improving your biggest part of muscles first (the small will follow), so that you will faster improve your fitness. The most simple idea is to improve your back and abs muscles because they often do most of the work.

Now you can ask how the hell this is associated with parkour, and where the hell are the reps ?

Parkour exercises resolve around strenght. Strenght is built when you overload your muscles. To move more easily around city obstacles you will need a great dose of strenght, which will mean alot of static exercises, like flexed arm hang with weighted workout vests (20kg) or ring dips with the same weight. You can flex your muscles by a 5 reps of 2 minute flexed arm hang with 20kg vest then there shouldn't be any problems for you with starting your regular sam fisher calisthenics like regular/chinese (aka divebomber) pushups, standard dead hang pull ups and regular dips and situps.

So typical strenght workout may look like this :

biceps - 5 reps of 2 min flexed arm hang (20kg vest or dumbell). Its ok if you cant do all 5.
triceps - 5x5 reps of 30-40kg weighted dips. Do them slowly ! Don't bounce up and down.
belly- 5x5 knees to elbows with 10kg dumbell.
one legged squat (10 second for a repetition) -5x5 with a weight if you can do more than 8 or 10
deadlift- use a weight you can lift max 5 times and do 5 sets
weighted steps, farmer walks etc...

max 2 minutes of rest between sets and exercises

Remember it is made the way you are supposed to fail during performing it. Because if you can do more than 5 reps in the set or exact 5 times then you aren't challenging yourself enough. Always use very heavy stuff here. Never do that "10kg 5 reps ... hmmmm i think im tired", you are supposed to fail in the process. Strenght is just supposed to improve your calisthenics.


Typical calisthenics routine could be (semi-advanced) :

3-5x8-12 pullups
4x25-35 pushups
4x20 dips
5x30-40 situps
5x50 squats or one legged squats

max 1 minute between the sets, max 2 minutes between exercises

If you can perform too many pushups or pullups make them timed. If you reach 100 pushups or situps in over 2 minutes, switch to either one arm or add weight or other.


What will this give you ? If you've got the balls and consistency, you can be sure you will get ripped really fast, you will be both fast and strong, proficient in most physical exercises.

And the coolest thing about navy seals is that all of the info you need is avalible free on their site. So I highly encourage you to at least try it, training is so damn rewarding that I can't even explain it. Just go to http://www.sealswcc.com/

Everything there is free, you will even get free nutrition info- there is so much stuff on that site that its a small university. All from the guys that took down bin laden. I don't think there can be a better recommendation for self improvement. Don't go to navyseals.com seal-fit or some other civil phony workouts. sealswcc.com is an official site of navy seals.
Here you've got Naval Special Warfare youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/NavySEALandSWCC

This game is one of the most inspiring game that I have played so far. It is this game that got me into krav maga training and navy seal workouts. If you still wan't more info (or check out the game) you can check:



Oh and by the way. If you would like to read real-life story of an delta force operatives that do pretty much all the stuff that Sam Fisher does, you can read Delta Force by Eric Haney. Highly recommend it.

Some other tv stuff on the topic:

Gunnuts, outlaws, creeps, serial killers...

It was the summer of 2007. Having no place to go and nothing better to do, with noone to meet as a full time lazy creep job I decided I will see a long awaited movie called the zodiac. I expected boring piece of crap about emotion-less investigation and boring trial scenes where in realistic costumes and photography I will numb myself with a 2 hour movie as I did on a regular basis. The premiere in my country was ... probably also around the 4th of july. Getting out of the army for a short time pass I felt that moment of a glorious freedom, an asylum from everything, I had a 3 day pass... So actually it got me pretty excited about going out and watching something all by myself without any reason at all. Well so during the warm evening I got into cool cinema where I could still smell the fresh summer air from the outside with some small dose of a typical smell from the cinema. Barely 20 people were in the room. No wonder, cause it was still pretty early.

So they finally played the movie. It all started like one of those "The wonder years" with a huge bag of american middle class idyllic peaceful life in the burbs. Thats the typical idea people have about the sixties and early seventies. In the burbs everybody knows everybody, everything seems the same when you pass by with a car like in the opening scene. 4rth of july, people are celebrating free time just as I did. From a grease-type of idylla the movie turns into "the car" type of horror movie, and the killer suddenly starts shooting in a slow motion high res 1080i resolution, with an incredible donovan lead song playback in the background. You just can't make any creep any cooler than that. Just shooting, no words, just the non-spoken-word.

The kind of mystery that you could very clearly see in the twin peaks series. Just where nothing bad can happen because everybody knows eachother someone suddenly a very intense execution takes place in the burbs. You can see that the characters are living their normal lives, some of them probably already know who it was just in the town's mysterious inner relations are not willing to relase any info regarding the crime. We are clearly set in a at least weird perspective where from the one hand we see a murder that shouldn't take place, in the other hand we see a portrayal of a man that rebelled and shaped a new reality of a crime- terror, in the end shaking whole state with very media-popular letters that the notority just spreaded his outlaw legend, just like earlier role model of John Dillinger. In the movie we can even see how the media and gov. authorities allowed a live tv session interview with the supposed zodiac. It is pretty much a perfect movie to watch on a balcony or backyard in a warm summer night, I tend to watch it every summer.

The Dillinger of the 60-70 portrayal is an surefire creep. But also it has the feel of a "new cool" creep. Movie does very well in delivering the ideas and feel of the bizarre reign of terror in california and the panic and paranoid chase after the terrorist which destroyed many lives and careers of that time. Now heres the part of the movie that changes perspective from a gritty violence movie turns into a movie in style of a epic story, of the strings of events that hapenned AFTER the murders, the hopeless investigation, the ruined lives and careers of the law enforcement, the frustration over missed chances and focusing on a bizzarre effect of a well performed terror campaign.


Movie shows and whats great we can actually feel how bad time shaped the rest of what was left after the official investigation, continuing obsessive paranoia around fading sheds of evidence, just like an really bad scar that hardly stopped bleeding. Thats what this movie is about, the scar on the system that have failed and the scar on the society that bleeded both emotionally and physically. But not on the official streams, movie focuses on the backdoor, the kitchen of whats going on around in the neigborhood.

If you like it, check the blu ray version ! Get all the smallest details from this movie, because it is one of the rare movies today that were filmed in Viper cameras by a real professional ! (sorry michael mann, your camera work sucks)

Wedding music ideas

Well it has been a busy week for me and I apologize if this post will be left unfinished, don't worry, I will just add up new music each day.

So don't know how about you, but mine experiences with weddings and music were terrible. I pretty much always ended up as a wall-flower or the music was just poorly and cheaply chosen. Well lets start with that you might want a wedding music, not death metal music, not r&b music (sorry beyonce/keys, don't care how much money you spend on self promotion) neither cheap party music.

Lets start with the idea that it has to be classic, it has to be catchy and it needs to have the right feel to it. And it needs to have a party-romance feel, offspring songs like want you bad are perfect for that, they have lots of songs like that. Lets add some of them up, here ya go :



nice one, despite not having the romance theme to it, it brings the great warm relaxing mood. But the overall factor is that it will make it very memorable.



this for example has a great romantic theme to it. Well like I said, the goal is to make it the way everyone, including your parter will remember it just like the first time they had sex listening to it.



despite some controversy in language, you can freely play it in no-english-persons weddings, noone will notice.



other than offspring, queen has also the great vocal-sync which is a perfect band for every kind of celebrations.



belinda is a great pick for such music. Has the right celebrating/ecstasy mood and you can easily pick her other songs.



this is a perfect example. It is the kind of a classic tune you always feel like you heard long time before. Perfect to bring it up. Has everything -classic/romantic/celebrating themes to it. Originally made by gary glitter, but he looks so creepy that I finally decided to pick the much more charismatic Joan.



play this song and you wife will fall in love with you FOREVER. Whoever she was, back then she probably loved this song. This is really a big winner in this list. Probably number one if it was a ranking. It will make your wedding glam, modern, sexy... everything you always wanted. If you were a fan of guns n roses you might try their other tracks :



great for albumbook dvd promo hah.



well this one is a true classic, can't argue with that chicks love this song, even Celine Dion singed it.



Hard to get a crowd that will get wild to it, but its one of those tracks that really should have their place during moments like this.



we really got into slow dance songs, its really easy to pick slow dance songs



and the king of kings of slow dance songs. Well this is a song that probably fits even more into deep love moment/20 year old marriage song, but it gives a very powerful vibe, perfect for wild marriages like those you could see in the deer hunter.



This is an always-win song. You can't play it and fail with it.



Do you remember my name is earl episode where Joy wanted to dance to this song ? It is one of the biggest winners in the celebration theme here.



boy this song sounds very old, but its not about that, just like queen and offspring has a great vocals with very celebrating theme.



well despite the very heavy parts of this song, the main vocal part is fantastic and very unique just like we want it to in this ranking.



Dont bother with rock around the clock if you want unique wedding that everyone will want to remember to the rest of their life- pick runaround sue



Despite being a little too much celebratory, it will do just fine



All good to bring a good mood to the event, if you end up with this and a death metal record, play this



Now I'd like to emphasize that this is the kind of a song like I mentioned with the track by Joan Jett, it gives out the glam and celebratory part of the event and also comes up with the romantic theme.



Now thats what I call the deer hunter vibe, nostalgic, totally wild and made for getting smashed in the process. Only for some people, use with caution hah

You see you need to check which part of the mood you want to expand, some will prefer much more of a glam themes like anything for love, while some other will enjoy much more the deer hunter vibe tracks like loveshack or other.