Thanks for visiting dunkbonds.com, the dormant Rails app I built to gamify charitable contributions toward personal goals, piloted around my goal to dunk. You'll notice I have made zero effort to update its style, so it still harkens back to its original 2011-era mint.com inspiration, when it was likely already looking pretty dated. Have a click around!
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Aaron DUNKs

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January 04, 2013

Final Two Months

It's January.  Less than two months until DUNK deadline.  This is the final stretch.  Some updates:

DUNKbonds have been on sale for 8+ months, but this is actually the 20th month that I've been training.  The first phase was to get my base strength up (to around 1.5x bodyweight squat).  Strength is obviously a good way to leave the ground, but explosiveness, elasticity, and power to weight ratio are all important.  That's when the plyo and technique work come in.

Power is one thing, but getting lean is just as important.  If you haven't followed the DUNKblog, I feel that during these last few months my best shot at improvement is to cut fat and work on explosiveness and technique, as my strength isn't going to improve as quickly at this point.

Nutrition, Fat Loss, Diet

I'm experimenting with a mix of what I'll call carb-burst diets, drawing from Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body and John Keifer's Carb Nite and Carb Backloading techniques.  So far I've been very, very strict:


This chart counts cheat days as compliant, but I still need to tweak the cheat days to get the right amount of carb intake and right duration of carb refeeding.  I think I went overboard a few times, and that might explain why at the moment I'm only down about a pound from my starting weight.  Still, I'm learning a ton.  Interesting stuff, nutrition.

Injury Report

What would an update be without an injury report?  In December I saw my sports med doc about my hip flexor, and we determined it is indeed a strain.  I've been to one PT session so far, and we came up with a rehab plan.  Of course, to truly heal a strain takes about 6 weeks, which pushes into early February, but we are going to reevaluate on January 9th.  I'm currently finishing a week of 600mg ibuprofen 3x/day, and I'm prohibited from impact and jump drills, but I'm cleared to exercise in any way that doesn't hurt it, which includes biking, HIIT, squats, deadlifts, calves, abs and core, etc.  Honestly, recovery is coming along really well, and I hope to be back to jumping near the end of the month--hopefully with better calves and a much stronger, more stable core.

DUNKbonds 2.0 Coming Soon

You may not know, but I've been spending a large portion of my free time working on a complete rewrite of the website.  Soon (within weeks?) I will be opening it up to a select few beta goalsetters so that they can get all public about their goals and sell some DUNKbonds, and, their counterpart (drumroll...) the DUNKswap.  If you've noticed, DUNKbonds are a bet against a goal completing in time.  A swap is a way to bet for it.  With bets both for and against a goal, we will have a much cleaner prediction market, and I believe that will provide a ton more fun and gamesmanship for everyone involved.  

Reevaluate Your Target Pledge

With less than two months to go, DUNKbonds have paid back all but two bucks of their face value.  This means if you own some DUNKbonds, your original pledge amount has dwindled to $2/bond.  Please log in and check your pledge amount, and if your pledge amount has dwindled to an amount lower than what you'd hoped to donate, you might want to buy yourself some more bonds.  ;)