Training & Health: Laptop Mount for Exercise Bike or Treadmill

I, like a lot of Nerds, spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer.   That is bad for both health and comfort in the long run.

One partial solution is to do some of our work or play from computer on a treadmill or exercise bike, youtube & link below is to a very cool Do It Yourself (DIY) setup for a laptop.

But you could also do this for keyboard and large screen TV, your not going to be able to do high level micro this way, but watching replays or streams is certainly doable.

How To:  Mount a Laptop to Your Exercise Equipment by ManMade.


Advanced Training Tip:

Stress is Stress, the body doesn't know the difference of Stress because of exercise to the Stress of Tournament competition.

So you can train for Stress of Competition, with interval exercise (ie do high or moderate intensity at intervals with slow periods between), and doing a game during easy intervals between.

Fine Motor control (things like Micro) and Thinking both drop much lower than normal under Stress.

Practicing under Stress helps with that, because you get used to it, called Habituation in Psychology, and also because you improve your performance under Stress.

For more of my posts on Training & Practice, check out Starcraft 2 Skills:  Cross Training.

Also the Labels Learning SC2 and/or Starcraft 2 Skills.

Starcraft 2 Skills: Cross Training

I thought about titling this post "Learning to Learn", so you can certainly consider that an alternate or subtitle.

If you have ever studied Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of the Five Rings" (A book about real sword fighting, the strategy & philosophy of life or death sword fight) you will have read my favorite phrase in that book several times, since it is repeated often:  "From one thing, know ten thousand things."

I have usually thought of that as meaning to find as many ways as possible to use a skill or bit of knowledge.

Not only singly but also by combining skills and knowledge.

I have written several posts about Training, Practice, and Skill development for Starcraft 2 though I try to write each post in a stand alone fashion, many are best read as a collection.

This post ties in closely with these previous posts:

• Planned Structured Practice
• Mindset
• Learning and Intervals between Practice Sessions
• Dealing with Fear/Stress

In those Posts linked above, I cover the importance of recovery or rest time that is needed to improve, in a way practice programs our body and mind, while the rest & recovery stage stores it in long term memory with backups, so we can use that program again.

You certainly need some time that is pure rest, like sleep, and some time that is pure relaxation, like watching TV or reading, but you can use much of your recovery time to improve other skills & abilities that are not often used in your main practice.


One skill I strongly urge people to develop and improve is reading.

WTF Cliff!

Yes reading, it develops many of the same parts of your brain that you need to remember little details for Starcraft 2 ever notice how Idra or Artosis are almost like a human wikipedia?

Or Liquidpedia to be more precise ^_^

I saw these article today in my RSS feeds

• Some Books Are More Equal Than Others
• Teach the Books, Touch the Heart

Which led to this blog post.

The first article talks about how important it is, if you want to improve, to read challenging material.

It is like riding a bike, your never going to be able to do BMX racing or extreme/technical Mountain Biking if you never took the training wheels off your bike.

All of us are limited more by our drive, focus, and knowledge than any fixed limitation.

If you doubt that, you might read this post from one of my other Blogs about Rafe Esquith, http://bookreviews-cliff.blogspot.com/2011/09/there-are-no-shortcuts-by-rafe-esquith.html, Rafe is respected by Gandalf & Magneto (ie in real life:  Sir Ian Mckellen).

Might also think about why Samurai studied things like Calligraphy & Poetry.

GL HF,

Cliff