My cig-battle progress.

Gotta set a quit date now. Good luck buddy. Sounds like you are on the right track.

I’m gonna have a delicious cigarette to celebrate.

@Konrad_von_Marburg a cig? Do a cigar instead, cigs dont even taste good anymore.

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@Rogue

Well done mate…1 week today I smoked tobacco for the last time. If I can give up 10g a day of Amber Leaf then anyone can! I’m finding a 50/50 mix of White Elephant and Rustica is doing the trick nicely.

Keep at it!

Amazing achievement. I myself am an ex-smoker, and now just have a pipe or two over the weekend. Mainly a snuff user now. Keep going @Rogue - you can successfully quit cigarettes. I did. 

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@dan11 nice, keep up the gold work. Im confident I can quit cigs. @newbiesnuffer I have a few bowls a day. Me and a friend just chainsmoked our pipes after a workout session to see if we got ill effects. With cigarettes, he gets a hard time breathing, and long time before his heartrate goes back to normal. I feel my heart beating heavier with cigs after workouts. With a pipe, none of us felt any ill effects, so we took another training session, which seemed to be easier this time. Makes you wonder what the hell is in those cigs!

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smoke contains carbon monoxide. That shit bonds to red blood cells more efficiently then oxygen. Inhaling large quantities of smoke gives you large amount of carbon monoxide. Your heart has to work harder to get the oxygen around the body. Hence the lower heart rate with less cigs. That might help give the final push to think about that any time you have one.

@bob yeah, thats part of the reason I quit.

Well heart rate increases due to nicotine. Nicotine is in all of these products.

@Konrad_von_Marburg I know, but for some reason snuff and pipe doesn’t seem to have that horribly bad effect on me OR my friend.

Update again: Small relapse, needed a few extra cigs to get me through yesterday.

@Rogue these things will happen. I’ve tried to cut down to only X or Y a day, but sometimes events occur that cause me to smoke more. The only real option is to get off the cigs and don’t buy them. It’s also harder if you live with, or have a large social group of, smokers.

At least you are trying and figuring out your triggers, etc. 

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Relapse for cigarettes mainly occurs due to old habit of the motor function of lighting and smoking it. Once you use snuff (especially ones high in nicotine), I dont think you ‘crave’ nicotine, but just the feeling of filling your lungs with smoke. You can snap out of it (even cold turkey) anytime you decide. 

@newbiesnuffer I know, but events as of late has required me to get a strong and quick nic-fix to be able to keep goin through the day.

cig-battle paused. Dislocated shoulder while sparring, had it put back in place, dislocated one minute later while moving arm. lots of pain lots of cigs. Funny thing: First thing I did after relocating it the second time was to grab a cig…foolish me.

@Rogue - take care man. But isnt it worse to kill yourself with cigarettes when some other pain is already doing that? Try some strrrrong snuff :slight_smile:

@newbiesnuffer Hard to move my arm up to nose level, goin with my left hand makes it very messy.

@Rogue If you’ve cut down to 4 cigarettes a day, I’d say cut them off entirely. You’ve obviously beaten the physical aspect of smoking by substituting, why not go all out and beat it mentally? 4 cigarettes don’t really provide you with all that much nicotine, you probably can’t get past the little “rituals”, like smoking after waking up or after dinner, or even lighting and holding a cigarette. These things are understandably hard, but you’ve went this far so why not go all out? Also, if you’re going to smoke and box, it’s not a good idea to count on your stamina. Develop knockout power so you can drop people before the 3rd round starts, or maybe even tough it out like I did and do extra cardio. I used to run 5-6km every day and still put away a pack of smokes. I was as determined of a smoker as I was a boxer. My role model was Ricardo Mayorga, and he still is in some ways.

@DrOctagon Mayorga, eh? I always digged Nicolino Loche. My very style in boxing is actually based on wearing my opponents out. I never go toe-to-toe, I like to make every punch count, and rely a little too much (which some people have exposed) on counter-punching alone. It should be noted that 4/5 of my wins were due to well-placed counterpunches. I know my stamina holds me back, which makes me avoid combinations, I throw 3 maximum, and its rare for me to throw that many. I have decent reach, so I try to stay on the outside, which I feel helps me catch my breath if, for some reason, I have been trading blows for too long, which I try to avoid. On topic again; I found I dont need any cigarettes if I smoke a pipe, so I ordered a few pipes, just to have something on hand when my old carey’s magic inch is resting. Im thinking of buying a few cobs too, those things never need any rest it seems, so that should be a good all-day pipe. Luckily for me, pipe tobacco is cheap over the border, and I smoke way less pipe tobacco than normal tobacco, which is an economical win too. I have also noticed that I dont even enjoy cigarettes anymore, at all. A pipe is more relaxing, satisfying, tastes and smells better, and lets face it, a pipe is freakin cool. Theres nothing like playing chess and smoking a pipe while recovering…or just smoking a pipe now that I dont have anything to recover from. I was forced to quit boxing for a year by my doctor, who told me I need to let my shoulder rest for a ton of weeks, which I have to follow up with weightlifting (not the worst medication I guess), but there goes the hand-speed and loose shoulders I spent a long time training for.

@Renegade I dug Mayorga because he’s like us, he’s a smoker and a boxer who on several occasions actually blew smoke in his opponent’s face at the weigh in. A true character. And as per smoking boxer MO, always got winded in the later rounds and lost, which is why he knew to finish early. Truly a God among men. I always hated guys like you, to be honest! I was a pressure fighter, and I hated having to chase guys around who knew what they were doing. My trick was just to rush the opponent, corner him and tear him apart. Whenever guys started doing stuff like gauging distance or fancy footwork or counterpunching, I got irritated. I’m a fairly short guy and I’m a southpaw so I ate a lot of small punches before I got inside so it always had to be me punching harder than the other guy otherwise I’d probably lose. I’m too old now, I’m almost 30, plus I have a lot of little old injuries that get aggravated when I get too into it even on the heavybag now. I can’t even tell you how many times I broke fingers or got that stupid boxer’s fracture or wrists or something, and these things add up. Whenever it rains now I feel every single thing that I broke. Also if you’re looking to speed up recovery time, I suggest you go out and find Thai Boxing Liniment. It’s this yellow oil you rub into sore muscles or sprains or even bruises and it does wonders. Usually it’s fairly cheap, but make sure you get it from a legitimate source because there’s a problem of bootleg Boxing Liniment coming out of thailand. My advice to you with regards to smoking is, stick to one thing for long periods of time. If you try snuff and snus and pipe tobacco, eventually you’ll exhaust your options and go back to smoking. Maybe we should contact a snus manufacturer and perhaps get a snus mouthguard developed? How cool would that be! You’re just handling your business in the ring and you get your nicotine at the same time. But I digress. Quitting smoking is done in 2 ways: you either quit cold turkey, or you wean yourself off it. The latter is mostly psychological because eventually you’ll have to quit cold turkey anyway, but honestly out of everything I’ve tried to quit with–and I’ve tried all of it–there is a lot more progress with snuff than anything. I just wanted snuff to try it, but I’ve actually noticed a pack lasting me longer and longer.

@DrOctagon Nicolino was a smoker too, a heavy one, smoking between rounds, even. I guess thats one reason why he never made it big, despite a lot of skill; bad image. And I know what you mean regarding injuries, I had some wrist/hand/finger issues myself, which luckily, I dont have now. I havent tried the thai cream, but I use tiger balm, which is absolutely incredibly too. Im not sure if it will work on my shoulder problems, but I will try it. Im waiting for an answer for what they found on the x-rays, which is hopefully nothing that requires surgery. My doctor “prescribed” me some weights and some weird freakin ways of lifting, which he says works very well, cause it tightens up the shoulders (but should not be done with healthy shoulders, cause apparently it can damage them). And I can undertand your frustration with outfighters. I have a friend who is competing on amateur level, who I have the “honor” of sparring with. I dont compete myself, but love sparring. Anyway, the first time we sparred, he was a slugger. Slow, easy to hit, bad punches. After a while, his coach had him switch styles and copy mine. Now I have problems hitting him!!! So instead of simply being an outfighter, I was forced to focus on counter-punching to be able to hit him, cause that became my only way of actually hitting him. He trains much harder than me, which I assume is why he bypassed me in regards to footwork…frustrating indeed. It was actually in a sparring match with him that I damaged my shoulder. He threw a jab, I crouched, countered with right hook, and as soon as my glove connected, I heard a weird sound in my shoulder followed by excruciating pain. With no workin out, I find it hard to avoid cigs tbh, boxing is one of the things that convinced me to quit.