raiden

Backend Developer at Black Box VR. Always striving to push myself to be the best I can be, and improve others lives. Fitness is one of my new passions!

[raiden @RaidenDeluca]

@Vicky This is what the bible says! We are bound by time, but God is not!

[raiden @RaidenDeluca]

@tailopez The key to happiness is Jesus!

[Ryan DeLuca - @VR @VR]

MY CORE BELIEFS AFTER 20 YEARS OF INTENSE STUDY:

1. The modern fitness industry is fundamentally broken, and I know because I helped build it.

I founded Bodybuilding. com in 1999 and grew it to nearly $500 million in annual revenue. I saw from the inside that the entire industry is designed around a lie: that information and motivation are what people need. They're not. 80% of people still don't exercise enough. The industry profits from selling hope and then watching people fail. Now I'm building the thing that actually works.

2. Exercise is a brain problem, not a body problem.

The body is almost always willing. It's the brain that says no. Exercise adherence is 99% psychological. Your brain evolved to conserve energy, and it will veto exercise before your conscious mind even gets a vote. Every failed gym membership, every abandoned New Year's resolution, every "I'll start Monday" — that's not weakness. That's a million years of evolution doing exactly what it was designed to do. The only way to win is to stop fighting the brain and start designing for it.

3. You have to make exercise disappear.

Distraction doesn't work. Watching TV on a treadmill is just suffering with a screen in front of it. What works is dissociation — becoming so absorbed in an experience that your brain literally stops monitoring how hard your body is working. The insular cortex goes quiet. Time warps. Thirty minutes feels like five. That's not a metaphor. That's neuroscience. And it's the entire design philosophy behind everything I build.

4. Identity is more powerful than motivation.

Motivation fades. Habits break. But identity persists. If someone sees themselves as a Crystal Breaker who does battle three times a week, they'll keep showing up — not because they should, but because that's who they are. The 300-millisecond identity veto is real: your brain checks every behavior against your self-image before you're even conscious of the decision. Our job isn't to motivate people to exercise. It's to make them into someone who wouldn't dream of stopping.

5. Humans are tribal animals pretending to be individuals.

We are wired for belonging. Social isolation is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The brain's default network processes social information even when we're doing nothing. People work 24% harder when their team NEEDS them. The future of exercise is obligation to a tribe you love.

6. The game around the game matters more than the game itself.

In every truly addictive game ever made, the core gameplay is only about 10% of what keeps people coming back. The other 90% is progression, social systems, live events, competition, status, and identity. We have an incredible VR experience. But if we don't build the meta-layer — the teams, the daily reasons to open the app, the faction wars, the things that pull you in between battles — we're leaving 90% of the addiction on the table.

7. Dark patterns can be used for good.

Variable rewards, loss aversion, sunk cost, FOMO, social pressure — the gaming industry weaponized these psychological mechanics to extract money and time from people with nothing to show for it. We use the exact same playbook, but the addiction delivers real health outcomes. Muscle growth. Fat loss. Reduced depression. Cognitive improvement. When the manipulation genuinely serves the person's wellbeing, it's not a dark pattern anymore. It's medicine in a better wrapper.

8. The biggest market in fitness is people who hate fitness.

65% of Americans feel too intimidated to join a gym. That's not a segment — that's the majority. And no one is building for them. Planet Fitness tries, but you still walk onto an open gym floor with mirrors and strangers. We put you in a private booth where no one can see you, no one is judging you, and you're too busy fighting a boss to care what you look like.

9. Words are architecture.

The language you use literally changes the neurological response to the experience. "Battle" activates excitement. "Workout" activates dread. "Crystal Breaker" is an identity. "Gym member" is a transaction. We don't have trainers — we have Hero Trainers. We don't have gyms — we have Arenas. Nobody describes skiing as "burning 400 calories." They say they went skiing. If your members are describing what you built using the language of suffering, you've already lost.

10. We're not building a gym chain. We're building a new sport.

Thirty-minute battles. Teams of twelve. Seasonal leagues. Three factions at war for territory. Champions, Powerups, elemental strategy, deck building, live events, and a meta-layer that plays out on your phone between battles. The ambition is 1,000+ locations worldwide. But the vision is something that's never existed before — a physical sport born inside a virtual world, where every rep is a move in a game that millions of people play together.

That's what we're building.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

Biblical repentance means a change of mind that leads to a change of action.

You haven't truly repented of a sin if you're planning to commit it tomorrow.

Repentance isn't about sinlessness, but it is about a genuine heart change that actually manifests itself in holier living.

[raiden @RaidenDeluca]

Stop letting reductionist science scare you from what God explicitly gave us.

The problem was never the meat.
It was removing it from God’s design - factory farming it, injecting it with chemicals, and blaming the food instead of what we did to it.

[raiden @RaidenDeluca]

🥩 God gave us red meat for nourishment.

Modern science tried to vilify it, but they’re measuring the wrong variables.

Let me show you why your local, pasture-raised beef is exactly what we’re designed to eat.

A thread 🧵

[raiden @RaidenDeluca]

My solution:

Quarter cow from a local farmer. Pasture-raised, grass-fed/finished, no vaccines, no antibiotics.

Supporting local stewardship. Eating biblical food. Honoring God with my body.

This is how it’s supposed to be. 🥩