Punch Club

- Your first instinct at the start of the game will no doubt be to train your dude to increase his stats, and avoid the fighting tournament because everyone will own you with their sick moves. This is a huge mistake, and will lead into the Punch Club Cycle Of Failure, where you start out with some money and terrible stats, and then you train and increase your stats, but then you have to manage your money, fatigue, happiness and hunger, and when you're done with that, your stats will have deteriorated because of all the not training you've been doing, and at the end you have some money and terrible stats, and literally everything you've done has been a massive waste of time.

- Join the fighting tournament immediately. Everyone will indeed own you with their sick moves, but the fighting tournament is free, and you can join as many times as you like, and it has only one permanent effect: You gain skill points, even when you lose. With skill points you can buy such amazing permanent character bonuses as "a fighting technique that doesn't suck" and "your Agility will never deteriorate below level 4, ever, so go ahead and just watch television for a month".

- Also, don't neglect your happiness stat. It might seem tempting to go to the gym while sad because the game just lets you, but Sad Training gives you a penalty to your gains. Just spend that little bit of extra time watching television and gains will come to you much faster.