10,000 Push-Up Challenge

For 100 days straight I did 100 push ups- as fast as I could- every single day, no exceptions. I decided to do this because I had stopped exercising for several weeks and couldn’t get myself back into it. I would work out maybe once every week or two but I wasn’t developing the consistency I had in the past. I was busy and it was easy to say ‘one more day doesn’t really matter’. So I committed myself to doing 100 push ups every day, and getting other workouts in when I could. My results were even more positive than I anticipated. Not only did my chest, arm and back strength increase considerably but I also found that I was less tired and more willing to get a full work out in a few times a week.

Each day I recorded the amount of time it took me to complete all 100 push ups, the number of sets it took and how many push ups I did in each set. In this article I will share several graphs and discuss my experience.

From my data I created a column called push ups per second which divided 100 push ups by the number of seconds it took me to complete. For example if it took me 5 minutes to complete 100 push ups that is (100 push ups)/(300 seconds)= 0.33 push ups per second. Below is a scatter plot showing the number of push ups per second I did every day. My first day took over 6 minutes, my last day took only 1:40.