How I did 1,000 Pushups in a Week

Simple habits that will take you to the next level

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Not to brag, but I did 1,010 pushups last week. That sounds like a pretty big deal, right? And no, I don’t consider myself a particularly active, athletic, or fit person either.

“How?” You may ask then, did a fifty-something dad accomplish a nearly olympian feat?

The answer stems from two main ideas:

1. By setting up a series of small, individual triggers and steps, you can actually begin to effectuate a habit in your behavior. And that small habit, can lead to a bigger goal. James Clear explains this concept in greater detail in his book, Atomic Habits.
2. Oftentimes, we believe that we have to be motivated in order to achieve results. But in reality, it’s the results that drive the motivation, hence the concept of the myth — from the book Motivational Myth, by Jeff Haden.

You see — that number of pushups sounds so incredibly big, but if we start to break it down, we realize that through a series of very small steps, we CAN accomplish it.

Using the 1,000 push-up goal, we’re going to talk about how to implement three habits that can create big change:

Habit One — Setup for Success

• Pick a room in your home that you visit regularly. I recommend the bathroom.
• Pin a calendar behind the bathroom door and put a pencil or a pen next to it.
• Get yourself a towel that you hang on the towel rack, used for one purpose and one purpose only — that is, to do pushups.

Every time you enter the bathroom, for whatever reason, put your towel down, and do 10 pushups right there. Just. Do. Ten.

Suppose you can’t do 10 pushups — don’t worry. It’s not about the actual form; it’s about the motion. If you can’t do a perfect full plank push up, drop to your knees and do the modified version. If you still can’t do a push up, drop to your stomach and do the worm!

The idea here is — for one week — every time you go into that room, you stop, put the towel down and do 10 pushups, no matter how you can do it, whether they’re perfect or not.

Habit Two — Record the Results

• As soon as you’re done, stand up and mark on the calendar that you just did 10 pushups.
• The pen and calendar are right behind the door where you can find them, so there’s nothing preventing you from recording it.

Remember, recording the results is what is going to fuel and motivate you moving forward.

That first week, you’ll probably do 50 pushups a day, simply because of brushing your teeth, taking a shower, and other functions of the bathroom. And, you actually won’t get very tired because you’re only doing 10 at a time, and very easily.

After a week, you will have now marked off on the calendar exactly seven days of doing pushups every single day.

Habit Three — Trick Your Brain

Here’s a tip that I learned in the army on how to trick your brain into shortening a destination.

When doing a push up, we normally go down with the count of one and come back up, and that counts as one push up. But I’d like to teach you a new way.

• When you drop down, you say “one.” When you come back up, you say, “two.” When you drop back down, say, “three.” And when you come back up, that counts as one push up.
• In reality, we’ve done two, but your brain only hears you say one. So the next push up is down one, up two, down three, up two. Now you’ve done two pushups.
• Again, repeat it down one, up two, down three, up three, down one, up two, down three, up four, and so on.

“The Four Count,” as we called it in the army, will help your brain not be focused on the actual number of pushups and get psyched out. For example, you only have to do 10, but in reality, you’re doing 20.

Again, the goal is not the number of pushups. The goal is that you do pushups every day and every time. What will happen is that your brain will start to see that calendar being filled in as it forms a chain of continuous days.

The secret here is to not break the chain. You’re trying to establish a habit. Jerry Seinfeld has famously used this method for his stand up comedy. https://dontbreakthechain.com/

The Breakdown

After a couple of weeks, if you’ve been able to do about 50 pushups a day, you are now on track to doing 1,500 pushups in a month.

The next step will be to increase the reps. Can you do 20 pushups? And if you can do 20 pushups at a time, five times a day, you now are up to 3,000 pushups in a month.

Finally, the goal now is to increase just a little bit so that you do on average 150 pushups a day.

Now that sounds like a lot, but after weeks of simply doing pushups every day, it should come easy to do 20 pushups, seven times a day. That gets you to 140–140 pushups a day over seven days is 980 pushups.

At last, all you have to do is drop and do 20 more, and you will have hit your goal of 1,000 pushups in a week!

Conclusion:

You’ve taken the tiny steps necessary to build a long-term habit, and the goal was a thousand pushups in a week. You will have accomplished that goal with very little effort on your part simply by maintaining and sticking to the process more than focusing on the outcome.

This is an example of how you can develop a practice in your own life by utilizing small goals and identifying the small steps, to achieve a much bigger, broader goal.

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