Testing the month long push-up challenge.

I’ve seen several month long exercise challenges, push up, sit up, burpie, chin up, all with the same idea, you do one push up one the first day, two on the second three on the third and so on until you are doing 30 on the 30th day.

The text with it normally explains how you might not be able to do 30, but you can easily do one, then one more the next day is almost nothing extra, and before you know it (in one month actually) you’ll be doing 30 no problem.

(This one has rest days making it infinitely better than many of the ones I see)

I normally kind of roll my eyes at this, it doesn’t line up with how I think muscles work. Sure you would gain some muscle in a month, and some technique, but not enough to add more than a few extra push ups to the total you can do at the start of the month.

Add to this that there are no rest days to let the growing muscles heal. Just a slow and steady increase in difficulty, and I just don’t think it would work.

But I do prefer testing things that are easily testable to just rationalising my lazy arse way out of exercising, so I guess I’ll just give it a go and find out how well it really works.

I’m choosing push-ups since I know I can actually do more than 1 of them but don’t think I could do 30 putting me inside the range that the month challenge is supposed to do something in.

Test day:

As I mentioned above, I don’t think a person would go from being able to do 12 push-ups to doing 30 easily in a month with just an increase of one a day. I wonder just how many I could improve by though, and it’s one of the big things I want to test. To test this I first need to find out how many I can do. This is where the test day comes in.

Before I started the challenge I needed to see how many push-ups I can do. My plan was to push up until my arms collapsed on me and I couldn’t do any more even after I had a short breather. Then push up off my knees until I got to 30 since that is the amount I’m aiming to get to by the end of the month.

But I got to 30, sort of…

I wasn’t expecting that, now I won’t be able to test how many I can improve by. But my tecnique was terrible, and it was difficult, so I should be able to have some kind of measure of improvement.

So, test day results:

30 push-ups,

• I flopped onto my stomach after each one, getting a bit extra rest, for the down movement and lying on the ground.
• After 0 push-ups I took a short rest to stand up and stretch, not because I needed it but because I was surprised to get there at all and did it automatically.
• After 12 push-ups I was really struggling, my arms were moving around and I was getting bad
• After 15 I was feeling it in my lower back more than my arms and was stretching out in between and stretching my arms wide.
• After 22 I managed to keep going, but barely, I delaying lifting my knees and probably looked more like a drunk worm than a push-up.
• On the drive home my arms felt every move of the steering wheel, my muscles burned.

My thoughts after test day:

I had an unusual gap in my normal schedule while I waited for dinner to cook, that allowed me to do 30 incredibly slow push-ups. While it won’t be a problem to find time each day to do 10 I hope I can find a time every day for the whole month.

One thing about the exercise and about writing about it is that it’s given me motivation to start. I’m wondering if that’s more the point than the improvement, the push that you can do just one no problem,then just one more, that gives you the motivation to go do something. Maybe something that you can already do but just don’t know it yet.

I’m feeling really sore, I’m still sure that anything over 20 will be hard in the near future and I’m not sure how I’ll go backing up that many on already sore muscles with no recovery.

The fire in my arms feels good.

I’m not sure if I’ll manage to stick to the plan, if I break from it I’ll still write since any problems following it are part of what make it work or fail. I hope I can stick to it.

I plan to write every day, publish the diary every week, and sum it all up after the month is over. Hopefully I can stick to that.