Pushup Club

A group of people I used to work with started something called the Pushup Club. They woud pick a day of the week, Thursday in this case, and give themselves the entire day to do a set number of pushups. So on the first Thursday, they did 100 pushups in one day.

They could divvy up the 100 pushups any way they wanted to: in sets of 10, 20 or even 5 and they had 24 hours to complete those 100 pushups. Then the following Thursday the number was 200 pushups. The week after that, 300 pushups, and they would add 100 pushups to the total ever week.

This was very effective weight training because you were stressing/pushing your body beyond its previous limit in one day then giving it 6 days to recover and rebuild before distressing it again. Plus pushups are an excellent all-around exercise for the upper body.

I started doing this a few months ago as a substitute for the gym and because I got tired of running. I was already in pretty good shape so I started with 400 pushups on a Monday. I added a hundred every week and the highest I got up to was 1,200 pushups.

It sounds a lot more ridiculous than it really is. You can rest between sets as much as you like and 24 hours is lot of time. The hump for me was the week I had to do 700. Almost didn’t make that one. Once I got past that, the following week totals were fairly easy.

But then I got tired of doing the pushup club and went back to running.

Maybe now I’ll do just a little bit of running and a little bit of pushups instead of this all or nothing approach. ;-)