One Hundred Push-Up Challenge

After nine months of backpacking I returned home six weeks ago, the lightest weight I’ve been in years.

The scales showed 188lbs which was none too shabby for someone my height – 1.87 metres (6 ft 1.5). The pounds rolled off quite easily in the last few weeks of my holiday hinting at a six pack underneath that I hadn’t seen since I was an asthmatic, greasy teenager.

Suffice to say, that being back in Ireland again with home comforts and a fairly sedentary lifestyle it’s been hard to get back into the swing of things from a fitness and exercise stance.

Except for now.

I honestly believe that a public declaration of your goals is one of the keys to success. It holds you accountable to follow through, even when you don’t want to.

I’m starting from scratch again. No real exercise in the past ten months. My diet has been all over the place.

Fortunately, through trial and error, much research and listening to my body over the years, the decade that was the noughties had been a fairly healthy one for me. Loosely adopting a Paleo/Caveman diet, I had been a fairly consistent gym goer spaced around my yearly jaunts around the world. I had even run a marathon for Christ sake.

That muscle memory has to count for something.

So it is with renewed focus that I’m going to take advantage of the current good weather and start whipping my ass into shape again.

I read about the Hundred Push Ups Challenge several years back. The goal is to go from zero to 100 consecutive push-ups within seven weeks. It sounded like an amazing feat to accomplish. At the time however, I was more interested in bulking up with heavy weights rather than adopting any kind of body resistance exercise. That viewpoint has changed since I broke my wrist mountain biking in Bolivia. Under Doctor’s advice, I’m laying off the weights for a couple of months to avoid any kind of permanent lasting damage.

I’m using push-up bars in this challenge to help ease the stress on my wrists. This also deepens the stretch making the challenge much more difficult than a traditional ‘hands on the floor’ push-up. I’ll be following the website’s training program closely and doing the resistance workouts 3x per week. I’ll also be throwing in some additional exercises to focus on other muscle groups e.g. Pull Ups and Chair Dips.

This is part of a lifestyle overhaul and a major influence in my life has been the author and former endurance runner MARK SISSON who has some wonderful information on his extremely popular blog.

I’m a firm believer in the adage, a healthy body is a healthy mind. I feel that the crap I’ve been eating these past few weeks has made my thinking muddled and dampened my creativity in some respect. Perhaps this is reflected in the quality of my recent blog posts!

Either way, we all have to start somewhere.

It’s a long road back, but the journey must begin with a single step. Mine starts today.