Spicing Things Up

Ten days ago I did the math and thought Man, over three hundred pushups a day, this is just stupid. Hence the title of this blog.

Now it seems that, barring serious injury or a full-time job, reaching my goal of 100,000 should not be so hard.

That is why I am changing my tactics.

A few days ago I was talking shop with my good friend Mark Clement over at MyFixItUpLife. I told him I was shifting my hand position from set to set both to try to save my aching shoulder while spreading the workout across a slightly broader range of muscles. I don't want to end up in ten months looking like I've grown a couple of tumors on my otherwise modest frame. Mark responded with a flurry of ideas for changing things up: wide hands, putting my hands/fingers closer together, turning my hands around, putting them further away from my shoulders either up or down, lifting one hand off the ground a little every pushup or every third or fifth or whatever, feet on the bottom stair, hands and feet on top of three paint cans, substituting some parallel bar dips (tougher than pushups), Rocky-esque one-handed pushups (uh, maybe in about October), feet up on the third step...

After a fairly slow start I ended up doing 495 pushups yesterday - 16 sets, none of them more than 40. This is not a big deal when you keep your set count low enough and spread your sets out. So in addition to switching up the routine I'm going to push a little harder each set, crank out a few more at the end to get more out of each day's total, even if the daily average goes down at first. In the long run I think - God, I hope - it will pay off.

All of this is easy to say right now as I've taken the day off.

2,425 pushups this week. Back on the floor tomorrow.