A New You In Only 10 Minutes A Day!

Ten minutes a day. How hard is that?

Depends on what you're talking about. And if that ten minutes is a minimum (as in exercise) or a maximum (as in facebook).

All year I've been able to keep up my commitment to do 10,000 pushups a month. At the beginning of each month, usually the day after I've barely hit my goal for the previous month, another 10,000 begins. I'd take a day off if I thought I could afford it.

A set of fifty takes a minute, more or less. According to my math that means ten minutes a day gets me 500 pushups. Done every day that amounts to 15,000 a month. Take every third day off and I still hit my target.

Yet somehow, sometimes, it seems hard to do even this.

It's not the physical part. Fifty pushups at a time has become routine, and not a difficult one. (Not bragging, that's just how it is after 190,000 pushups over the last eighteen months.) The tough part then must be mental. And mental discipline, I find, is my personal holy grail.

Losing Count

I have found a new way to punish myself.

Counting to fifty should not be difficult. Not for a grown man. But on more than a few occasions recently I have been in the midst of a set of pushups and lost count of how many I’ve done. This happens mainly because I have this habit of not counting by ones.

Sometimes I’ll count to ten, then instead of eleven I’ll say ‘one’ and proceed to nine, followed by ‘twenty’. Then back to one, up to nine and then ‘thirty’ and so forth. And whether from a lack of blood reaching my brain due to the ongoing physical strain or a lack of brain cells from my ongoing brain-cell-challenged life, I will sometimes forget what should be coming after one of the nines.

On occasion I will count to twenty, then twenty again, then finish off the set by counting to ten. This should lend itself to fewer mistakes; how can one possibly forget whether this is the first ‘twenty’ or the second?

I don’t know. But it happens.

And when it does? I punish myself. I take the lower count and continue. If I don’t know if I should be saying thirty or forty, I say thirty and keep going. If I don’t know if I’ve done twenty or forty pushups I call it twenty and go from there. (Sometimes I have a real hard time pounding out fifty and have to suspect I’ve actually done seventy but into the books goes another set of fifty.

If I keep punishing myself this way maybe I’ll eventually start paying more attention.

Maybe I should just count by ones.

Catching a Break

Okay so I haven't evolved; aside from pushups I get virtually no exercise unless you count when I have to run dragging my kid to his bus stop so he doesn't miss the bus again.

I have adjusted the schedule. This should count for something in the planning & management department.

After doing the math again it occurred to me that doing 1,000 pushups every three days gets me to 10,000 for the month, which is the ongoing goal. So do 350 a day and I'm covered right? Well yes, but I recently also realized how cool it is to be dragging my butt down the stairs to the kitchen to try to get my son fed and readied in time for the bus and suddenly think 'Hey, no pushups today!'

If you can't relate to this, substitute the word pushups with 'work' or 'wife'.

So now I make it a point to crank out 500 or more pushups two days in a row, then take a day off. The results have been unbelievable! With regular days of rest and recovery my pecs are now busting out of my shirt, and because of this people come up and give me free stuff on the street, chicks dig me (even more), book sales are up, I've got more friends and followers than ever and I just won Powerball.

Okay maybe not. But the days off are still nice.

Time For More Pushups

In retrospect I figure I should have tried to get some pushups in on the flight from Tokyo to New York. These days that would likely count as suspicious activity and I might have been taken in for questioning, the perfect premise for the kind of story that in our society merits national attention (assuming I could somehow get the incident up on YouTube). Then I could parlay the whole thing into a blitzkrieg of traffic to my writing endeavors. What the heck, it's easier than figuring out SEO.

Instead I planned ahead and blitzkrieged my knuckles in the week leading up to my August 15th flight - 4,150 pushups in seven days already clogged with birthday stuff for my son, packing for the trip home, and taking care of the kids while my wife ran all over town trying to get done what would be borderline impossible once her wedded babysitter was gone. I'd also cranked out 2,600 pushups the first four days of August to make up for the zero I was planning to do on a three-day camping trip with the family starting the 5th, so overall I would have no quarrel with my conscience about planting myself in seat 43D and watching movies for 13 hours.

What I didn't plan for was how long my day off was going to last.

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.

Push-ups and...Car Crashes?

I am so screwed. I couldn't sleep last night - no doubt a case of acute obsession. The nocturnal manifestation of being sub-consciously scared out of my gourd about trying to do over 300 pushups every day for the next ten and a half months! What the hell am I thinking?? After I finally did conk out (judging from my bird's nest bed head I'm guessing it was around 3am) I had this wacked-out paranoia dream, worse than any nightmare about waiting tables (which I still get sometimes, fifteen years after the fact).

I was with a group of guys. One of them was a long-lost cousin I think, which made me feel particularly bad when I drove his parked car into another guy's parked car. Inexplicable why I would do this, in a dream or in real life, though not out of the realm of possibilities in either world. Anyway, suddenly I was behind the wheel of this second car (someone in my past who I don't really care for actually so it was all right), and I was rolling toward the car parked in my neighbor's driveway across the street. Of course I hit it, sending it rolling through the woods and crashing into the big wooden staircase in front of another neighbor's house on the next street. It was dark and quiet out. I tiptoed away.

The staircase was painted blue. I wonder what that means?

Next I was back home and some friends I knew were in my house, packing for their trip to Turkey. And that was it. Dream over.

Turkey? That must mean something... Turkey...turkey sandwich...spicy hot mustard...burning tongue...fire...pain...excruciating, unbearable pain...

Best not to mull this one over. I don't think I want to know what the turkey or anything else means.

Update: It's 10am and I've got 90 pushups on the day.