Greasing the groove: Push ups - Results


I did 120 push ups, 6 times 20 repetitions spread arbitrarily over the day, for 30 days starting the 04/24/2017. The last of these workouts has been done the 23rd of May 2017 without skipping any repetition during the 30 days. After all, I performed 3600 push ups.

Today, the 29th of May 2017, I measured my maximal number of push ups anew. Initially, I performed 42 with 20 warming up repetitions.

This time without warming up repetitions, I performed 70 push ups. This is a performance I am happy about.

Experiences

After approximately 15 days into the challenge, I felt that my handstand and overall shoulder strength increased. Exercices such as holding a frog position without leaning on my knees became more accessible and the initial phase of a straddle press felt like I could make future progress with. In comparison to my pull up challenge of 50 pull ups a day for 30 days in the winter 2015/2016, this challenge has not had an as big impact on my daily life in terms of soreness and time consumption. However, also the performance increase hasn’t been as dramatic. Generally, one should make sure that the excercise performed in such a challenge is not too difficult as the body will struggle even with the simplest excercises when repeated that often. While I underestimated that for the past pull up challenge, I did take this into account for the just finished push up challenge. Getting the 6 sets done over a day was relatively easy so that one could think of performing more than 6 sets. I did the repetitions exclusively on parallets which (a) protected my wrists and (b) increased the range of motion. My wrists never made any problems and, amazingly, I got used to the increased range of motion so that regular flat-hand push ups feel easy now. While the wrists were fine throughout the challenge, my shoulder felt irritated sometimes. However, never to the degree of pain but mostly only cracking.

Outlook

Various future challanges came to my mind:

  1. 3x 50 push up repetitions a day: For increasing the maximal number. 20 repetitions were too easy after some time.
  2. L sit to tucked press (explained in terms of the frog position above). I might train these excercises separately at first to build up enough strength for the challenge.
  3. Frog stand on parallets.
  4. Stretching routine each day.

The stretching routine seems the most appealing for me now as it is more passive after such an active challenge.


Subscribe via email to get notified about new blog posts