One Thousand Push ups to a New Life

Many have come up with the idea of doing 1000 pushups a day. Some have thought of becoming record setters and have done 10,000+ pushups at one time. I'm not going that far. Initially inspired by Charles Linster, I decided to start a club for people doing pushups. This club is about the commitment to do 1000 pushups a day. It'll be the struggle to get there, along with the small victories, that will keep us going.

The following tale is my journey.

As I first set out to do my one thousand pushups, I had the idea of doing them continuously without stopping. At that rate, I was only increasing my pushups by 5 a week - which was definitely not going to get me to 1000 anytime soon.

But I thought to myself, "Myself, wouldn't I be happy if I did 1000 pushups in any combination, with or without breaks?" The answer was resoundlingly "YES." I'd be just as happy doing 1000 pushups throughout the day as I would be doing 1000 pushups continuously within half an hour. Albeit, it would take less time doing it the latter way.

So I started with 2 sets, each to failure. The first was 28 pushups. The second was 20 pushups. And I probably could have done more. One gentleman had figured out that by increasing your pushups by 2% per day you would be able to get to 1000 by the end of the year. That became my new plan: increase pushups daily by at least 2%.

By goodness, I WILL do 1000 pushups a day by the end of the year! There is nothing to stop me.

My next goal was to see if I could do 1000 pushups a day by August 12 - the day my baby boy is due!! After a while, I got an inkling that the 3% increase in pushups needed to reach that goal may be too steep.

The other issue is how many days to do pushups and how many days of the week I should rest. I was doing two days on, one day off for a while. The funny thing is though I felt stronger on the third day than the first two days. So I tried out the three days on, one day off, two days on, one day off. And it worked fabulously.

I was beginning to notice my arms looked more tone, my shoulders and traps looked bigger, and I felt stronger overall.

I did start to feel a little anxious however about whether I can maintain the steep 3% daily increase in pushups. I was still doing 4 sets of pushups to get to may daily goal, and I was willing to do 5. But...I still became anxious. I realized that if I were to succeed, I will need not only to fight against the physical strains, but also the mental ones.

A few other factoids I'd found along the way:

- in doing a standard pushup, you are pressing approximately 60% of your body weight

- doing a pushup on your knees equates to pressing approximately 35% of your body weight

Taking into account this info, after doing a set of pushups to failure, you can go to your knees and continue doing pushups to burn your muscles out. This technique will also likely help increase strength so you can do more pushups in each set.

My current problem while doing my pushups is breathing. I'm not sure how to breathe. Do I inhale on the way down and exhale on the way up with every rep? Then I feel like I'm hyperventilating. I semi-hold my breath, semi-breathe when I need to, but I'm always out of the breath at the end of the set. If I could breathe better, I bet I could do more pushups.

Here's to 1000 pushups! May the road that's paved with pain end in glory!