One-thousand eight hundred and ninety push-ups in a 2-week period!!
I did them during the same time the Rio Olympics were going on, and it never dawned on me that the games may have had a subliminal influence upon my performance.
So I started doing push-ups again around April, but this time rather than 3 repetitions of 7 for a set total of 21, I doubled it to 14 for a set total of 42. More volume, more push-ups and more hurt … but surprisingly, my upper body was not as sore as I thought it would be!
Was I in that good of conditioning?? I was doing them consistently for about 18 months from mid-2013 to the end of 2014. Then I had a stressful house move because I was under a serious time crunch. Then I stopped doing them. That was easy. It was real hard starting up again. I kept finding excuses not to start again.
It’s hard to break a bad habit. And it’s just as hard to get into a good habit.
I remember something my mom told me years ago. She said the reason a bad HABIT is hard to break is because if you remove the H, you still have ABIT, and if you remove the A, you still have a BIT, and even if you remove the B, you still have IT.
So now my default amount is 3 sets for a total of 126 per day but I sometimes do 4 and 5 sets … mainly I do that so when I do the 3 sets, they seem easy. Truth is, they all hurt, but you’ve got to find mental tricks to get you down on the floor to start … and then you have to find tricks to get you through … to push through.
Three is a good number. When I finish doing 14, I tell myself that once I complete the 2nd repetition, I only have one more rep to complete the set. Then I feel good. The same trick with sets … hey, I already finished 2 sets, I only have one more set to do … and so it goes. Bingo, 126 push-ups. It’s more mental gymnastics than anything else.
The amazing thing is that the mental tricks not only help you do the push-ups, they help you push through the hurt. It’s that old joke about mind over matter … if you don’t mind, (the hurt) it won’t matter. But it really is mind over matter … your mind will either stump you or will make you prevail over adversity.
My goal now for either October/November is to do 2,000 push-ups in a 7-day period. It’s just a number and something to aim for.
Olympian athletes are really amazing individuals who push their bodies and minds to the absolute limits of human endurance. They sacrifice a lot … and most of them live with some degree of pain and hurt. That’s what it takes. I remember Janet Evans from several Olympics ago who belonged to the Fullerton Aquatic Swim Team – FAST – and every day before her school classes began, she went to the training pool with her coach and peeled off 100 laps, every one of them in world record time. Then she would head off to school. That’s what it takes.
Now I know these individuals were guiding me subconsciously. I’m just glad that my upper body is not that achy. Right now I’m at 840 for the past 5 days and I’m good with that.
