Chris Meistre

For some reason when 19:00 came tonight, I was getting ready to go on with our Ninjitsu training.  And why this is weird is that we don’t do Ninjitsu training on Monday evenings!

So already in the mood for some training, we decided to only do a 30 minute workout session.  I combined this with my initial max test for the Hundred Pushups challenge.  The initial max test is basically doing as many pushups as you can until you simply can’t anymore.  The last time I did this I did a lot more pushups than I thought I would.

Now, depending on how many you could do you will start on a certain level in the program.  Obviously the higher amount of pushups you could do, the more fit they assume you are, and the harder you have to push yourself in the exercises as you go from level to level.

I decided I would keep it to a max of 15 this time around, as last time was a bit hard on me.  I could easily have done more, but for the sake of having an easier workout I left it at 15.  Perhaps this sounds stupid, but I want to start on a lower level this time to have time to work up towards it.

What I didn’t mentioned previously, is that this program is supposed to train you up that you can do 100 consecutive pushups within 6 weeks!

In October last year (2008) I came across this website, http://www.hundredpushups.com/. Nonsense I thought, utter nonsense.

For some reason it bothered me immensely, and I want to know if it really worked. So I downloaded the little manual, read a bit more about it, and understood what they were trying to achieve. To get anyone, no matter if you can do 1 or 50 pushups right now, to achieve a goal of doing 100 consecutive pushups.

So I did my max test (which is the initial one) and did 19 pushups. I never thought I would be able to do so many, and was quite happy with myself. Then I realised that because I did so many, you skipped a couple of weeks of training and headed straight towards the more advanced weekends. There reasoning obviously being that if I can already do 19, they don’t want me to train to reach 19, I must start off from there.

It was quite tough for me not doing any exercising or so at that time, not even to mention the fact that the only other exercise I was getting the previous year or so was Geocaching! So I was literally killing myself doing sets of 15, 20, 25, 30 and then 40 pushups for example a day, 3 times a week. Needless to say, sometime just before the December holidays I stopped, with the plan to just take a break for a week. I haven’t done it since.

And now the reason for the title of the post, Take 2. I will be starting it again from next week, Monday. This time I will only go 70% of what I believe my max is for this first max test, just to make the training a bit easier!

At this point you might be asking yourself, why train to be able to do 100 pushups? The only answer I can give, is that I want to see if I can do it.