Shaping Up

I just completed Week 5, Day 2 of the 200 Situps challenge and thought, hey, there's a blog post in there somewhere. So here it is!

With new found singleness comes a renewed feeling of pressure to shape up. It's not like I let myself go when I got married, but I definitely didn't feel the pressure to always look my best at all times, which I happen to think is a good thing, but that's maybe just me. I didn't get fat by any means, maybe just a little overweight, and maybe a little chunky in the stomach area. I primarily want more muscle definition in my arms and chest, and reduced love handle mass.

Anyone that knows my ex-wife knows that she lost a lot of weight in the past couple of years. So I was feeling some pressure to shape up long before now. With the release of Wii Fit last summer, I started my first workout program in years. Since that time, I have been very diligent about tracking my weight every day with the Balance Board. I was doing pretty good, too, losing 10 pounds in the first six months with a combination of light weight-training and cardio. And then April of this year came around, 5 extra pounds appeared in the stomach area, and I'm not even sure what happened, but the Wii Fit graph doesn't lie.

So this summer I realized I needed another program. I think most people would agree that it's tough to motivate yourself to workout without a program to follow and a goal to attain. I decided at the beginning of June that I was going to try the six week, 100 Pushups challenge.

I have never been able to do many pushups. But at the same time, I had never pushed myself to do more pushups, so this was going to be an interesting experiment. For my first exhaustion test I managed a pathetic 15 pushups in a row. It was going to be a hard six weeks!

Looking back, it is quite amusing that I actually thought I could follow that program for a measly six weeks and then maybe be able to do 100 pushups. The first two weeks went well, and I managed 23 pushups in my second exhaustion test. Week 3 went okay, but the workouts were certainly getting tougher quick. And then I hit the wall on Week 4, Day 1.

I tried repeating Week 3 to build up to Week 4 again, but the wall was still waiting for me on Monday morning. Next I decided to repeat Week 4, Day 1 until I could complete it comfortably, which consumed nearly all of July. I may have moved onto Day 2 at some point, but unexpected life circumstances turned August into a complete workout-free write-off month...

I finally decided to give the challenge another go this week, and after a month of inactivity, I had little choice but to go back and start with Week 3 again. So far it's going okay, and I look forward to smashing through that Week 4 wall on Monday.

I am now able to do 30 consecutive pushups in exhaustion tests. If I look at that as a 100% increase from what I started at, maybe it isn't too bad. But it's still a long way from 100. But I also haven't given up. I would definitely be happy with 50, which I think is an attainable goal.

But wait, didn't this post start with me talking about 200 situps? Yes, yes, it did. Thanks for paying attention.

With the pushup challenge going so well at the end of Week 2, I decided I needed something to do on the rest days, and the complementary situp challenge seemed like a great idea. My initial exhaustion test of 41 was good enough for me to skip ahead to start with Week 3. So, the plan worked perfectly; I was working on Week 3 of the pushup and situp challenges at the same time.

But I never hit a wall with the situp challenge. Week 4 was cake. I easily hit 100 on my second situp exhaustion test. Week 5 wasn't much harder. Week 6 brought the hurt, but I was managing. I completed Week 6, Day 2 pretty comfortably. But then life interrupted and August was wasted.

I restarted Week 5 of the situp challenge this week. Day 1 started rough, with a whole month of no situps at all to overcome, but today's workout felt very good. I don't think I will have a tough time at all managing 200 consecutive situps in a week and a half. Maybe there is a wall there that I just haven't found yet, but I don't think so. Maybe this is a common experience for people, I don't know, but it's interesting how much easier the situp challenge has been for me than the pushup challenge.

So, what's the point of this blog post? There isn't one. Does there have to be? This year was also at one time going to be the year of me running a half-marathon, but that dream died pretty early. There might be another blog post in there somewhere...