225 Pushups Per Week

Photo Courtesy of SheepGuardingLlama from Flickr

I have been working on a small experiment around achieving personal goals and making the goal a habit.  But before I share the technique, perhaps a back story is appropriate.  

Last year while training for a marathon I broke my foot.  The broken foot took running out of my fitness equation for months and I was looking for something else that I could do to at least stay in some form of being in shape.  In my search I came across an idea about doing 100 pushups per day.  Having never reached such a goal I decided that this might be an appropriate fitness goal for me.  I reached that goal last August and remember telling a work colleague about how proud I was about being able to do 100 pushups in 5 sets.  Shortly after I reached the goal (I ultimately achieved 107 pushups) I stopped doing pushups as a part of my fitness regimen.  As the months have rolled by quickly since last August I have had various challenges to keeping my fitness regimen.  When I was able to add distance running back in my routine I found myself experiencing various foot problems related to the break.  I would stop and start always ending with pain or minor injury.  Finally, in frustration, I took time to reevaluate my situation.  I first had to come to grips with the painful reality that I am not as young as I once was but also that the foot injury was a direct result of not taking things in moderation.  My break was as a direct result of over training, and putting on too many miles far too quickly.  I was also running too fast for my level of fitness always pushing harder with little appropriate rest.  A month or so ago I finally got it.  I recognized that I really needed to add moderation, pace, and rest to my schedule.  While this likely makes a great deal of sense to most people it is not the process I have followed traditionally.  I felt that getting fit was about running harder, pushing further and not stopping.  I know differently now.

In order to get back to comfortably running distance I set myself on a path to running just 15 miles per week while making sure that I ran 5 times each week.  For a regular runner 15 miles per week over 5 runs is not very much running.  Of course this is really just 3 miles per day.  The point however was not the number of miles per day but rather getting to a place where I could know that I would consistently run 5 days per week.  I recognized that over time the miles would add up but while getting back to 5 days per week I would allow my foot to adjust to the frequency of running and recovery.  At the same time I was recreating the running habit for me.  

One of the challenges I have usually faced when I run regularly is that I don’t feel that I have time for any exercise beyond running.  This means for me that the running causes me to lose muscle as well as fat.  This year I wanted to make sure that as I got my running pace back that I would also get my strength back to the level where it was last summer.  I really wanted to get back to 100 pushups per day.  Suddenly an idea came to me that really is an interpretation of something I heard from another runner (credit to Laurel Youse).  She said “no matter how slow or how far you run you are lapping everyone else that is not running at all.”  I trust that I have faithfully translated Laurel’s quote but it caused me to realize something.  In order to convert my desire to build strength and muscle in addition to aerobic fitness I needed to develop a new habit.  My running 5 days per week is part of my running habit but I did not have a strength habit.  Laurel’s quote also reminded me that it did not matter how small you start.  

Just over a month ago I set out to do 40 pushups in a week.  I recall telling that story while giving a presentation recently.  During a break a man walked up to me and said “you were really joking about 40 pushups per week right?”  He went on to say “you really can do more than 40 pushups in a week right?”  My response to him was of course I could do more than 40 pushups in a week but that prior to setting that goal I was not doing 40 pushups per week.  I also asked him how many pushups he was doing each week.  His response was zero.  right then I realized that I was on to something.  My 40 pushups per week were actually lapping his zero pushups per week.  Since I set my 40 pushups per week goal a little over a month ago I have consistently been doing a growing number of pushups each week.  Last week I successfully accomplished 210 pushups while maintaining my distance running schedule.  The goal for this week is 225 pushups which means just 32 pushups per day with one day requiring 33 pushups assuming that I do this every day (which has been my habit these past few weeks).

Here is why this has worked for me.  First, I started small with a goal that I knew I could easily achieve while establishing the habit.  Next, I increased the number weekly using last week’s performance as my guage.  If the number felt too easy I increased the weekly goal.  Finally, I worried less about the total than I did about the habit.  The key has been in establishing a habit of daily activity to achieve a new goal.

So here is the question.  Do you have something you have been putting off?  Perhaps my plan will help.  Set a goal today that you want to reach.  Make the goal so small that you would be hard pressed to actually fail but still spread the goal out over the course of a week.  Don’t exceed your goal that first week or for a while as you build your new habit.  You will be amazed by what happens.  

I want to hear your comments and I want to know your goals.  Next I will write about how you can track your goals and perhaps how you might use public accountability to keep you focused (think Facebook).