Category Archives: Push-up/Sit-up Improvement

Workout for Wednesday, 10 April

 

 

 

 

 

Up at 0430.  Knocked out pushups on the balcony and a 40-minute  trainer ride on the bike.  I snapped a screenshot of a different page of the pushup app because this one actually shows the rest intervals.

On this workout I used NO EXTRA REST TIME and I knocked out the final set of 60 without coming out of the front leaning rest.   Felt really good.  Breaking the lead in sets in half makes the fatigue much more manageable compared to the workout on Monday.

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I also finally pulled my mountain bike out of the closet (covered in cobwebs and with two completely flat tires).  It’s all polished up, lubricated, pumped and ready to go.  Next week I’m going to start sneaking out after work and hitting the mountain bike track near my office on Thursdays. If I don’t post next Friday, send help.

Two days in a row

I shouldn’t be this excited considering I worked out first thing in the morning for . . . oh . . . about 14 years of my life.  But considering I don’t have a single workout partner or any form of external influence to “encourage” me to do so nowadays I’m significantly proud that I once more got up early and worked out BEFORE work.

It is fantastic to come home after work and have the evening completely free and not have to force yourself to muster the mental energy to get out the door and workout.

Here’s all what I did before the sun came up today:

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I’m feeling really strong on the pushups.  This workout for example only called for 50 reps in the last set.  Did 57.  No ‘pike’ resting either.  I took one or two quick breathing breaks in the plank position but for the most part just knocked them out.  Solid.

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Wasn’t feeling really strong for this run.  Could have been the time of morning.  Could have been the cycling the previous day (always hard on the legs).  Really just wanted to slog through at a slow trot, but I scrolled through the custom workouts on my Garmin and decided to knock out this 30s hard/30s easy run.  It was not fun.

Workout for Saturday, 23 February

I skipped my cardio again today.  Did the push-up workout though.  It was a rough one.

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I gave myself and extra 30-seconds of rest before the final set of 50.  I would have taken ANOTHER 30, but I wasn’t fast enough pushing the button and the timer ended so I went with it. Even with that I had to take a break at 27.  Got up on my knees, swung my arms a few times and took a couple deep breaths and then went back to work.

Next scheduled workout is a best effort test.  Last test was 75.  Not sure how much improvement I’ll see this time, but I guess that’s what the test is for right?

Workout for Saturday, 2 February

Today was my second Hundred Pushups workout.  I forgot to grab a screen cap of the workout but if I recall correctly it was something like this:

  • 20
  • 25
  • 15
  • 15
  • 25

For a total of 100 pushups.  Each set had a 90-second rest interval.  So far the program is pretty easy.  We’ll have to see how it ramps up.

Next was a run.  I decided to mix it up today for two reasons: 1) variety in training is good and 2) I was in a hurry and didn’t want to spend 40-minutes out on the road.  Good enough right?

Luckily it was a hard effort run day.  It’s a lot easier to adjust your time factor and still get the workout you want on a hard day than on an easy day.  On an easy day, less time means less distance.  No way around it.  But with a hard day you can be creative.  I wasn’t that creative since I just did a 2x1600m interval with a warm up, cool down and 200m recovery interval in between, but at least it was something different but still relevant to my goal.

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Obviously, my second 1600m wasn’t as strong as the first.  Part of that was fitness, part was poor strategy.  I think I should have gone a little easier during my recovery period in order to maximize my effort during the hard legs.  I really like this workout for the longer sustained effort it requires.  I think that 1600m intervals are great for training my mind to the difficulty of a 2-mile run effort.

[Note: I realize that posting the maps is fairly pointless at this point since I run the EXACT SAME ROUTE every time but I’m just getting in the habit because my hope is to start mixing up my run locations so I have a neat collection of maps and even getting some elevation changes in there so I can justifiably post the elevation profiles of my runs too.]

Workout for Thursday, 31 January

Short, 30-minute jog today in the Five Fingers.  My feet and calves are feeling it.  I am not as used to running in those things as I was four months ago.

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I really, really, REALLY can’t wait until I live somewhere that has more than one viable running route available from my place of residence.  I am getting extraordinarily tired of the scenery and traffic on my current route.

But, the more exciting note for today is this:

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That’s right.  I did a pushup.  More precisely, I did 80 pushups in five sets, separated by a minute.  One of these days I’ll do a post just about the app that is shown above, but suffice it to say (for now) that today was the first day of my quest for 100 consecutive pushups.

Which is the first day of my renewed quest for the 375.  Pushups and pushup motivation are the big rock to be crushed in this equation (shhh, don’t think about the metaphor, just keep going, it’s okay) so for now, I’m going to start doing pushups.  Saturday, I’ll be doing 100 of them (not consecutively).