The Path to 1000 Push-ups Begins with 100

The photo on the left is from March, a month after I started working out, and the photo on the right is from this past Saturday. The lighting in the two photos is a little different and I am in a slightly different pose but you can see I've made some progress from then to now. The big reason for this post though isn't to show before and after photos. The photo on the right was really taken as a before photo, because for the first time in my working out I've set a real goal.

 For some reason when you Google push-ups the first website that comes up is hundredpushups.com. It is a week by week guide on how to do a workout that will allow one to do 100 consecutive push-ups. I began it being able to do 50 so I got to skip to week three and as of yesterday I've done one workout. After I complete this I will have another picture taken of me and compare it to the before picture and see if there have been any changes. I can tell you the biggest changes aren't noticeable in the above pictures. In the picture on the left I was a size 36 waist and in the one on the right, 34. Not the biggest of drops, but it is something.

As you may have noticed from the title to this post 100 push-ups isn't the real goal. It is only a stepping stone to reach 1000 consecutive push-ups. I don't know yet how I'm going to do that but I have a plan. I'm thinking the first step is to complete the 100 push-up program and then take a week off from push-ups and double the program to get to 200 and then repeat that until I can do 1000. As of this writing the mere thought of doing 1000 consecutive push-ups sounds overbearing and if I were to continue to think of it in that manner it is a task I'd never complete, but by having a goal of 100 then 200 then 300 and so on. 1000 push-ups will become more realistic with each passing goal. 

The other week I did 600 push-ups in a single day. I did it with mostly sets of 25 and by the end it was hard to crank out a set of 10, but I did it and it shows that that many push-ups can be done. This was in one day and not consecutively but the number is still impressive, and along the way to 1000 consecutive push-ups there will be a 1000 push-up day in there. Once I talk the number in a day it will become less daunting and my mind will understand it is an achievable goal. 

The mind can be a great barrier. When I was still lifting weights and doing bench press on a regular basis my final set was five reps at 295 and I could complete all five reps, but add five more pounds and I couldn't do one rep. All rep calculators would've told you my max was well above 300, but put 300 lbs on the bar and I couldn't do it. The funniest thing about this was with squat I never had this issue. There was never a mental blocker when it came to squat, but with bench press the thought of 300 lbs crushed me. That is why this must be done gradually and with precision so that the mind never has the chance to think of 1000 push-ups as 100 and 200 reps eventually become as 10 and 20 reps are now. 

I am starting out on this path and the end will be reached, but first there are many steps along the way. 100 push-ups is the first goal up and in around three to four weeks time that goal will be in the past and I will move onto the next and with each passing goal the next one will become closer and closer and I will reach the final goal without even realizing I'm there.