Friday, March 11, 2011

Ladies and Gentleman I have an important announcement:

Today I completed 30 real push ups (3 X 10 reps).

Ok, so here's why this is important and exciting to me.  For years I always thought real push ups were too hard for me and that I just wasn't strong enough, that I just hadn't built up enough strength to do em.  Or I thought they were just for men, or for women who were really in shape of had the "guns".  So every time I did a push up I would stick to the "girl push ups"*, the ones where instead of being on your toes, your on your knees.  

Last December, during pre-season I realized that in order to get a nice upper body workout with my girl push ups I had to do 30-40 reps.  Talk about time consuming.  So I tried to do a set of real ones.  I could barely do one.   I thought to myself "ok I've been doing these for years, and I'm not all that much closer to doing a set of real ones.  Maybe this approach (the girl push up approach) to getting strong isn't working for me".  So I agreed to myself that each week, 3 times a week I would do 3 sets of the most I could possibly do.  The first week I could only do 1 push up, so a total of 3 that day.  It was frustrating,  but I just kept saying "hey you gotta start somewhere.  You have to work at this, you can't just magically build the muscle to do 10 in a row".  So each week I would try to do more.  Sometimes the push ups weren't in the best form so I would often do the same number as the week before but I would aim at maintaining my form.  So finally today, I did it!  I met my goal.  I completed 3 sets of 10 push ups in good form.  

So no, real push ups are not reserved for the strong men, or the women with guns.  Even I can do em.  You probably can to if you're willing to try just one.



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2 comments:

  1. Any 28 year old woman who titles something "Ladies and Gentleman I have an important announcement" should immediately add "(no, I'm not pregnant in parenthesis).

    I'm all excited and now it's about push-ups. Bait and switch.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think it's great that:
    (a)you're not pregnant and
    (b) that you can do manly push-ups. yipee!

    ReplyDelete