Week 9: Let's Get Physical, Physical

For this week I decided I needed to get back into exercising regularly. I've made several attempts to do so over the past few years, none of them all that serious. I decided to try to stick to doing some simple exercises every morning that strengthen my core. Something I could spend 10-20 minutes on in the morning and be done with. I wanted there to be no need to go to the gym or even leave my room necessarily.

I remembered Aaron, a friend of mine from the 404s, had at one point been going through the One Hundred Push-ups program. I'm not sure how well that worked out for him, but I checked out the website and it seemed like something I could follow. Exercise three times a week, only about 10 minutes each time, and within 6 weeks, you're supposed to be able to do 100 consecutive push-ups.

"That's not too bad" I thought to myself. "I'm pretty sure I can do at least 10 in a row now".

So I took the initial test, and collapsed onto the ground after the 16th push-up. That made me feel pretty good about myself, beating my own expectations.

"Awesome!" I thought. "This puts me into the advanced bracket!"

This meant that I would do more push-ups per rep when training. So I did my exercises on Monday, and then again on Wednesday. At this point my brother passes by and tells me I'm not doing it right. So I get curious and look for how to do a proper push-up on Youtube. This guy ends up giving a pretty decent explanation.



Instead of the above, I was doing more of a half push-up, not going all the way down so my shoulders meet my elbow level. So I started trying to do them the correct way and collapsed at 4. Uh-oh. not nearly as impressive as I thought I was. So I'll be restarting the routine this week with a lighter, but proper workout.

I also joined the related Two Hundred Sit-ups program (which actually should be called the two hundred crunches program as that is what they advise you to do) and that is going really well. I have no trouble doing 80 consecutive proper form crunches at this point, so 200 in 60 weeks seems very achievable.

In case you're interested in doing crunches yourself, there are a couple of important things to remember while doing crunches that I learned from a gym trainer when I last went to a gym:

1. Rest your hands behind your head, but don't use your arms to pull yourself up. In fact, your neck shouldn't be moving. A good way to prevent this from happening even by mistake is to make sure to be staring at the ceiling at all times.
2. Make sure to tense your ab muscles while rising, the same way you would if you knew that someone was about  to punch you in the gut. This ensures that the right muscles are getting the workout.
3. As long as you're following the above tip, you only really need to go up a bit to do a proper sit-up. Say, about 35 degrees.
4. Breathe out as you rise, breathe in as you descend.

This dude will show you:



Anyways, I'm determined to stick with these two programs. Exercising like this has felt pretty good so far, actually.