30 Days of Push-ups: Lessons & Takeaways

Hello fellow fitness lovers and welcome back to the blog. Today’s blog will be all about push-ups as I have recently completed a challenge to do fifty pushups every day for 30 days. It seems this self-isolation is making me find creative (and slightly crazy) ways to stay entertained. So in today’s post I’d like to talk about what the month was like, what I took away from this challenge and how something like this could benefit you. 

First off I’d like to say that the catalyst behind this challenge was the imposed home isolation here in Belgium. While the situation is not ideal and there are many who have been negatively affected, or at least horribly inconvenienced, I wanted to find some positives. One of the ones I thought of was using the time to try to become a healthier and stronger version of myself. Enter: the crazy idea to do one physical exercise every day for one month. I was not motivated to change the way my body looked, but rather to see if I could get any stronger in these 30 days. I chose push-ups because they have always been difficult for me and I therefore thought this would be a wonderful experiment both for my physical and mental fortitude. It’s simple and maybe even enjoyable to do something for a month that comes easy to you, and for some of you that might be push-ups (which is great) but the purpose of this challenge (and this subsequent blog post) are to show the benefits from doing something hard and uncomfortable consistently. I love exercising because it is a concrete and free way to overcome little challenges each day that, overtime, increase your confidence in your abilities and this spills over into other areas of life. The aesthetic is simply a side effect of choosing to move your body in creative and challenging ways each day. This is what I promote here on my site and to my clients- find a type of movement that you enjoy, practice it consistently and continue to find ways to up the ante. I believe that this is one of the best things we can do for ourselves, and also something that will positively impact those around us. 

But back to the push-ups. To be honest, the first few days were brutal and about half of the fifty push-ups I had to do on my knees. And that was fine by me :) The important thing was showing up each day and repping out the fifty. As the days passed, the breaks shortened and I was able to complete all fifty on my hands and feet. All of this was great until week 3 when I hit a series of hard days in which I reverted back to my knees. This was really frustrating because I felt I was going backwards. It’s times like these, though, when it’s crucial to keep the bigger picture in mind. Progress is seldom linear, be it in fitness, career, health, etc. What I found helped me on these two days was to take it in stride, know that tomorrow is a new day and give the push-ups all I could. That is all any of us can do- give our best each day. That may not mean 100%, or perfect form, or what you managed two days earlier. It means giving what you can today, being proud of yourself for that and gently trying to improve in the ways that you can going forward. 

Now that the thirty days is up I’m happy to report that I have decided to continue doing daily push-ups and have upped the amount to sixty- I told you this quarantine is making me a bit loopy :P You may be thinking: this sounds crazy, boring, not something I’d benefit from, or just, why? And I understand. I’m not here to advocate you do a month-long push-up challenge yourself. I only wanted to share my experience and recommend that you do something that challenges you to see how strong you are after it’s said and done. Your challenge could be fitness related (squats, pushups, burpees), information based (completing an online course, reading a book a week, etc) or more introspective (meditating every day, journaling, practicing gratitude, etc). It doesn’t really matter what you choose, so long as you consistently show up for yourself and push through even when things get hard. Because they will. And it’s by staying on track and remembering the bigger picture that you will come out the other end a stronger and more confident person.

Do something today that your future self will thank you for :)

Thank you all for reading this week and I hope that you are staying healthy and safe during this strange quarantine. Hopefully it won’t be long before we are all hugging, socializing and chit chatting again :)

Until next week,

Alexandra