Conclusion of 100 Push-Ups Challenge

Our 100 Push-Ups Challenge at work is DONE! No more having to do push-ups until fatigue (or rather, muscle failure) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week! So, on our final day where everyone showed up to see the results of our training, my grand total was....75 consecutive push-ups (then 25 modified to get to 100). 60-80 seemed to be about the range that most people were getting into. There were two men in class who did get to the full hundred...actually they both did 101, just for bragging rights, probably.

I knew going into today that it probably wasn't physically possible for me to get to 100. When I got to 75, I was almost tempted to try to get to 80, but I'm not sure I could have even done 76 without face-planting, so I stopped with a nice number of 75. On one hand, it's disappointing to not reach the end goal of a training program, but on the other hand, who would have thought that I could have done 75 consecutive push-ups in my life?!

My thoughts on the 100 Push-Ups training program are that it makes significant changes in your upper body strength and makes a regular set of push-ups seem like a total piece of cake. I still don't see how someone can be expected to get to 100 after only have gone up to 60 push-ups in the training program. That seemed to be the consensus of the class participants when I polled them today: that the program was great and hugely enhanced their upper body strength and push-up ability (the attendance in the class alone spoke to that), but they didn't see how in just 8 weeks of training they could be expected to pull off 100 push-ups. I would really be curious to see if someone kept repeating the last few weeks of the program, could they ultimately get to 100?

When I asked participants for their feedback on the program, another big comment I saw was that people were shocked that push-ups alone could tone their arms as much as they do and build up that much strength in a short time period. Yep, that's the beauty and benefit of body weight workouts--they're tough, they're multi-joint exercises, and they get the entire body involved. We know push-ups most obviously work the chest, triceps and shoulders, but whoever says they don't work everything from your back, to your core, to your legs, clearly hasn't done this program!

I recorded everyone's initial push-up test numbers and then everyone's final number today. Here's the breakdown:

Participant average of initial push-ups on 7/11/12: 33
Participant average of final push-ups on 8/29/12: 71

I would say that's a program success!!! Most people doubled their total number of push-ups...which, if you take into consideration that this was only in an 8 week time frame, that's incredible!!

On that note, I'm off to bed....we have to leave our house to catch our flight to Florida in 5 hours...yep 4am. Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!