Sometime in mid 2014 I added 50 pushups to my morning routine. It seemed like a small and simple thing to do to supplement my gym workouts, taking just a couple minutes every day. I stuck with it for about three weeks, then forgot one morning. Once the streak was broken, I just stopped and didn’t think about it again for a while.
Last month I decided I wanted to start again. But I knew I needed to approach it differently if I wanted to make it a longer term habit. What I quickly realized is that I don’t really care whether I do 50 pushups every day, and there isn’t anything particularly special about doing 50 reps. Some days maybe I’ll want to do more, others none. My goal was really just to integrate more pushups into my life.
I figured I had probably done about 1,000 pushups over the three weeks when I stuck with it, and then maybe I did another 500 at other times throughout the year. So in the first 11 months of 2014, I probably did about 1,500 pushups. So I set a simple goal: over the next year I’m going to do at least 10,000 pushups, and I don’t care when I do them.
To track this, I put together a simple grid with 400 boxes, each box representing a set of 25 pushups. Every time I do 25 pushups, I write the date in a box. If I do 50, then I fill two boxes, and so on. And I put the grid on the refrigerator.
I’m two weeks in, and so far this has been extremely effective for me. Sometimes I do pushups when I wake up, other times when I walk by the fridge and am reminded of the 10k goal. In the two weeks I’ve averaged about 70 per day, but with a wide amount of variation – on one day I did 200, and I skipped Christmas. Here’s my progress:
If I were to do this over a year, it works out to about 27 pushups per day, but at my current rate, maybe I’ll finish the 10k more quickly. When I do, I’ll plan to just print a second grid to keep at it.
I told this to my friend Dan Siegel, who loved the idea and asked for a copy of the tracker. He immediately forwarded it on to a few of his friends (before even looking at it), then later complained that he didn’t realize it had no explanation and was just an excel spreadsheet with a grid designed to fit on one page. After telling some other friends, I got more requests for the copy of the tracker along with a bunch of commitments to do 10k pushups in 2015.
So I’ve “updated” the grid with instructions, added a name (i.e., The 10K Pushup Challenge), introduced a logo for kicks (I Googled free logos and found DesignMantic, which presented me with a sweet logo of a bear growling), and turned it into a PDF file. Here’s what it looks like now:
I don’t often make new year’s resolutions, and didn’t intend for this to be one, but the timing is right, so I figured I’d share my tracker today. And I encourage anyone reading this to join me and do 10K pushups in 2015.
You can download the tracker here. Happy new year.