The Road to 10 000 push ups

September 8, 2019

In 2018 I started a physical challenge with a friend of mine, we decided to start doing 50 push ups a day as a way to get in shape, this quickly turned into something more serious and we invited a couple of friends to join. Being a web developer, it was not hard to build something that will keep track of our current progress and in 2019 the Outmuscle Me project was born. A lot more people liked the idea and joined our challenge, it evolved into 6 months of doing Push Ups, competing against each other, finding the motivation of doing exercises each day.

A couple of thoughts on strategies when doing the challenge, as this was not my first rodeo I knew that it’s more of a long term game rather than making a lot of Push Ups a day and not following for a couple of days, meaning I tried to stay consistent, not skipping a day trying to do at least a set no matter how down I was feeling. This turned out to be a winning strategy and I managed to finish second, the challenge at that point had 43 participants. 185 days (6 months) and I managed to do 10396 Push ups, which makes 56.19 Push ups on an average per day. Here’s a graph of how I did across those weeks

My longest streak (consecutive days of logging activities) for was 53 days, which meant that I managed to do almost 2 months without skipping a day, that kind of feels bad because I remember the day I skipped and the reason was that I simply forgot and did them after 12:00 AM (I blame the tooling as no reminder is available atm). In retrospective I see that May was a good month for me, I was feeling the benefits of everyday training and I was more comfortable doing several sets a day, in July I tried to focus more on my form rather than on repetition and that’s clearly shown in the graphic.

I am happy that I’ve managed to reach the secret goal of 10 000 Push Ups, that’s kind of a lot and things are looking really good for the next challenge. Working hard always pays off!