If you’ve read Happy Trails since January of 2011, you’ll know I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I’m actually a big proponent of resolutions, (reinvention is a powerful fulcrum, after all) but for me, the New Year presents too much pressure to go for the gold, which is why I withhold my resolutions for less “new” times of the year. For example, May is a nice odd month for change.
Coincidentally, though, I began a resolution last year in January (cross my heart, NOT a New Year’s resolution) to put a little bulk on bones. There were two ways to do this: lift hot dogs or weights. Tough decision, but I opted for weights, which posed a big problem:
I don’t like working out, especially with weights.
They’re so heavy, and I rather abhor the whole torture-chamber process of sitting in a mechanism whose sole purpose is to make you “pump iron.”
Opting against the Inquisition method of getting ripped, I chose the equally oppressive-sounding prison exercise option, which is anything you can do in a cell: pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups … maybe.
I also had to consider time. I don’t have much of it, and I didn’t think I’d have the strength to lift minutes in addition to weight (minutes are small but heavy things), so I decided to stick with pushups only. According to my research, pushups, if done properly, worked out your whole body and could be done daily.
About twelve years ago, Robert Downy Jr. appeared shirtless and buff on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine shortly after he was paroled from prison. When asked how he achieved his physique, he told the reporter he did 500 pushups a day in lockup. I figured since I was already going with a prison exercise, why not set a goal to match what one of my favorite actors could do. 500 a day it is.
I’m relatively young, thin, in shape, I should be able to do at least half that now, I thought.
I dropped to my hands and knees, got on my toes, ready to hammer out an easy 250, and was beat after five. I looked on my back to make sure there was nothing attached to me, adding unfair weight (found nothing there but my own deflating pride), and tried again. Another five. Terrific, 495 more to go. It was like standing at the base of Everest.
Right there, humbled on my hands and knees, I realized I had two options: weak as I was, climb the mountain or stay in base camp, eating hot dogs. Believe me, I debated, but eventually, I started to climb …
… first on my hands and knees, then on my hands and toes.
Like a baby learning to walk, it was wobbly at first. I started with four sets of 10 pushups throughout the day. But after a few weeks at that rate and increasing only two reps a time when I could, it was going to take me until I was 80 to reach 500 pushups a day, so I upped the number of sets to five per day. A month in, I was doing 60 imperfect pushups a day and told myself I’d worry about the technicalities later.
This began a year long process.
In September of 2013, I reached my 500-a-day goal, doing five sets of 100 pushups on my hands and knees. With that out of the way, I decided to do them on my hands and toes. Surprisingly, I could now do 60 as a baseline and moved forward from there. Again, the only problem was they weren’t perfect: all the way down, all the way up. Well, nobody’s perfect, I told myself and continued on. In early December I hit 500 imperfect pushups on my hands and toes.
Today, I still haven’t crested the mountain, but I graduated to perfect pushups and am doing five sets of 32 perfect pushups a day for six days a week, making a grand total of 160 pushups a day or 960 a week, which lets me know one thing is definitely true: being perfect isn’t easy.
