30-day fitness challenges

Back in December when I wrote about trying to get fit, a reader asked if I had seen the 30 day fitness challenges website.  I hadn't, so I checked it out.  There are a lot of different challenges and as far as I can tell, they are all brutal!  Most of them I couldn't do to save my life, but I thought that I should try and find one that I could at least attempt.

After looking at the squat, abs, burpee, plank, butt, splits, and crunch challenges, I rejected them all as too difficult and likely to cause injury to my soft body.  I was intrigued by the Beach Body Challenge, but I had never heard of so many of the exercises, I figured it was unattainable.  There are more challenges, but most of them seemed even worse.  

I finally settled on the easy push-up challenge.  It starts at 3 push-ups on Day One, and by Day Thirty you can do 20 push-ups!  Unfortunately, by Day Three my arms were killing me, and even after a day of rest, I was unable to complete Day Five.  Apparently, I can't do very many push-ups day after day after day.

Obviously, I needed an easier exercise in order to build up my arms.  I decided to do wall push-ups. But the easy push-up challenge was definitely too easy, if all I was doing was wall push-ups.  So I started the regular push-up challenge.  That starts at 15 push-ups on Day One and climbs to 40 by the last day of the challenge.  Plus, there are fewer rest days, which seemed reasonable for wall push-ups.


What's cool is that if you look closely, the poster shows the woman doing one-arm push-ups.  Maybe on Day Thirty I could do some one-armed wall push-ups!

Currently, I'm on Day 18, which means that I will do 29 wall push-ups this morning.  And my arms will be sore by the end of the repetitions.  I'm already looking beyond the end of this challenge though.  Will I be strong enough to return to the easy push-up challenge?  How far might I make it before failure this time?  Should I double down on the wall push-ups, one set in the morning and one in the evening?  Should I move on to some other challenge, most likely adapting it to make it easy enough for me to actually accomplish it?

I don't know yet, but I have twelve more days of wall push-ups to figure it out. What's fascinating to me, is that I'm in shape enough to tread water for an hour or two all the while playing strenuous water polo, but I'm still in really bad shape on land.

Working on changing that . . .