Week 2 Pushups and Situps == FAIL!

On Wednesday I did the tests for the hundred pushups and two hundred situps challenges and that put me pretty squarely in week 3.

Turns out I’m not ready…. and yet I still did 73 pushups and 80 situps!

I had decided to start next week at the beginning in week 3, so I wanted to get into it by doing the end of week 2’s program today. Boy was I in for it.

The pushups program for day 3 of week 2 is 5 sets of pushups (with 2 minute rest in between): 16, 17, 14, 14, then as many as possible with a minimum of 20. Situps is similar though only a minute rest between each for 24, 25, 21, 21, then max (min of 30).

I got through all the normal sets of pushups though the last 4 in the last set of 14 were wicked hard. I then experienced a spectacular failure on my 12th pushup in the “as many as you can” set. Luckily I turned my head before I hit the ground. I tried to get more in, but I was spent.

In situps it was worse — I didn’t get through the fourth set; I conked out at 10 out of 21. I’m not sure if it was because I only rested 5 minutes after I did all those pushups, but maybe.

I realize that this will be harder than I thought. My initial test had my max as 27 pushups, but you’ll notice that I did 73 pushups: 16+17+14+14+12–but with 2 minute breaks. Similarly I did an initial test of 51 situps but what I was able to do today was 80 situps — 24+25+21+10.

For situps, I know I can do better. In high school I did something in the range of a hundred situps in 2 minutes as that was part of the physical fitness test. However, I think the pushup number was 10 or 15. This is crazy; I did 73 pushups today?!

I’m going to scale back and do week 2’s program next week (and maybe rest a little longer between pushups and situps), but I may rethink my goal for this. I just looked ahead to week 6 after which I should be able to do 100 pushups in a continuous stretch. The last day of week 6 is 9 sets of pushups totalling 274 in the workout. Oh. My. Fracking. What. Situps goes to 427. Yikes.

I’m not sure how important it is for me to do a continuous one hundred pushups or two hundred situps, though it does sound really cool. We’ll see how long this sticks. I’ll always have sledging to fall back on.