This post shared my experiences and strategy on how I started my push-up habit and accumulated 1197 push up until this morning at home.
Formulate A Plan that Works for You
I started by formulating a plan for myself. This plan shouldn’t be too dense as it might demotivate me to stop or quit. Thus, I start small and easy to ensure myself to do this consistently before I raised the difficulty level.
These are the questions I ask myself when I formulating a plan.
- How many pushups do I want to achieve in a day?
Answer: 30 - How many pushups I can make in a row/session?
Answer: 10 - When would I make this push up?
Answer: Before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Which means I will make 10 pushups before every meal
Do Not Blindly Follow Your Plan, Update It until It Suit You.
When you execute the habit is a very important factor. I made a mistake from the beginning where I choose to make this push up before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is because:
- Working from 9 am to 6 pm sometimes made me skip the 10 push up that I intended to do before lunch.
- I keep forgetting the pushup session that needs to done at before lunch session.
After I trying for several days, and I get to know this is not working for me. I change my plan.
I shifted and make my push up before the bath. Since I am having my bath in the morning and night before going to bed, I think this is a pretty good strategy and it worked magnificently.
Before I bath, I will make 15 pushups.
1 Percent Better — Challenge Yourself During the Pushup Session
At this stage, I have already established the routine and habit for the pushup session which is consistently making 15 pushups every session before bath for a week.
This is where I started to implement the 1 percent rule, I read about it from Atomic Habits by James Clear which is one of my life-changing books.
In short, one percent rule is simply mean Getting One Percent Better Everday.
Thus, I started to gradually increase the difficulty level, where I might do 16 pushups for a few days, and increase it again when I started to get comfortable.
Until today, I can make around 44 push up daily.
Things to Avoid In Your 1 Percent Better Journey
- Do not increase the number of push up every day. Allow your body and your muscle to get used to it. Since this is our daily habit, we do not want to end up hurting or injured our muscles
How I Avoid Skipping My Habit
I want to clarify here that we’re human after all, we have to accept ourselves ain’t perfect, and we might make mistakes and fail to follow the plan.
But what I am sharing here is minimize the skipping. I organized my push up session at morning and night before bath. This approach not only allows me to make the push up easier and enjoyable, but it also makes it difficult to skip.
If I skip the morning session, my guilt will encourage myself and told me that you have skipped the morning push-up, you better ensure yourself don’t skip the night session.
With this approach, it makes the skipping hard, even if I miss my morning session, I can still do my push up at night.
Incorporate Other Fitness Activity
When I have successfully installed the push-up habit, I started to incorporate other activities such as Plank into the session. For example, I started my 30 seconds plank after 25 days of continuous push-up and increase the total duration for my plank session gradually.
Thus, this could transform into my workout session instead of just push-up.
Conclusion
In short, here are the summarized steps of my approach.
- Formulate A Plan. I have also provided some questions that I asked myself during plan formulation.
- Try out the Plan and give yourself the freedom to adjust it until it suits you.
- Stick to the Habit For 1 Week and Gradually Increase the Difficulty.
- Besides, I also shared my approach to how I minimize the skipping of habit.
- Lastly, I also start to incorporate other related activities such as plank into the pushup session.
Last but not least, I will share out my push up spreadsheet tracking.
Recommendations
- Atomic Habits by James Clear. I really recommend this book as it brings me a lot of value in my life. I enjoyed reading it and also taking actions using the strategy from the book.
Thanks for reading and I hope this article really has given you some idea on how to start your push-up journey or any other habit you want to build.
