Whether you go to the gym regularly or have decided to train at home by creating your own gym, one thing is certain: you want to gain more and more muscle and lift more and more weight.
But does this let you know how strong you are? Of course, you can't compare yourself to others who are heavier or lighter than you, but you can compare yourself through a challenge.
This is the push-up challenge, an exercise that allows you to assess your strength relatively, that is, against yourself and not against the weight lifted by others. Push-ups are one of a group of exercises that challenge you to lift your own body weight, and that's what this challenge is all about: seven days of doing different types of exercises, and at the end of it all, you'll be able to do 100 push-ups without stopping.
As the experts at Men's Health explain you can take on the challenge at any time of day, as it won't take you long, but you must concentrate on doing the push-ups perfectly. The ideal is to do as many consecutive repetitions of each exercise as possible, and if you can't, do as many as you can until you have no strength left – it's better than doing them wrong.
The Seven Day Challenge
On the first day, we will face the pause push-ups, that is, introduce a small pause when the chest almost touches the ground, before getting up. To do this, place your palms under your shoulders, contract your abs and glutes and perform the push-ups correctly, but with this small pause before returning to the starting position. Try to do 60 reps in a row.
The second day is the push-ups with free hands. In this exercise, we will support the chest on each descent, lifting the hands, to come back up and continue the reps. It is important to keep the shoulders contracted and the tension in the whole body to correctly perform 45 repetitions without stopping.
On the third day, we will repeat the push-ups on break from the first day of training. Ideally, we should try to do more reps than the first day, until we reach 70.
The fourth day is devoted to 1.5 push-ups. It's all about getting the body to the lowest point of the push-up and, instead of returning to the starting position, only going halfway and then back down. In other words, it's like doing 1.5 push-ups with each repetition, hence the name. It is a difficult exercise, but if we do it correctly, it is very beneficial. We should try to do 40 push-ups of this type without stopping.
On the fifth day, we do the push-ups again with a break, but trying to reach 80 reps without stopping, which is already a challenge.
On the sixth day, we repeat the push-ups with our hands free, but instead of the 45 reps we did on the second day, we'll try to reach 55 reps without stopping.
The challenge is to successfully do 100 push-ups in a row on day seven.
Finally, on the seventh and final day, we will need to be able to complete the challenge, which is to do 100 push-ups in a row without stopping. These are normal push-ups, the ones we've always done, but it's important to do them correctly to avoid injury and to make the work effective. If you have successfully completed this seven-day challenge, you are ready for anything.
I'm a big fan of short stories about people – I'm a pro at tech and smartphones, serial literature, and writing in my spare time.
