Real Push Ups

As regular readers will know, I am participating in the 100 Push Up Challenge where I follow a training regime aiming to result in being able to perform 100 consecutive push ups after 6 weeks.

My current weight is about 94Kgs and if I had a very athletic body, it would be more like 84Kgs as it was when I used to do martial arts about 9 years ago. So if I get leaner it would be easier for me to do push ups. My age is 45 years old and I am a male

But, so far I have completed week 2 of the challenge and will do a test on Thursday as to how many push ups I can do in one go. This will determine the level I start at in week 3 of the challenge, but the top level only requires 25 push ups which I am sure I will surpass. So, I am really looking forward to find out how many I can do now since I have no clue what my limit is. I only finished day 3 of week 2 today so I need to recover before the test.

Also, I may video my test and upload to YouTube. Then you can see how an overweight middle age guy can still do more push ups than many younger, leaner people to give you inspiration maybe?

When I looked at many of the push-up videos on YouTube, many of the people are not performing the push-ups in good form. So I dug out a video of a young lad doing them in what I consider to be good form:

You can see how he keeps his torso straight, locks out the arms and goes down deep. The supports are to save straining the wrists and allow a deeper range of movement. I will be placing my palms on the ground and bending my arms to at least 90 degrees. I guess I will use a pad to touch my chest on to know when I went deep enough, then lock out my arms on the upward movement.

This is what I gathered is the full range of a standard pushup. Going deeper is for body builders, so I want to be on a level playing field with the rest of the honest challengers.

I think the young, lean guy in the video said he can do about 40 conventional push ups, so for fun I want to beat him!

Wish me luck …