About 4.5 years ago I started wearing a Fitbit and tracking my steps. The default goal is 10,000 steps per day and I made that my personal goal. Some days I do not meet that goal either because of illness, scheduling, weather, or laziness, but most days my Fitbit jiggles and I exclaim “10,000 steps!” In the 4.5 years I have walked over 17,500,000 steps which averages out to just over 10,000 steps per day and my record for continuous days over 10,000 steps is over 100 days. But this post is not about steps.
Just over a year ago I underwent some surgery. Not only did my step count plummet, but I was unable to do any strenuous activity for six weeks–particularly nothing that would use my abdominal muscles. After that activity hiatus, I wanted to do something to get into better shape without overdoing it.
I couldn’t do a lot, but I could do five pushups and five sit ups without feeling too much strain in the scarred area of the surgery site. So I did five pushups and five sit ups every day for six days. Then I did six pushups and six sit ups every day for another six days. Then seven and then eight. I kept on doing pushups and sit ups every day and added one more about every six days (the number of days varied slightly so that I would add five every month).
It never got particularly easy and, as the daily count grew, some days I would break up the count into multiple sets. But every day it was doable. After several months, I reached the point where I was doing 50 pushups and 50 sit ups every day. That’s where I stopped adding to my daily count, but still continued with the daily activity.
So now it’s been a year since I started and I am still doing 50 pushups and sit ups every day. It still isn’t easy, but it is always doable. When I started, five seemed hard, but now I zip past five, ten, 15, 20, and beyond before even noticing the effort.
As I realized it’s been a year, I wondered if I could say “10,000 pushups!” and “10,000 sit ups!” so I decided to do some rough math and see about how many I did.
It took about three months to do the first thousand, but the rate increased and the total grew ending up closer to 12,000.
So if you can do five pushups today, you can do 10,000 in a year. 10,000 pushups!
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