{"id":477,"date":"2018-10-07T17:26:02","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T01:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanbak.com\/?p=477"},"modified":"2026-01-02T20:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T04:05:20","slug":"10000-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/?p=477","title":{"rendered":"10000 Steps!"},"content":{"rendered":"

About 4.5 years ago I started wearing a Fitbit and tracking my steps.\u00a0 The default goal is 10,000 steps per day and I made that my personal goal.\u00a0 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!”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But this post is not about steps.<\/p>\n

Just over a year ago I underwent some surgery.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After that activity hiatus, I wanted to do something to get into better shape without overdoing it.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 So I did five pushups and five sit ups every day for six days.\u00a0 Then I did six pushups and six sit ups every day for another six days.\u00a0 Then seven and then eight.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

It never got particularly easy and, as the daily count grew, some days I would break up the count into multiple sets.\u00a0 But every day it was doable.\u00a0 After several months, I reached the point where I was doing 50 pushups and 50 sit ups every day.\u00a0 That’s where I stopped adding to my daily count, but still continued with the daily activity.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Approximate number of pushups and sit ups per day<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So now it’s been a year since I started and I am still doing 50 pushups and sit ups every day.\u00a0 It still isn’t easy, but it is always doable.\u00a0 When I started, five seemed hard, but now I zip past five, ten, 15, 20, and beyond before even noticing the effort.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Total number of pushups (and sit ups) over the course of the year<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It took about three months to do the first thousand, but the rate increased and the total grew ending up closer to 12,000.<\/p>\n

So if you can do five pushups today, you can do 10,000 in a year.\u00a0 10,000 pushups!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 4.5 years ago I started wearing a Fitbit and tracking my steps.\u00a0 The default goal is 10,000 steps per day and I made that my personal goal.\u00a0 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!”\u00a0 … Continue reading “10000 Steps!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}