I stumbled across the 100pushups website the other day and was immediately intrigued.  Keep in mind that I’m the girl who has never been able to do more than maybe 2 push ups at a time in her life, and even then they were probably the girlie on your knees type push up.  Upper body strength has just never been my forte.  Luckily in High School the Presidential Fitness tests didn’t expect girls over the age of 13 to be able to do push ups or pull ups so I never really had a reason to push myself or to try.  I could do the rest of the parts of the test fine and get the award without doing a push up so why bother?  As I looked at this site, though, and pondered its simple premise, to be able to do 100 consecutive push ups at the end of a 6 week period, I was overcome with a desire to try this and to succeed.  I want to prove to myself that having some measure of upper body strength is not outside my means and that just because I’m a girl that doesn’t mean I can’t do a push up.  Granted, I’m not expecting a miracle here.  Coupled with my lack of upper body strength to start with and the weight I really need to drop, completing this program successfully will not be easy.  However, by the beginning of September I’m really curious to see where I stand.

The program has you start off with a test to see how many push ups you can do so that it can gauge which level to place you at.  Doing a traditional plank style push up I could do 1, sort of, so I was obviously starting from the very bottom rung for this task.  I completed the first day today and decided that if I was going to make any progress I was going to have to do the girlie push ups, at least for now.  The plan has you retest yourself after two weeks, I will gauge if I can switch to regular push ups at that point.  Today called for 4 sets of 2 push ups each and then a final, 5th, set of as many push ups as you could do.  I managed 10 before my arms called it quits, though I don’t feel any lasting soreness thus far.  We shall see what Wednesday’s workout holds.