cross train | Noshing On Asphalt

Thank you all so much for the encouragement and support from Friday’s post about my brother’s death. It means more to me then you may ever know. I had a blast over the weekend celebrating my brother’s life by getting splattered with paint at The Color Run in New Orleans. I’ll have a full recap on it next week but here’s at least a bit of a teaser shot for you. 🙂

Looks fun, right? Well, it was!! I’m still finding random splotches of blue on me….

Onto the the heart of the post….If you are even a part time peruser of my blog than you know that it’s no secret I have basically 0% upper body strength. And I’m not being modest; although, I wish I was.

As a runner, obviously, most of my energy is focused on my lower body but by doing this, I’m totally cheating myself out of the benefits that upper body strength can bring to the table. Not only does have a svelte upper body look great but it also increases endurance in running. Think about it this way, the faster and longer you can swing your arms while running, the faster and longer you can run. During marathon training when I was doing 8 miles of speed work, I would feel every bit of those miles the next day in my traps and deltoids.

Now that I’ve started training for my second marathon, I want to make sure to address this deficiency. And, I’m not going to lie, I ~~kind of~~ really want that svelte look I mentioned earlier.

I said svelte, not stacked, Arnold!

Several times throughout this past year I’ve gone to the gym and lifted weights only to find myself stopping after a few workouts for whatever excuse I could concoct. I have the type of personality that responds really well to structure like training plans and challenges (like my no sugar detox which ends today) so when I found 100 Push Ups, I was pretty stoked. Plus I can do it right in the comfort of my own home….in my PJs. They even have an app for your smart phone (their website’s pretty simplistic but the app is better).

If you’re wondering why I would rather do push ups instead of targeted weight training at the gym, the answer is simple: push ups are one of the most effective upper body exercises you can do. Pushups work numerous muscle groups simultaneously and you’re already equipped with everything you need to do them – no fancy gym equipment required!

All the muscle groups worked by pushups.
Source

The 100 Push Up Challenge is a 6 week program that is supposed to take about 30 minutes a week. 30 minutes…I think I can handle that. It starts with an initial assessment and then works on increasing the amount of push ups you can do. I was only able to do 10 ‘good form’ pushups so that’s my starting point. Meh, there’s only one way to go and that’s up, right? Realistically, do I believe that I’ll be able to bang out 100 push ups at the end of 6 weeks? No. But, if I can even get to 50 consecutive push ups, I’ll be completely satisfied.

I started the challenge last week and let me tell you, my arms have never felt like jello this much! Saturday was the end of week one and I had to do 42 good-form pushups. Yowza! At least the program has you do a rep/rest pattern. To give you an idea, the break down of Saturday’s program went like this: 8 pushups/rest 120 second, 10 pushups/rest, 7 pushups/rest, 7 pushups/rest, and finally 10 pushups….Done, son. I’ll give updates on my progress periodically over the next 6 weeks and hopefully I’ll have a great before and after picture to share. So here’s the before picture….GULP!