I like this photo which I found on facebook from the group Female Health Motivation: Eat Clean Train Mean.
Reminds me of my fitness goals…I have many, many fitness goals but the top two right now both involve improving my upper body strength, which has been very slow going for me.
Goal one: 100 consecutive push-ups
Achieve by: 50 by end of March, 100 by end of June!
Right now…I can do a little over 20 consecutively… one of my personal trainers that I go to told me she thinks I can do 100 consecutively by the end of March this year! I think she is crazy, so secretly I am aiming for 50 by the end of March and 100 in 6 months…that will still be impressive to me. I can still remember only a couple of years ago when I could only do 1-2 push-ups… (on toes of course.)
I feel like being able to do so many pushups is especially empowering for a girl. I have skinny arms that look very useless but slowly i have managed to increase my strength and have found that it makes so many everyday movements such as carrying things and lifting so much easier. Many girls don’t realise the value of increasing their strength in particular upper body, they are more concerned with simply looking slim (and therefore do a lot of cardio) and there is nothing wrong with that, however increasing your strength has so many benefits, in addition to making everyday tasks easier, it helps improve your posture, balance out your body and protect you from injuries.
How to achieve this goal?
For a while I have been using this free app i downloaded onto my phone called 100 pushups. It breaks down pushups into sets and increases the sets each time. For example my next attempt looks like this:
13, 12, 14, 12, 12, 11 with 60 seconds rest in between each set for a total of 74 pushups.
You are supposed to do this every second day….I admit that I only get around to doing it maybe once a week. I do pushups as part of my workouts often but the amount I can do is greatly affected when i am already fatigued. So the main issue will be simply reminding myself to practice every every second or at least every third day!
Goal Two: Perform 5 (unassisted) chin-ups
Achieve by: end of March
Another goal I’ve had for a long time but until recently wasn’t really putting the effort that I should have into it! I guess because I hadn’t set a time. This is why you have to set very specific time for achieving goals by!
We all had to choose a fitness goal to reach by the end of our PT course and that will be in March…
so this is the one that I have put down. Currently I can do 2 chin ups on a good day….I don’t want to even say how long it took me to get to that point.
My training for this is to use the assisted chin-up machine at the gym where you use weight to help make it easier a few times a week. I also will jog down to a park near by me and attempt chin ups using the bars there, and then i do “reverse” chin ups where I will jump up till my chin is over the bar and then slowly lower myself down and repeat as many times as I can – this helps build the muscles. The other method is to jump up and then lower yourself down till your elbows are bent at 90 degrees and then hold in that position for as long as you can.
Hopefully the fact that I blogged about this will put more pressure (and motivate) on me to achieve these goals in time!
Veganlosophy 