TL;DR
- Self-experiment on habit development
- Do 100 pushups/day (with variations/progressions when suitable)
- Complete a total of 100 000 pushups
- Why? To get exercise and yes, to do a self-experiment.
Pushup log
Pushup log in reverse chronological order; also empty days are marked to keep me accountable :) Data is added retrospectively roughly once in 1-2 weeks.
Background
A few days ago I read an article on why one should be building habits and systems instead of (only) thinking about some really far-off goals.
In short, the point was that developing habits and sticking to them provides you with a very clear metric: you can easily tell whether you’ve completed your whatever daily routine. The other good part with this is a sense of accomplishment arising from sticking to what you set out to do.
On a larger scale, of course if so desired, you can align your small daily habits in accord to completing something much larger. But the point is not to focus on the far-off big thing but on being content in completing the small steps that take you toward the bigger objective.
Developing habits
They say it takes somewhere between 30-60 days to develop a habit. This was referenced for example in the previous article. What happens if you take a relatively small task and repeat it for say a 1000 days?
Pushups
I’m not a fitness expert, personal trainer or anything like that. I used to practise basketball eight times per week but that was 15 years ago. In the past year I haven’t exercised much and want that to change.
So partially just to get the exercise and partially as an experiment on myself, I’m starting with the following:
- 100 pushups/day
- complete a total of 100 000 pushups
- so that’s 1000 days (approx. 2 years, 9 months if done every day, which I’m not doing)
- use variations/progressions on pushups as seems fit
Finishing thoughts
Getting exercise and doing a self-experiment on developing and retaining habits; with only a few minutes of time spent per day. Let’s see what comes out of it.
What kind of a habit would you like to develop?
What kind of a habit would you like to develop for yourself and why?
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