The Gun Show

Welcome to the Gun Show!  Like Ron Burgundy knew all too well, nothing attracts attention to a guy's physique faster than some well sculpted biceps.  An athletic build requires some upper body bulk to accentuate your flat abs!

However, if sitting on a bench doing curls is not your thing, you can build your biceps effectively doing nothing more than push ups.  Yeah that old gym exercise!

Sometimes we get the idea that only high-tech exercises performed in laboratory conditions (e.g. at the gym) will help us reach our fitness goals.  However, you may not realize that some of the most effective exercises can be performed anywhere without special equipment.  Push ups are one such exercise.

A few weeks ago I was impressed by some college football team mascots.  You know the ones.  Guys who do push ups everytime their team scores.  They do them quickly in full costume.  Which made me wonder, how many points could my favorite team score before I would be out of gas in a push up contest?  I discovered my limit:  40.   Thank God I'm not the mascot for the Crimson Tide.  I'd be fired immediately!

So I talked to my trainer about reaching a new goal:  100 consecutive push ups.  Figured this was a good way to focus on my upper body a little, and achieve a nifty new goal.  Rebekkah agreed that working up my consecutive push up number was a good idea.  She suggested that several times a week I do 100 push ups.  The first set is as many as I can do.  The second would be the same:  as many as I can do.  And keep doing sets until you reach a cumulative 100 push ups.  Seemed like a good idea.  Her only caveat was to try and do one more push up in the first set every time.

Ah, a plan to reach 100.  Kind of slow, I know, but a plan.

For two weeks now I've been doing push ups on my "off days" when I neither swim nor go to the gym, and I'm up to 47 consecutive push ups.  It's slow progress, I know, but progress nonetheless.

The way I see it, in our personal fitness goals, we're either moving forward, getting bored, or going backwards.  I'd rather be moving forward--and working on being a featured showman at the Gun Show.

Good luck!