One Hundred Pushups

I'm already obsessively tracking my swim progress each and every year. While my yardage totals and performance in the water would not be impressive for a trained swimmer, I've been pleased enough with my old guy efforts.

One of the joys of swimming is also a problem: buoyancy. The water holds me up when I'm swimming. It's gentle on joints - knees, ankles, and hips don't take the pounding that something like running or basketball would dish out. But you don't get the benefit of a weight-bearing activity.

We all lose muscle mass as we age. I've been thinking for a while that I need to mix some strength training into my routine. I've never been a machine or weight lifting kind of guy. The place where I swim today offers a lot of interesting alternatives besides swimming, but I'm not sure that they fit into my day as nicely as the early morning, before work swim does.

So what's my solution? I'm trying a regimen that I Stumbled Upon: One Hundred Pushups. The idea is to build strength by working your way up to 100 good push-ups per day over a six week period.

I like it, because it can fit into any day, it doesn't use machines, and I don't have to go to a special place in order to do it. I can also work it in with yoga, so I'd have all three legs of the fitness stool: aerobics, strength, and flexibility.

Today was my first day. I know, the web site says to work on Mon-Wed-Fri with weekends off, but I swam last night and wasn't up to doing pushups when I returned home. I did the test on Wed and found that I was average for a guy my age. So I'm starting at the beginning at Week 1.

I'm hoping that having a routine laid out will help me stay with it. I'll be tracking it in my Excel spreadsheet. I'll report back on my progress in six weeks.