Sit-Up Challenge - Week 1 Recap

On February 1st, I started a fitness challenge where I have to do 100 sit-ups every day for a month. The inspiration came from a blog that I came across where a lady did 100 sit-ups everyday for a month. There are no rules. Just do 100 sit-ups everyday. One at a time, 10 sets of 10, it doesn't matter. I posted my intentions on my facebook account to let the world know what I was going to do. This way people could hold me accountable. I encouraged my friends to join me in the challenge, and much to my surprise many people did. I've been checking up on them as well and I know that many of them haven't broken the challenge.

Day 1 was easy. I started with 10 sets of 10, no problem. Day 2 hurt a little bit, but it wasn't too bad. I didn't like doing the sit-ups on the floor so on day 3, I went Kijiji and bought this sit-up bench for $15. 

Day 3 and 4 hurt like hell. I found myself doing 50 sit-ups at 11:00 pm on both nights as well, because I had busy days.

On day 5, I decided to increase the reps up to 50. Just to see if I could do it. Turns out I could, but it hurt. I also did two sets of 50, on day 6.

On day 7, I decided to do 4 sets of 25. I found that while doing 50 reps, my form started to collapse and the quality wasn't as good. Day 7 was the first day that it started to not hurt as much. Doing 4 sets of 25, my form was much better than it was doing 2 sets of 50.

I was feeling good enough on day 7 that I thought I would try doing some push-ups. This was a bad idea. I did 3 push-ups and couldn't do anymore. It wasn't because my arms weren't strong enough, but because it was killing my abs! Doing push-ups hurt my abs more than doing sit-ups. I know I'm not in as good as shape as I should be. That is why I decided to take a challenge like this - to get in better shape and strengthen my core. I'm a fairly active guy. I play hockey anywhere from 1-3 times a week. My job involves a lot of light manual labour. I know I'm fairly active, but I didn't think that I could only do 3 push-ups. It's very embarassing. I wonder how many I could do if I wasn't doing the sit-up challenge. My arms/upper body are not the problem, it's my abs/core. It's pretty obvious what next months challenge is going to be.

I'm not stupid enough to think that working muscles that haven't been worked in a long time will not be sore after only one week of working out. In my denfence, I've been getting over an illness that had me laid up for most of December. My strength wasn't at it's best starting out. I'm not using that as an excuse though. The good news is that the sit-ups are starting to get a little easier, and after week 1, I haven't missed a day of the challenge. The bad news is that I'm in worse shape than I thought I was. I knew that work and hockey wasn't enough activity. The good news is, I'm doing something about it.

It's not too late to start the challenge. I started on the first of the month just cause it's easy to keep track. You can start anytime. 100 sit-ups for 30 days. Start right now!