After deciding to repeat week four of the 100 Pushup Challenge, I threw in the towel. I realized that I was holding back on my “rest” days and altering my workouts too much to justify the limited gains I was making during the Challenge. Yes, the sets were difficult, and yes I was getting better at doing more pushups. However, in order to perform as well as I could, I would do limited or no ab and cardio work the day before. I did P90 Basic Phase 03 a few times, and found that it was much more difficult to perform my Challenge work out the next day.

In order to safe the village, we had to destroy it — so the 100 Pushup Challenge is over for me.

So what am I going to do instead? Until I decide on a longer-term endeavor, I am going to revisit the Great Body short workouts and the P90 Hawaii Fat Burner Express DVD. They were fun, and at this point I just need to stay active.

Two possible candidates for my next workout regime include more kettle bell training or P90X.

The end of the 100 Pushup Challenge’s Week Four is an all-out stress test to see how many pushups you can do at once without stopping. I could do forty before I started the program, and figured I was sandbagging. I was excited to do the test at the end of Week Four; after all I had been cranking out a lot of pushups and going to failure in the last two weeks. Plus, I was skeptical that I would be able to go from forty pushups to 100 in just four weeks.

I knocked out thirty without a problem. I felt strong, I felt like I had made an improvement. As I approached forty, my arms and chest started to get very weak. My rate slowed, and by forty I was creeping along. I completed forty-five reps before my arms were shaking. Done.

Yes, it’s an improvement, but a little over 10% in two weeks isn’t going to get me from forty to 100 any time soon.

However, doing forty-five at once puts me into the hardest category of Week Five. That’s nice, but I couldn’t finish Week Four’s workouts without taking extended rests or without cheating.

So I’m going back down to Week Four, and I’m going to do the middle column this time. I am going to do it all by the book and see if I can hit each rep without doing breaking pace or form.

Overall, my body feels softer than it did before the 100 Pushup Challenge. I think the total body workout I was getting from the Beach Body programs put me in better physical condition. I really want to get to 100 consecutive pushups, but at this rate I may not achieve it for another month. I don’t think I can take being off of a full-body workout for that long.

Yesterday I finished the fifth session in my 100 Pushup Challenge workout. I started out in Week Three of six weeks according to my initial failure test results. I did forty during the placement test, which put me “column three,” the most intense of the three possible weekly workouts.

The first two sessions were cake, but now my body is asking me why I didn’t sandbag even more.
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So, there’s a thread over in the Lounge forum at Ars Technica about the 100 Pushup Challenge. The program prepares you to do one hundred pushups in a row — starting with 0 at week one, and ending up with 100 on week six. I just finished my second tour of duty with Tony Horton’s Beach Body Power Half Hour and was looking for something to do.

I’m in — one hundred pushups or bust.
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