One more push up a day

At the end of every year, I have a quiet period of reflection. This is where I look at what went well, what didn’t go well and identify goals and areas to improve.

One goal that seems to come up time and time again, is to exercise more. For one reason or another, I have done a lot of stopping and starting when it comes to training. This is despite the fact that I really enjoy going to the gym and training.

At the end of last year, I looked in the mirror and said, Chris, enough is a enough, I need a new approach.

The power of building a habit is repetition. How hard an activity or task is and how regularly you do it, impacts the time it takes for it to become a habit.

As a result, I asked myself, “What one thing can I do every day, no matter where I am in the world, to change the way that I am looking in the mirror right now?”

The answer I landed on was press ups.

I then asked myself, “What progressive goal can keep me inspired to do it every day?”.

I thought about it for a moment and said, “What about doing just one more press up a day?”.

There are few reasons why this was such a powerful idea for me.

1) Repetition – by doing it every single day I won’t want to miss it. I also record my completion of the activity using an app called habits.

2) The idea of just one press up a day seemed feasible to me. I didn’t say let me do 50 press ups, then 100, no, I said just one more a day. It’s great to set high goals, but if you aren’t going to do the work, what’s the point?

3) The small progression makes the next number seem feasible. I started with 30 press ups. If I could do 30 press ups, surely I could do 31? I am now doing over 100 press ups in one set, but when I did the first 30, it was hard! I hadn’t done press ups in a while, but gradually it got easier. So when I got to 99 press ups, I said, surely I can do 100, I’ve already done 99!!

A thousand miles begins with that first step. After that first step you don’t have to take 100 steps, 1000 steps or 10,000 steps. Just one more step is enough. After you take one step continuously, you might want to take even more than a step at a time!

Give this method a try. It doesn’t have to be for push ups. It could be for anything that you want to achieve in life.

Want to get up earlier and half an hour earlier is a struggle? How about starting with one minute earlier, you can do that right?

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