We have progress. Kind of.

You’ll be bored to know that I am repeating the first week of the program yet again (this is my third time around), but to me it only makes sense that I shouldn’t move up to level 2 of doing pushups if I can’t complete level 1 yet, and in fact can’t even do a single standard pushup. As far as I’m concerned there’s no race to complete the program in a certain amount of time, and my main focus is that I want to get this right. Insert toddler walking/running metaphor here.

I’ve learned a couple of tricks that have helped, and as well I do believe I’m getting stronger. On Shaunte’s advice I have started doing my pushups on the floor, and indeed it has taken out a lot of the complications I was experiencing before. Now it’s just me against gravity, which is much simpler in terms of position and form, although obviously more difficult in terms of strength required. Today I attempted a boy pushup out of curiosity, and I discovered that I can sort-of kind-of do one if I stick my ass in the air (which is bad form, but I’m simply not quite strong enough to flatten out into chataranga yet). I was able to do a second pushup by using my hips as a hinge, which again is cheating, but I just wanted to see what was possible right now and what wasn’t.

It occurred to me that doing them the hinge way is pretty much the lifting equivalent of a girl pushup, so my second experiment was to try pushups on my knees. To my surprise, not only was I able to do them, I did 15 of them! This is a huge deal— I’ve never been able to do anything approximating a girl pushup before, much less multiple times. I’m definitely getting stronger.

So, to summarise:

• Boy pushups: I can do 1 if I cheat, and 2 if I really cheat on the second one;
• Girl pushups: I can do 15 without stopping, whereas for the past 35 years I could never do any at all, not even with the help of a personal trainer.

I’m thinking that by the end of the week, I’ll be doing real boy pushups, and maybe then I can move on to the second week of the program. I’m not going to cry if I have to repeat the first week a fourth time, though— I’m nothing if not patient.

How’s everyone else doing? Anyone getting close to three digits yet?

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