100 Push-Ups (New Year's Resolution #1)

If you want to be able to do 100 pushups in a row, do not try to do as many pushups as possible every day. You'll probably injure yourself and end up unable to do any pushups at all. Training for competition requires an understanding of the stress-and-recover rule and the interval-sets rule.

The best way to improve any athletic skill is to stress your body on one day and then allow enough time for your body to recover before you stress it again. On one day, take a hard workout. On the next morning, your muscles feel sore. Take easy workouts until the soreness disappears and then take a hard workout again.

For your hard workouts, you can do far more work by exercising in sets, rather than continuously. If you can do six continuous pushups, you can probably do ten sets of two with twenty-second rests between each set. Do repeat sets of two until your muscles feel sore. Try to take workouts that are hard enough to make your muscles feel sore for no more than 48 hours. An ideal training program would consist of sets of three until you feel sore on the first day, take off the second day, do sets of five on the third day until you feel soreness, and rest on the fourth day. Repeat these four-day cycles, and you'll soon be ready to compete.

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Gain weight every year? You're not alone!

Most people become fatter with aging because they are less active, not because they eat more. Thirty minutes of exercise a day may be enough for heart fitness, but it is not usually enough to lose or maintain weight. Our grandparents doing heavy manual labor were active for 8, 10 or more hours every day. If you have a sedentary job, you need an exercise strategy that includes very vigorous exercise, more time spent in physical activity, or (preferably) both. Researchers from the University of South Carolina showed that the increase in body fat that accompanies aging can be completely prevented with prolonged vigorous exercise (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, August 2005.) The authors studied 60 thousand male runners and found that the more miles they ran, the thinner they remained. Waist circumference increased with age at all running distances, but the increase diminished in the men who ran further.

This tells us that you must increase your physical activity with age to prevent weight gain. Your chances for success will improve if you find an activity you enjoy enough to do it for several hours at a time, such as dancing, fast walking, rowing or cycling. Then make your sport a regular part of your social life, not just an exercise chore. (You'll get weekly tips in my free newsletter on fitness and health.)