Road to 100 Push-Ups in 100 Secs Part 1

Author: Tommy Leung | 09/05/2008 | Fitness, Strength Training

The idea of doing 100 push-ups in 100 seconds came to me one day out of the blue. I have never tried doing it simply because such an idea had never crossed my mind. The idea of doing timed push-ups is certainly nothing new in the world. My first experience in doing exercises competitively was in high school. I took a lot of co-ed advanced weight training and one of the teachers liked to do competitions in push-ups, pull-ups, dips, max bench press, etc.

The only event that was timed was the push-ups. No one was really able to do as many pull-ups or dips as they did push-ups. In a pull-up or dip, you are generally moving almost your entire body weight while a push-up only involves about 60% of your body weight.

I never did win a push-up competition in those high school gym class days–I blame my counter. I did win a dip competition but, not because I did an insane amount of dips. Everyone else was just fairly weaker in that department. I won with about 25 - 30 dips–not that impressive.

The greatest number of push-ups I have ever done was 104–I counted 105 in my head but upon video review it was only 104. It took a lot more than 100 secs and the form could have been better at some points. After coming up with this 100 push-ups in 100 seconds challenge, I sent a text message to my closest workout buddy to see what he thought. He thought it was possible. So maybe this idea is more than just an impressive sounding marketing line.

I haven’t been doing push-ups as much as I used to. I used to be able to easily drop and punch out 50 in the past but now, I’m pretty sure I can’t just do that at will. I started training to accomplish this challenge a few weeks ago. My most recent test runs shows that I can do 50 push-ups in under 60 seconds. There is still quite some work to be done to reach 100 in 100.

So far my training has consisted of doing push-ups using a Door Gym–it’s a product that allows you to do pull-ups on a door frame. It provides elevation for my push-ups so I can increase the range of motion and work more muscles. I don’t do these push-ups fast. I have been trying to build strength and endurance so that I could do 100 push-ups for a whole 1 minute and 40 seconds at a constant pace.

In order to build strength and endurance with these push-ups, I pause for 2 seconds at the bottom of the push-up and 2 seconds at the top of the push-up without locking my elbows. It was fairly hard to do just 10 of these at first but, I can do 20 of them now. I have switched to elevating my feet above the floor to increase the difficulty.

I also do chin-ups with the same 2 second pause technique as part of this training. It might seem completely unrelated to do a back exercise but, a strong back will help keep your form when doing push-ups. I also want to make sure I keep things even so I do a back exercise as well.

The last thing I do are plyometric push-ups. I’m trying to build explosive power with these so that I can make sure each push-up will only take 1 second to finish on average because that is all the time I have. Plyometric push-ups are ones where your hands come off the floor because you pushed up with such explosive force.

I have not officially set a deadline for when I want this accomplished. Unless I set a date, this is all meaningless and will probably never get done because I have forever to accomplish it. As I am writing this, I decided that November 1st, 2008 is as good a date as any other–today is the 5th of September. I am not yet half way to the goal and there is less than 2 months until the deadline.

I will continue to report on the results. Assuming I can actually accomplish this, I will provide a video showing it. Otherwise, how will anyone know that I’m not just talking out of my ass? :)

By Tommy Leung