Pushups with Beeminder

Some time ago I tried the 100 Push-Up Challenge, but found it a bit too much like hard work pretty early on!

I’m trying a new pushup challenge now: how many pushups can I do in a minute? And I’m doing it with the help of Beeminder and the Final Version.

Here’s the progress so far. From 8 to 12 in 8 days (including a missed day), a 50% increase. I haven’t set myself a target yet, as the idea is to find out the rate that fits you and then set the yellow brick road to keep yourself on track.

 You can follow my progress live by clicking here.

Comments

[Daniel Reeves]

Here's my pushup graph: http://beeminder.com/d/push
I track it with a little Android app that Bethany Soule (aka my Beeminder co-founder aka my wife) wrote called TallyBee. I put the phone of the floor and touch my nose to it for each pushup and report the running total to Beeminder.

I love this goal because pushups are an absolutely classic case of akrasia for me: the few minutes a day (if that) is nothing compared to the benefits of keeping some upper body strength, yet I never ever feel like doing pushups Right Now, so they never happen. Unless I have a yellow brick road I've forced myself to stay on.

(I made my graph flat for this week because I'm in the middle of a move and didn't want to have to think about it. Per usual with Beeminder, I had to specify that a week in advance.)

PS: Unlike TagTime (another sort-of Beeminder off-shoot), TallyBee is 100% normal-person friendly. It doesn't automatically report to Beeminder though, which would be awesome, and not hard to do if we get many requests for that.

[Mark Forster]

Daniel:

That looks like a whole load of pushups!

Unfortunately I don't have the sort of phone that Tallybee can work on (my aim when I'm out of the office is to be out of the office). But I'm sure there are loads of readers of this blog who would find it very useful. And if you don't want to do pushups, it's highly recommended for keeping track of your knitting.

[Zane]

Good ideas gentlemen! I'm going to track a variation of Mark's method in Beeminder to increase my strength, then follow Daniel's example and set a cumulative goal somewhere out in the future.

To increase my strength I'll do pushups to the beat of a song I like and see how many perfect-form pushups I can do before missing a beat.

Beeminder is addicting.

[Zach]

A similar iOS app is Tap Count https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tap-count/id347186887?mt=8