Having recently read Training For Warriors by Martin Rooney and also most of Al Kavadlo’s blog I’ve been turned on to the value of simple bodyweight exercises done properly.

Following Rooney’s habit of setting “challenges” for his athletes and fighters I decided to set myself one – to do 100 push-ups as quickly as possible.

I haven’t done more than sets of 20 push-ups for quite some time (years?) so as straightforward as this might seem, it was much tougher than I imagined. The first 40 came pretty quickly but then I hit a wall that took the best part of 8 minutes 30 to climb over.

The most surprising thing was the number of times – especially once I’d got up into the 80s – that my triceps just decided to give out and a couple of face plants were very narrowly avoided. My final time was a remarkably pathetic 9.46 (despite having hit the 40 mark inside the first minute). I’ll repeat the challenge every couple of days and I expect that time to drop considerably, although I suspect it’ll take a while before I’m at this level: