One important concept is time under tension when we discuss resistance training. The 100 push-ups challenge here is a great idea, but participants should not to it with speed to get over with it. There should still be body control or otherwise joints and tendons and cartilage have to bear more workload than they should. That's why reducing the number of push-ups when that leads to a better feeling and better body control is never wrong. Everyone of us knows this one guy from the gym hammering out the exercises as if it was about speed and not about strength, body control and body tension. This is problematic even more push-ups with one's own bodyweight as everything that creates force from exaggerated acceleration will make the body sore. So there is an important line between pumping out a high number of push-ups while neglecting form and doing it mindfully with the goal to make it for health reasons while not losing sight of the goal of this challenge.



@philippma1957 thanks for this piece of info. I haven't read the entire thread, which means I only know so much about your health conditions and don't know whether you have been posting about it before. But this gives me a better idea what certain workloads possibly mean for your body. As far as I can tell, you are approaching this challenge and your overall fitness level with reasonable caution, especially since you got surgeries. I am not a surgeon, but I am sure that the hernia surgery inevitably required you to avoid high pressure resistance training for quite a while as that takes time to fully heal I would guess. So the options you chose for you, emphasizing cardio training while keeping pressure on the body at a relatively low level seem to make a lot of sense to me. Including climbing stairs/flights, which still is involving your body weight only.


Once you get older, joints will have some wear and tear. But there are a few things you can do to keep inflammation at a lower level, which can help quite a big deal. Micro inflammations are pretty normal when the body gets trained, but young bodies handle that more efficiently. You can (and should) add some Omega 3 supplement on a daily basis. It is not expensive and you should have access to decent quality with a little bit of google research or Amazon. This turns into so called Eicosanoids and Docosanoids, which are some of the key anti-inflammatory molecules. It's proven research and it is one of the few supplements I would recommend taking regularly. Of course it doesn't repair a knee, but inflammation is an ongoing cell-demaging process that's not good for cartilage and entheses.

Great to see though that some here take it very seriously and share their experience. That's what makes Bitcointalk.org an enjoyable place besides all the tech (and the trash) that is being talked about here

And I mentioned this elsewhere I think, but I once saw someone bringing up this analogy that the body is the result of all the exercise added up over time. It sounds so simple, but compare the fitness of two people of the exact same metrics except for one guy doing 55,000 push-ups a year while the other guy doesn't do any. These little things add up over time and only makes sense because with every push-up you are sending your body a clear signal that degeneration is no option. This is so utterly important for overall health! Just think about how much less of a signal (or how much more for that matter) a body gets that does not do the 55,000 push-ups a year? So the good news is that a healthy body is not always about hard work, but about consistency and consistency can be more easily achieved than hard work. Not everybody has the physical condition (health) or the time or the motivation to go all out five times a week. But these routines still do wonders!