Push Up Club 2

I mentioned a while ago that a few of us had started doing push ups as a bit of a game. It was mostly just a way to add a bit of fun and poke fun at each other as a team-building thing, but at some point, it sort of ran its course. It wasn't going to be novel forever, and at some point, we realized that for some people it might actually impede their work day. So, we switched it up.

Instead, the members of push up club changed the format: we had to do push ups every hour during the work day. Not everyone works the same schedule, so we stuck to the hours when we knew that everyone was in the office. That worked out to 8 hours during the day, so that meant 8 sets of push ups. The actual number of reps changed over time, and we also adjusted it for each person to account for different levels of strength. So, every now and then, you would hear someone say, "okay, it's almost 9AM. Push up time!" as a few people dropped down to do their hourly push ups.

That format actually had more staying power, so it stuck around a bit longer. However, COVID-19 became a thing shortly after we started doing all of this, so the whole scheme got interrupted. I wasn't entirely sure whether the push ups would continue when we were all working remotely, but I was happy to see that a few of still stuck with it.

However, it's not like we could announce that it was push up time over the cube wall, since we weren't working together in the office. Instead it became more of a personal accounting of the push ups. I think that actually made the whole thing easier since we could be a bit more flexible around meetings, so I personally appreciated the switch.

The one major drawback to this, though, was that it became harder to remember whether I had done 4 or 5 sets in the middle of the day. After all, my mind was largely focused on work, so after an hour, I might or might not remember which set I was on. Under normal circumstances, I could just look at the clock and count off how many sets I had done, but, again, meetings made that less likely to be a consistent plan. In short, there were more than a few days where I simply could not remember how many sets I had already done at that point.

I will remind you that I am a grown adult with a degree from a four year university. And I was having trouble counting to eight over the course of a day. The whole thing was hilarious to me. My stance on this has long been that I will take the lower of the two numbers, so that I won't ever cheat myself and do fewer sets. I might end up doing more, but I'd rather not chop off a set by accident. In the long run, it might even make me a little bit stronger. Still, the fact remained: I couldn't really be sure what number I was on, so I was having trouble counting to the number eight.

After I finished shaking my head in dismay the second or third time this happened, I finally settled on a more sophisticated plan: I made a tick mark on a white board every time I did a set. Still, it took a while, and led to a whole lot of laughter in between. If these push ups lead to half as much strength as laughter, I'm going to be yoked by the time Push Up Club is done.