A friend of mine (we are both 56) contacted me in March 2022 saying that he saw this challenge of 50 pull ups and 100 push ups in 10 min in a fitness magazine and decided to give it a go. He rides gravel but lifts weights and does resistance work. On my side I had not done a single pull up since 1988 when I graduated from Royal Military College of Canada and just did endurance stuff, with small bouts of weight training (generally light dumbells and body weight work over the years). With no training he pulled it off because he already does a variety of this stuff. I was impressed.
In December of 2020 I was at the pool and one of the girls on my masters team popped herself out doing a full press up onto the bulkhead. I joked to her, “after having my arm run over by a bus in 2018, I don’t think my elbow can handle a single pushup”. In parallel one of my tri friends in the same age group was doing 100 pushups per day for the last 100 days of the year, so I got intrigued. That night I decided to start. I could barely do one without my elbow feeling like it would explode and I realized my chest/collar bone/shoulder was all screwed up from the bus crash, even though I could swim.
By end of Jan 2021, it was not that long to get to 100 pushups per day. Usually two sessions of 5x10 or 2x25 eventually got to 4x25, 2x25+1x50 etc.
Largely most days I do 100, some days 150, some days 200 through 2021 and 2022.
In any case, I got intrigued, because I was pretty sure I had the push ups down, but had not done a pull up since 1988. I also read that at his peak Phelps could do 28 in one shot. My best for Chin Ups (that were part of our fitness test in the military) was 22 in one shot, but I was also 22 years old back then
I was also worried, my elbow would explode and I would do something bad to my shoulders.
So I started doing lat pulldowns with 80 lbs, and 100 lbs, which was pretty OK given all the swimming I do. I also started dropping in at the gym and just hanging off the chin up bar after swimming and doing crunches raising knees to chest but strengthening my arms and lengthening my lats. Still I was worried to do my first one.
Once I got to lat pulldowns with 120 lbs (I weigh around 142 lbs now), I felt I would be OK…and gave it a go.
My first day I could barely do 3 and my hands, core, biceps all gave out. My lats were actually OK. I jumped back on the bar and did 3 more. I got to ten on the first day doing 2x2 more. The next day, I could barely swim. Everythng hurt. Surprisingly my tricepts hurt a lot.
I did a few days in a row that I added up to ten, but after that I had swim meets every 3 weeks or so. I backed off a week before each swim meet but gradually got to 20-30 in a sesson broken up into groups of 3-6 at a time.
Then I had three 70.3 races in 5 weeks starting in early June so I backed off in the days before and days after each race, but had around 5-8 sessions between races when I tried to consitently hit 20-30 several times per week.
2.5 weeks ago I finished Muskoka 70.3 and starting 2 days later I finshed up each swim 10 min early, hit gym and did 40-50 in groups of 7-10 depending on the day. I did a test of 40 in 3:56 elapsed time last week. Then I did another session where I did 66 in 15 minutes and a few sessions of 5x10 with jogging in between.
For the last week I have been doing 50 per day, so today decided to give it a go.
I broke it down as
7 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 15 push ups 10 breaths rest7 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 15 push ups 10 breaths rest7 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 15 push ups 10 breaths rest7 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 20 push ups 10 breaths rest8 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 20 push ups 10 breaths rest7 pull ups 5 breaths rest, 20 push ups 10 breaths rest7 pull ups
I looked down and clock said 8:49 elapsed time with 5 bonus push ups!!!
In any case it was fun to do a completely new challenge and go from nothing to completing it in 4 months elapsed time around swim racing and triathlons.
I found that my body has changed in these 4 months doing this. My core is looking like it did when I was 30 and I am 56 now with a young man’s six pack and the time investment in this is almost nothing.
Also to put it into context my upper body has been working pretty hard all these years. I raced 20 years at a very high level masters XC skiing and since 2017 I have been training for swimming IM so not the typical triathlete pull buoy minimalist swim routine (more like 400 hrs in pool per year) . So even though my upper body was not doing any proper resistance training it has been working pretty hard.