Giving Myself a Push
Finger tip pushups in the late 1990s.
A friend of mine just finished a fund-raiser challenge to do 1776 pushups in the month of July. That ends up being around 60 a day, which isn’t too bad. I dislike pushups, though, so even that low amount would be torture for me.
It got me thinking about my history with pushups. Back in high school gym when we did the Presidential Fitness assessment, I don’t think I was able to do a single pushup. I didn’t work out back then, just ran around a lot playing various sports.
When I started martial arts, all of a sudden it was expected that I do pushups. I remember watching a black belt do his second-degree test and do pushups without a break for several minutes. They made him do regular pushups. One-arm, diamond, wide stance, finger tip, backward, anything they could think of. And he did it. It was incredibly impressive and a little scary. I wasn’t sure I’d every be able to do that.
Within a year, I was routinely cranking out sets of 30 pushups during class. We did most of them on our knuckles or just regular, but sometimes we had to do finger tip. I started to get really good at finger tip pushups. Master Kwon could do 2-finger pushups and thumb pushups. So I started working on those.
I could hold myself in pushup position on just 2 fingers, but never quite got the pushup. Thumb was a whole other animal - balance is the key there and it is really tough. I couldn’t do it for more than a second.
When I moved to NC and started at a new tae kwon do school, I began to do add pushups at the end of class since we did not do them often. I would do 50-60 at a time, mixing up hand positions. Other students would join in, and it became expected of me after a time.
These days I can barely knock out 20 at a time. There’s a good chance the pushups I was performing back in the martial arts days were not full range of motion and proper form, but they had to be pretty close. Today I only do “proper” ones, and they always feel harder than I ever remember them being.
I’m not sure why I have such a hard time with them. They certainly aren’t the hardest movement I do. And when I do them in burpees, I hardly notice. There is just something about them that is a mental battle for me. But I’ll keep battling, and maybe I’ll learn to like them one day.
