👶🏼 Present self meets 18-year-old self
I wonder what my 18-year-old self would have said to my "1000 push-ups a day challenge"?
Lukas, that's too much cardio. You'll lose muscle doing that. Eat more, do fewer reps. - 18-year-old-Lukas
When I looked at old pictures from when I was younger than 20 years old, I feel a sense of pride but also a limitation.
Daily training, preparing meals, eating meals, etc. took a lot of time but also brought restrictions. I was careful every day not to burn too many calories and had to eat tons of food just to maintain weight. The gym was my second home.
On vacation, a gym within 1km and an All You Can Eat Buffet were a requirement.
But this phase of life also came to an end. Now I feel a lot better in my body and can go on vacation without dumbbells in my luggage. Endurance sports is no longer a dirty word 😉
👨🏼🏫 What I learned from this.
I've wondered what I learned from this challenge for a long time.
Push your limits? No. Just keep going? No, neither.
I learned how important time and energy management is.
⏲ Time management.
Time management because some days it's just not possible to get everything done that you set out to do.
The professor's simple trick, that you should first put big stones, second pebbles, and finally sand in a glass, does not work. Read more in one of my favorite books on time management, Four Thousand Weeks: The smash-hit Sunday Times bestseller that will change your life by Oliver Burkeman.
You have so many big rocks these days that the glass is overflowing. That's exactly how it was for me this Sunday.
I finished my NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) trainer training from morning to 6:00 pm.
Afterward, I went to the gym with a good friend, and we had dinner at my place. I did the first 120 pushups in the morning and the rest in the evening at the gym. Regarding the timing, my conclusion is:
Since you can sometimes lose track after a few hundred push-ups, I resorted to pen and paper, er handkerchief for safety.
🔋 Energy management
Energy management is so important because no matter how good your time management is if you don't have much energy, every task (at least for me) is at least three times harder.
Especially sleep, a good diet, and exercise play an essential role in this. If you want to know more about this, feel free to listen to my podcast episode about sleep. In it, I talk about the top tips I tested myself to fall asleep within a few minutes.
In the podcast episode about nutrition, I share exciting insights about food that our brain needs to think.
Afterward, you'll know how your brain power "goes through the roof." 🤯
📆 I learned a lot about energy allocation that day.
I realized that I shouldn't immediately start doing 20 pushups without rest.
When I do that, I reach my limit too quickly, and my muscles are exhausted. I agreed with myself on 10 pushups and thus found a good balance between pause time and power stroke (doing pushups).
I know it looks like I'm doing one pushup at a time. However, I swear there were at least two. 😜
Oh well, how much did I actually manage to do? When I managed just over 500 push-ups, I fell into bed. 😴
If you want to read more about physical and mental fitness, I recommend checking out the section on mindset.