My 8 Weeks to Rocking Abs Challenge

I recently did an Abs Challenge with a bunch of friends and strangers on Facebook. I was going to blog about my experience as I went through it but my abs were too tired. Just kidding… actually, I’m not kidding. They call it a challenge for a reason. Last year around the holidays I did the same challenge. We started with 25 sit-ups and added 5 more reps every day. So day two was 30 sit-ups, day three was 35 sit-ups, etc. By the end of the challenge we were to hit 325 reps. Holy crap, I really didn’t need to do that math but it was hard to avoid it since I was the one who did the calendar! 

The first few days I thought this isn’t so bad. 25 reps were pretty easy but I started slowing down when I got to 40. Then we were approaching 100 reps and all I could think was where is my rest day? The not so funny thing about if you skipped a day you had to double up the next day to make up for what you missed. When I did that and had to do 200 + sit-ups in one day instead of 105 I thought to myself wow, I need to refocus because I am NOT doing that again. It became apparent early on that if I didn’t get them done early in the day I would run out of steam to do them at night. Refocus I did – I jumped out of bed to do my sit-ups, put on some Tyler Rich, and knocked them out. For a while I almost looked forward to doing them. Then my lower back and my abs started to get fatigued. I got an awesome AbMat to give me a greater range of motion but also to support my back. This helped a lot. It was much better than the rolled up hand towel I was using. You can see what I got here http://amzn.to/1ZuVF3M

I learned a lot about myself such as when things are going well and I am seeing results I want to quit for some reason. It’s as if I think my goals will continue to be met if I’m not putting in the work. I had to look deep inside myself when I noticed that happening. Reaching out to the members of our group for support really helped. I asked them to hold me accountable as I was doing for them. The amount of encouragement from our group was amazing. It took a few days of struggling with that to realize that when you meet a goal it is much easier to keep up the momentum then stopping and starting again. Last year when I did this challenge I quit before the end when we hit the 200s. This year I did all but the last few days. I think my results could have been better if I watched my diet during the holidays. I am very happy with my results though because I can feel how strong my abs are and have noticed a difference in my appearance. I have moved onto maintenance mode which reminds me I am going to add some extra abs exercises to my routine tomorrow. I will be doing more challenges. If you want to join me sign up on my contact page. There were people in our group who had never exercised before and others who were mega exercisers and even did double the amount of prescribed reps each day.

Please join me on my next challenge! More on this will be coming soon. It will be more than just the physical aspect.