Month: March 2025

1000 Pushups in a Week

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Advice, strategies, and thoughts on 1000 pushups in a week:

Anytime you think of them, drop and do 10. Do you know that 1000 pushups a week is only 142.86 pushups a day? Most of us are up for well over 12 hours a day. That’s only 11.9 pushups per hour! Totally possible!

My pushup numbers were recently questioned when competing in a pushup challenge. All contestants were supposed to complete 400 pushups a week. My lowest number of pushups in a week for the last five weeks was 700.

In the last five weeks, I have completed 4,036 pushups. An average of 807.2, although that’s a little bloated by this last week of 1000.

Moving back to strategies, anywhere is a good place for a pushup, even in the shower if it is big enough. I am 6’9″, a shower big enough for me to do pushups in is not in my house, nor have I seen one, but I have seen plenty of showers in which an average height male could drop and get 20 ups in.

Keep a note in your phone titled Pushups Completed Today. Every time you knock out a set, no matter how large or small, instantly record those numbers in that note. It’s great to look back through the day and see that number grow and grow, bringing a great sense of accomplishment to the day. Also, at the end of the day, when it’s time to enter your numbers you have a handy note on your phone to tell you exactly how much ups you pushed.

There aren’t many rules to a pushup challenge, other than you have to do a proper pushup. No wide placement of the hands, but your elbows don’t have to stay in contact with your side through the movement. No incline pushups either. Those are too easy. But yes, decline pushups would count. Decline meaning with your feet on a chair or up a couple steps while your hands are on the ground.

Pushups don’t require special athletic clothing. They can be done in a suit. They can be done in your birthday suit, although that does mean some parts of your anatomy may be touching the floor during every rep. This can be uncomfortable and certainly a bit awkward if someone else is in the room.

This last week I did 150 pushups a day for the first five days. I did 170 on day 6 and only 80 today (that felt nice). The upper body definitely needs some rest now, but I never did more than 40 pushups straight. I often did sets of 25, but more common were sets of 20, 15, and 10, making that 1000 in a week completely manageable.

And if thinking about doing 1000 in a week is too overwhelming, set a timer to go off every 30 minutes or 1 hour for a reminder to do 10 or 15 pushups.

After building up to 1000 pushups in a week you will definitely be able to do things with your pecs that you have never been able to do, or haven’t been able to do in a long time. If you squeeze your pecs together and flex, BOOM, pencil holding cleavage. Make your kids aware that you can “dance your pecs.” They will delight in that oddity and it’s even something that you can keep your shirt on for.

Get your kids involved. On my last set of 20 today, my son was motivated to do pushups with me so he dropped to the ground and did sit-ups, telling me he can only do ten at a time. That’s okay. If you are walking around the house and randomly doing sets of 20 pushups your kids are going to get the message, pushups are important, fun, a great workout, and you can do them anywhere! Okay, maybe not in the shower.

Keep pushing up!

Moving On

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As soon as I carefully took the kids artwork down, picking at the bits of scotch tape holding self-portraits to doors, and taking care not to rip the large piece of paper my son drew a pipe system on, the house felt different. Moving changed from this half-serious idea that has held space in our heads for two years to this real, tactile change involving paper cuts from handling cardboard boxes and sore backs from lifting just a little too much. 

Official-looking family portraits have come down, replaced by blank walls or a photo of a nondescript hillside most passers by would not recognize as Scotland. Old carpet has been torn up and tossed out and now the house smells like Carpet Exchange. The amount of furniture in the house has been trimmed down, making some rooms feel nice, but not lived in. 

Load by load to the storage unit—the first I have ever rented—the home becomes a house, the house becomes a structure. Yet, still there are memories being made, even today, that will forever be associated with this house, which I have called home for ten years, the longest I have lived in one place.

Open house after open house I begin to appreciate our house a little more. The painted walls, the shiplap entryway, the exposed I-beam in the basement so I could attach a pull-up bar, and the immaculate basement bathroom. All projects that we completed ourselves or hovered nearby acting like an overbearing super on a construction site while others did the work. 

The furniture we are keeping in the house has been moved, cleaned, and flipped around like Lego pieces, indeed, revealing long-lost Lego pieces, a vintage Fisher Price puzzle piece that has been missing since my son was four-years-old, and more of those Checkers pieces that I thought we had successfully rounded up. 

The last evidence of our family in the house are some of the most treasured items. No stager will get me to take them down and no storage unit is secure enough for them. It’s my daughter’s framed one-month handprint that is barely bigger than my thumb, resting on my desk. A polaroid of Kate and I taken by an old friend. Two pictures of the family on the beach in Mexico. A kid’s first hand-drawn family portrait. And a large picture of my namesake, Bryce Neff, pictured with his bombing group in the Korean War. All these items and more will find a new structure that will become a house that will, with time, become a home, and God-willing, lives lived in that home will produce an equally wide swath of life as we have seen on 5th Ave.

God-willing.

Oscars and Pizza

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Twenty-one years ago Kate and I were driving back to the University of Wyoming from Longmont, Colorado. We made it as far as Cheyenne before the interstates iced over, visibility dropped to almost nothing, and the road to Laramie closed.

Stranded in Cheyenne on Oscar Sunday, we made the most of it by staying at a Quality Inn, ordering Domino’s, and watching the three hour broadcast of the 2004 Oscars.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King reigned over most of the night. Peter Jackson won best director, paving the way for a promising, yet ultimately, horrible adaptation of The Hobbit into three massive films.

But there was no denying Jackson’s touch on Oscar night in 2004. The LotR trilogy are three of the best movies made in my lifetime, but it wasn’t until the third movie that the Academy anointed Jackson and his flawless epic of a movie.

Tonight there will be no pizza and no wine shared during the Oscars. I am in Steamboat with Camden and Kate and London are in Omaha. It might be the first Oscars that Kate and I have spent apart since that Wyoming blizzard in 2004. We will make up for it tomorrow in the best way we can by queuing up the recording of the broadcast, opening a bottle of wine, and digging into some pizza. Although in the last 21 years, the pizza is greatly improved over Domino’s. And I don’t exactly miss the Quality Inn in Cheyenne either.