The Strathcom Push-Up Challenge: How to Build Trust & Muscle
Caffeine can do only so much to get the work day started. Here at Strathcom, we help each other by yelling at everyone in the office to meet us in the boardroom for our regular push-up challenge! At 9:30 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we put out the Lat-signal on our chatline for everyone to join us in burning some calories and grunting like apes before the heavy workload begins.
How it Started
While some of us are crazy enough to wake up early to go to the gym before work, or exercise during the lunch hour, most of us found it difficult to allocate time after the busy workday to commit to regular exercise. So one day, our web team started talking about getting more active throughout the year and our very own John Positos mentioned that he was already following a six-week program to up his push-up numbers by the end.
Within a few days, a couple of people started doing push-ups in one of the smaller offices. Next thing you know, the push-up challenge spread across various departments to the point where we have to move chairs out of the board room and even alternate doing push-ups on top of the table for extra space (sorry, Bill!). It’s one of our favorite things to do to get over the midday slump and motivate one another to finish what we started.
The Challenge
Our push-up challenge (courtesy of hundredpushups.com) consists of 5 sets with three different columns for people to choose from—beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Everyone can pick which column they want and do the numbers they want. What’s important is just doing them. Some of us started by doing 15-20 push-ups a set, but now, at week 5, we’ve got each other competing in trying to reach 60 on the last set! We even challenge each other to do claps in-between or do them on our knuckles. Anything to make the push-up challenge more interesting!
Our Workout Playlist
We’ve even got our boardroom bumping with our own workout playlist! We’ll typically ease into the first, second, and third set with some old-school 2000s Hip-Hop and R&B. We bump TLC in the morning because we don’t wanna end up like Scrubs that can’t get no love from anyone. Then, we start picking things up with “Drop It Like It’s Hot” By Snoop Dogg and Pharrell—pretty self explanatory. But then the last few sets is where we go hard. That’s why it’s all Kendrick! You can check out some of the songs we normally play below to start getting pumped.
High Fives, or it Didn’t Happen!
By the end of the challenge, we’re far from sitting down and being humble because we’re proud as hell that we finished. A round of high fives for everyone, or it never happened! I’ve been working on a push-up challenge high five where we push each other and explode à la Dragon-Ball Z, but no dice because I ended up pulling one of my pecs in the process. Oh well.
If you’re looking for a great team-building and support exercise (pun 100% intended) for your workplace, we highly recommend doing the push-up challenge. We like to meet our goals here at Strathcom Media, so let us help you meet yours when you’ve got advertising targets to meet for 2018 and beyond!
