First 30 day challenge

After my success in completing the 100 push ups 30 day challenge, my son wanted to do his own 30-day exercise challenge.  

My son wanted to build strength.  The best way to do this for a thin person (or for anyone else) is to choose a strength building exercise, decide on some minimums, and meet those minimums every day for at least thirty days.  The more time you put in the better, but decent improvements can be seen after thirty days.

I asked him to decide on an exercise and a daily minimum.  He can exceed these minimums if he wishes, and he had to reach those minimums each and every day for 30 days.  

Being young I did not want him to do too much, I did not want him to get an overuse injury, so I made sure it was something I thought he could do reasonably easily.

My son decided on a minimum of 20 strict pull ups per day.  I figured he would safely be able to achieve this number.  This amount of exercise was not completed in one session, it was spread across the entire day, every day for thirty consecutive days.  

This isn't western style training, this is prochnost' style training, and it works.  

Spoiler alert: pull ups are hard. 

Before the Challenge

At the start of his challenge my son was struggling to do 3 or 4 strict pull ups in a set.  He probably could have done a few more pull ups with sloppy form, but he could only do 3 to 4 with good form.

For the first few days reaching 20 pull ups over the day was killing him, partly because it is a lot, and partly because he needed to do a lot of sets throughout the day when you are only doing at most 2 or 3 pullups per set!

Pull ups, even when it's cold 

Thirty Day Challenges are Grueling

It was rainy on the second day of his challenge, and he had no choice but to go and do his minimums in the rain.  That wasn't heaps of fun.  

A couple of days in to the challenge he was tired and wanted to have a rest day.  He wanted to have a day off and just do more the following day.  Unfortunately it doesn't work that way with these challenges.  You have to reach your minimums each and every day, and you have to do them using proper form.  For these challenges to work you must be consistent.  This isn't western style training, this is different, this actually works. 

Other days he was tired, or not in the mood, or it was cold, or it was hot, or doing pull ups was the last thing he felt like doing.  To quote Pavel Tsatsouline "the Soviet training programs doesn't care about your feelings and neither should you".  My son still pushed through and got it done.  

My son had to reach his minimums every day.  So he persevered even when he didn't feel like it, and he did 20 pull ups minimum every day.  He never went until failure, but he got stronger and his numbers did increase significantly over the course of the thirty days.

Pull ups in the heat

Half Way There

After 15 days he was often doing sets of 8 to 10 pull ups, which is very impressive considering where he started!  This wasn't his maximum, he didn't even know how many he could do in one set because I didn't want him to train to failure.  He could do sets of however many he wanted, but had to stop once his form started to get sloppy.  

Sloppy form does not build strength, sloppy form often leads to injury, once his form degraded he had to stop and rest.  If his technique was starting to fail he would stop, if he felt tired he would stop, if he felt pain he was to stop immediately.  

The progress he made by doing multiple small sets every single day is just incredible.  This was far more efficient than the feel the burn, get pumped, no pain no gain, push to failure, no limits, type of workout nonsense that is far too common in western strength training.  Had he been training until failure he would not have made this kind of progress.

Other than once before the beginning of his challenge, and once after the challenge had ended, he was not striving to reach his maximum.  

Strict pull ups - they do get easier

Results of the challenge:  

My son successfully completed his challenge doing multiple sets of small numbers.  

Thirty days doing a minimum of twenty pull ups per day meant he completed a minimum of 600 pull ups that month.  Given the number of times he exceeded his minimums his total number over the thirty days would have been substantially higher!  

After the end of the challenge I asked him to do his maximum.  To his surprise, his maximum increased from a respectable 4 before his challenge to a whopping 15 at the end of the challenge.  Once again he probably could have done a few more pull ups with sloppy form, but he could only do 15 with good form.

That is a massive increase from just 30 days of doing sets of small numbers, stopping if he felt tired, never feeling the burn, not hurting the following day, and never ever training until failure.  You don't see this kind of progress in western style strength training.  

I wish I knew more about prochnost' strength training when I was young.  It is far more efficient and far more suitable for skinny people than any form of western strength training.  Had I trained like this when I was younger I would have been vastly stronger from putting in the same amount of (or less) effort.  

Over the thirty days of his challenge, my son completed more pull ups than most people in this country will complete in their entire lives.  He did this without ever doing more than ten in a row.  

Hopefully my son's success (and incredible progress) will inspire you to give something like this a try.  Decide on an exercise that you can do at home, set a daily minimum, write this down so you can't cheat, then reach or exceed this minimum every day for thirty days.    

Give it a try, you have everything to gain and nothing (other than fat, illness, and weakness) to lose.  Be stronger.