Planks Challenge Completed

On July 2, 2014, Elizabeth and I embarked on a challenge to do five minutes of planks a day for a month. All I have to say is that was a fabulous experience. Not only did I get a chance to find a love for planks, but I also found a great motivational friend in Elizabeth. We emailed our completions and texted each other everyday on how we were doing, pushed each other to finish, or gave each other the ok when we didn't finish.

This is a series of shots that Jim took of me on Skype showing what I have to deal with on a daily basis doing planks at the apartment. Only, I'm missing a dog. 

I definitely feel the difference in my tummy and now I see the difference just a little bit more than the midway point. I see this line around my stomach, but I still have a bulge there. Although, the bulge is partly do to some unexpected bloating caused by a minor procedure.

Both Elizabeth and I totally rocked this challenge out. There were some days that we didn't do a full five minutes, but we always made up for it the next day. My maximum amount of planks for a day was 9 minutes and Elizabeth did a beast mode of 15 minutes one day to catch up. Obviously, she was sore. One day, I plum forgot about doing any planks at all. She texted me to say that it wasn't too late to finish...and it wasn't. I busted those out before I left for the evening to see a concert.

On our last day of the challenge, Elizabeth met me on the hill at Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park to do our last five minutes of planks. It was totally cool to be out in nature doing our thang even if we had footballs flying by us on our last two sets of minutes. It was also great to have someone there with me and you know we took some pictures.

On our way out, I remarked that we should have done a plank by the millennium pool. So, we decided to a quick 15 second plank just in enough time to take some pictures.

I just really enjoyed this challenge so much and may just keep doing planks everyday. I may not do five minutes, but I am at least doing two minutes. And because we had so much fun doing a monthly challenge, we decided to do another challenge for this month. Elizabeth wanted to work on her pull-ups and I must admit that I wanted the same goal. So, we are doing 40 chin-ups, pull-ups a week to do at any time. These can be assisted or unassisted. I'm already doing a minimum of 18 assisted chin-ups a week with my workout program (and sometimes, 36). Of course, we had to up it. We start tomorrow.

The only question left is what's stopping you from joining us? You don't have to do 40; go for one or five per week. Just get it done.

On a side note, this was a picture of me smiling on my run Saturday before I met up with Elizabeth. It was such a beautiful morning with I think a record temperature of 76 degrees for August in Texas. I was saying good morning to everyone I passed and it was the first time to do negative splits. I ran 11:20 minute/mile the first mile, 11:05 minute/mile the second mile, and 10:45 minute/mile the third mile. I've never done negative splits on purpose, but I really tried to focus on hitting these numbers for each mile instead of just doing whatever just happened.