20,000 Push-ups and Pull-ups in 30 Days Challenge (featuring David Goggins)

A few days ago I tweeted I will do as many push ups and pull ups next 30 days as this tweet gets. Likes, retweets and comments. No number is too high. Bring got 20,000. So thank you Internet friends for the love and the suffering. It was probably about four or more times the amount that I was mentally preparing myself for. In the name of health, I decided to spread that around across multiple bodyweight exercises including push ups and pull ups, but also squats, ab rollers and running. One mile of running equals 42 pushups, Lex Math and all. Happy with myself, I wrote to David Goggins asking for his advice thoughts on this challenge. If you don't know David Goggins, he to me is one of the toughest, most inspiring humans on the planet. Retired Navy seal, ultra marathon runner, former record holder for the most pull ups in 24 hours. Author of the book Can't Hurt Me that highly recommend, especially the audiobook. Anyway, I asked him a few questions about this challenge and he was kind enough to respond. I'll interleave the clips into the video. So the first thing I did is I explained to him the challenge and the way I spread it around across multiple bodyweight exercises and just ask them for his thoughts about what I'm doing.

Well, I think it's a pretty good damn workout, but this is the issue right there, man. I believe that you told people on I think it was Twitter, I'm not quite for sure I think it was Twitter that you would do push ups and pull ups for the number of retweets that you had. Now I'm hearing running, I'm hearing squats, I am hearing push ups and pull ups, I'm hearing all kind of different other exercises. And you also told people that guess what, bring it. No numbers too high. But now I hear other exercises, so that must mean that there is a number too high. So be careful what you wish for, my friend. So that being said, I would have stuck with the damn push ups and pull ups and challenge yourself to the umpteenth degree of pain and suffering and that would have really taught you a humongous lesson about yourself and everything else. But what you have here is also amazing, but it's nothing compared to what you had previously talked about.

Well, there you have it. When David Goggins calls you out in your bullshit, you got to step up. So I'm going to do what I originally promised, which is the 20,000 push ups and pull ups. And on top of that I'll do My best to do also the other body weight exercises really for the sake of health. So we're talking about squats, ab rollers and running. The whole goal I wanted to do here is something that's healthy but still pushes me to my limits physically and mentally and allows me to build up a habit of doing some efficient exercises every day. You know, something that takes less than an hour, but keeps me in pretty sharp, hard shape. That's what I do here. Certainly with 20,000 pushups and pull ups, that's a whole nother level. I don't know what's going to happen, but I will learn something about myself for sure. So I want to mention some of the reasons, some of the motivations of why I'm doing this challenge. So first is I didn't think too much about it. I just dived right in. It was actually just laying in bed and tweeted it out. I think some of the craziest, most fun, some of the most ambitious things we can take on in life sometimes can be just on a whim. So I'm decided on a whim, but gonna take it to completion. Also wanted to do an exercise program that I've done often in the past that takes very little effort. So, like, being busy is not an excuse. It can take 20, 30 minutes a day just to get a hard workout in. You can do it at home. There's no excuse not to do it. The other thing is that travel is not an excuse because it's body weight. You can basically do it anywhere. You probably heard me talk a lot about it before, but I'm a huge believer in habits because habits remove the need for day to day motivations that can go up and down. I have a lot of research work related habits that are part of my life, but I wanted to get exercise as part of a daily routine in my life. I think especially in these times of the coronavirus and all the madness that's going on in the world. Being healthy, making sure you're strengthening your immune system with good diet, good sleep with good exercise is really important for everybody. Everybody's kind of locked up and it's easy to slack on the exercise. And I wanted to motivate others perhaps to join me on getting their exercise back, on getting, getting back out there, getting a little bit of movement every single day. And also I wanted to harden up that muscle of doing a thing you don't want to do for that long period of time and getting it done. So I actually asked David, what should I do when things get tough.

This is a good fucking question, man. Because it's going to get fucking difficult day after day after day. That's the thing about what you're doing right now that's challenging is a lot of motherfuckers can sign up for the fucking one day event. A lot of people do. A lot of these CEOs, a lot of these people don't want to suffer, you know, as a living. Who don't want to suffer as making it a habit. What they do is they go out and they recruit these people to put them through a two day, three day fucking challenge. Anybody can do that shit. Because your mind can process two or three fucking days of suck. What you're doing, my friend, is going to be damn near a month of suck. So basically you're going to have a lot of days, especially in the morning time. The mornings when you wake up and your body says, go fuck yourself. Because I don't fucking feel like doing this today. And you go look at, because you're running six miles a day. I believe you know what's going to happen to your fucking ass is you're going to wake up in the morning and, and you're gonna fucking do what I do. People think, oh, David Goggins just wakes the fuck up and he just gets his shit on. He gets this fuck no, I don't, I don't get up and get after it. I look at my shoes sometimes for hours. I pass them, I go, I get something to drink, I go to the bathroom, I'll watch tv, I'll start doing some work. And I look at those fucking shoes. Cause why my body's saying go yourself. So you have to be able to win the morning. You have to be able to not allow that to get too deep in your brain. And when things get really tough for you when you're out there on like day 17 and your knees are hurting and your back is hurting, your shoulders are hurting, your elbows get elbow tendonitis and all kind of going on. You got to start remembering your resume. A lot of people don't remember what the fuck they've accomplished in life. And at that time of suffering, you have to be able to fucking go through and pull up that who the fuck I am resume and say, oh for you, I'm sure you studied your fucking ass off for hours and days and years to get where you're at. I guarantee you did shit harder than this. And that's basically what you have to go back to. But it's hard to do because in that moment of suffering, all you can fucking think about is getting the fuck out of it. So you got to take that one second to pull yourself out of that suffering, to have a clear fucking thought. It's hard to have clear thoughts in the midst of extreme pain and suffering. Find that clear thought. Remind yourself of what you've been through back in the past, back in the day, to get to where you're at today. So that's what I do. It's a constant reminder. And then through that process, I guarantee you, your mind and body will say, oh, we got this. We've been here before. Maybe not in that kind of pain and suffering, but we've been here before and in the demons of your own mind. So that's the best reminder in the world.

All right, so what I'm going to attempt, what I'm going to do is 20,000 push ups and pull ups combined. And on top of that, I'm also going to do squats, ab rollers, and run 6 miles every day. So the routine is this. Run 6 miles and then do 34 rounds of the following 15 push ups, 5 pull ups, 5 ab rollers, and 10 squats. Just over and over, 34 times a day. I might split it up 3 times a day. I might do it twice a day, I might do it just one a day. My plan is to do the hardest one early on in the day, try to get as much done as possible, most likely about 14 rounds, and then do another 10 and 10 later on in the day. The goal is for each round like that to take about two minutes. So for 34 rounds, that's 68 minutes. So the start is tomorrow, Wednesday, June 10th, going on for 30 days after that. So let me quickly do a round to give you a sense of the form and then talk about it. So there you have it. That's one round. The hope for that is to take about a minute and the total is two minutes. So you get a break of about a minute between each session. Obviously, good form is important. There's always going to be a keyboard warrior out there. I'm looking at you with some sweatpants in their mom's basement, with Cheetos all over the place, way out of shape. Who's going to comment about the fact that the push ups aren't all the way down or aren't all the way up? And same with the pull ups, so on and so forth. None of that matters. Good form in this case for a push up and a pull up is something that minimizes the risk of injury. I think this whole thing is a tough workout, to be honest. Yesterday and the day before, I did over 400, which was I was trying to see is this even possible? Can I do 680 total push ups and pull ups in a day? It seems like an insane number to me. So I did 400 and it was tough but doable. And I think if 400 is doable, then 680 is too. I think I can certainly with a little bit of suffering, do it for a few days if I can be fortunate enough to avoid injury. The rest of the month is just mental. That's where the battle is. That's where all the good lessons are to be learned. So I also asked David, by the way, there's a laptop over here. That's why I'm looking over here. I also asked David about the fact that some people might join in on this challenge in whatever capacity they can and what he recommends for me and for others to stay injury free while still pushing their body and their mind to the limit.

Well, this challenge you're going to get injured if you don't have a good base. Like for instance, if you don't do a lot of pull ups, a lot of push ups. What you do for both is you're utilizing these elbows which you get tendonitis severely bad and your shoulders. So with the push up you're here. This is your hinge part. Yeah, you are using your chest, using your triceps, but this hinge is being used an awful lot. This elbow hinge, these shoulders are being used awful lot. Even in a pull up motion, being used an awful lot. So basically what happens is you're going to get injured. So for a lot of you, I would definitely suggest doing a lot more squats, do a lot more abs, doing things like that, even abs, you can injure your abs but going from zero to hero, you will have some injuries and you got this isom. Try to get your body to recover as fast as possible possible. Taking in proteins, taking in aminos, things like that. Getting as much rest as you can. But you're going to get over overuse training issues with your body. That just comes with the, it's just nature of the beast. And like I said, those of you who start to get injured, start doing those, start making those squats. You know your your go to because your legs can handle so much. When I was doing the pull up record, people wonder why that was so hard for me. First of all, I had a jacked up body when I was doing it a very, I guess, out of alignment body. But your only contact point is your hands. And there's been times in 200 mile races where I tore my quad, completely tore my quad. I was able to bandage it up and walk it out. I was able to walk 75 miles. So this is the thing. Your legs can handle a lot of abuse, a lot of abuse. So when you start hurting, go to your legs.

So there you have it. Don't use any kind of injury as an excuse to stop, to stop moving, stop exercising. Just find an alternative exercise that doesn't hurt. You know, I'm gonna really try to stick to the push up and pull up and do everything I can to remain injury free. For me, a part of avoiding injury is stretching really well. Also doing a good warm up. Like for me I'm doing the six mile run before doing the body weight exercises. Also, obviously nutrition is important. Everybody has their own journey. I've dieted my whole life all kinds of ways, did combat sports my whole life. So cutting weight and performing optimally was always important for me. Whatever you think about it, the main diet that I've come to enjoy is either keto or carnivore. So primarily a meat based diet. Meat and fat, very low carb. So mostly for me that just means ground beef, sometimes steak and keto. Friendly low carb snacks here and there. Nutrition wise, it's pretty basic, but I did do take some stuff. So I take sodium in my food, so I put quite a bit of salt in there. Magnesium. Also take fish oil and pill form. Not much like two or three fish oil pills a day and a multivitamin. That's it. It would be of course awesome if other folks, if you decided to join in on this challenge at whatever level you want. It would just be fun to do push ups and pull ups together or any kind of difficult exercise activity that will challenge you. Do it every single day. If you, if you haven't ramped up to it, you haven't done it much. What I recommend is to start very low to where almost you're comfortable and then increase it day by day to when you quickly become uncomfortable. But give your body time to adjust, that's really important. Again, the point here is to do a difficult exercise, but really is to do it for 30 days. And what I'm doing, and I hope you do as well, it's not just for 30 days. For 30 days you do something difficult, but you form that habit and you stick to it for months to come, especially in These times, exercise is just so important for staying healthy and staying sane. So I'd love it if you joined in on the challenge. I'll have a spreadsheet linked in the description while I keep track of the reps that I'm doing on a daily basis just so you can follow along. You can also just copy that spreadsheet and use it for yourself to track your own numbers. Share it with me on any of the social platforms. I'd love to see your progress. I'll also maybe go live on one of the platforms. Instagram, YouTube, on our Discord server, Twitter. I don't know. I don't know if there's interest in that. I'll be honest. I tried Instagram Live a couple of days ago to work out, and it was a little weird for me to work out what other people watched. I'm not sure, but maybe if there's interest, let me know. Maybe I can take a few questions about the challenge. I'll probably record video throughout the month and just publish it at the end. So with that, I'd like to thank David Goggins. I follow him on Instagram and he's a constant reminder that I need to push myself to my limit mentally. I asked him, of course, whether he'd want to be a guest on the podcast. Let's see what he had to say.

No problem, man. I. I love what you do. I've seen some of your work. You're extremely intelligent guy, so your intelligence. And I see that you're willing to go the next mile. So you. You're willing to be a guy that is just not all right. So, for instance, I was in the military. They say, you better be real smart or you better fucking be real hard. And so I was the real hard guy and I had to develop the smarts. I see that you're a really smart guy and you're developing the hard. So I think that we can really have a good podcast together. It'd be really interesting conversation.

So there you have it. It's on. I think I'm recording this video. But most of this journey is quiet. It's on my own. It's with myself. It's a quiet journey of suffering. So, yes, it's a way to get exercise back in my life, but it's really a chance to rediscover myself by doing something really, really difficult for a prolonged period of time, no matter what. I'll be a different and I think a better human being on the other end. If you join me on this in your own parallel journey. Great. Either way, stay healthy and stay hard.