6 Week Challenge

A few months ago, I signed up for a website called NerdFitness. It's definitely for nerds (like me) and it's set up like a video game, probably so that we don't feel too much out of our element. The concept is great and if you remember my Fitocracy post, studies have shown a correlation between those who excel at video games and those who excel at fitness.

Anyway, NerdFitness does these 6-week challenges, where you set up a challenge thread on the forums for yourself. You pick three diet/fitness goals and one life goal and at the end of the 6 weeks, those participants who were determined by the other members to be the "winner" (by the highest success toward your personal goals) wins a t-shirt.

I signed up for this go-around and it's my first challenge, so I'm pretty pumped about it. The three diet/fitness goals that I chose were:

1) maintain a 100% paleo diet (I post my paleo recipes here)
2) lose 10 lbs of body fat
3) learn to run 2 miles

and my lifestyle goal is to read 15 books for my book review blog, starting with "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence" (which I'm half-way through).

Once I got to reading some of the other challenge threads - some of those people go hard or go home - I decide to add another little test to mine. Since my overall goal is to improve my general fitness level, I decided to test out how many push-ups and crunches I could do without stopping and how long I could hold a plank. I logged them and I'm going to try it again every day to see how much I can improve in 6 weeks.

My initial numbers were:
kneeling push-ups: 31
crunches - 50
plank - 30.1 seconds

Today is day 3 of the challenge, and I'm making decent progress. I even decided to take a few pics to judge my physical appearance progress. Here they are - shield your eyes! :P

I'll keep you all posted on the progress as it goes along. Personal improvement is the name of the game right now!

If you're a member of Nerdfitness, you can follow my thread. My username is "epaleocookbooks".