Day 31 – Push-Ups for St. Jude

I am happy to say that I did 50 (or more) pushups every day for August 2023. It was not as easy as I thought it would be to VLOG about 50 pushups for 31 days straight.

David Kolmer, Improvement Dave doing pushups on his deck looking down at the deck.

This all takes way more time than it looks like. There were times when my family missed me and I had to step away from this to tend to them. I learned a lot from this challenge and I am proud to say that I completed it. It forced me to learn how to generate “PNG” files with a transparent background and even apply those custom artifacts over video footage. I am at a different place than I was 31 days ago, (mostly I am just better at doing pushups. HA! 555+) but this has forced me to grow in more ways than one and for that, I am very grateful. Consistency is not easy but once it becomes a habit it is not difficult either. I will miss this daily grind, but at the same time, I am so glad it is over!

My goal WAS to do 50 pushups every day for August 2023. My stretch goal STILL IS to do 50 quality pushups in a single set. Today I did two higher-quality sets of 25 pushups, for only 50 quality pushups in total! I think this is the best approach overall to do an actual set of 50 by the end of 2023.

David Kolmer, Improvement Dave doing breathwork on his deck.

I did a 5-minute breath work session between the two sets as preparation and a reset for the second set of 25 pushups. This video is available to view after the two sets of pushups. In this video, I do the basic 4-count in, 4-count hold, and 4-count exhale. Then when that feels comfortable I up it to 8-counts for all three. Normally I would do a 4 or 8-count hold after the exhale but having just done pushups and preparing to do more pushups I do not tend to hold on the exhale very often.

David Kolmer, Improvement Dave doing pushups on his deck looking at the camera.

I have done more than 1,550 Pushups for St. Jude – Please donate to my fundraiser!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1690575421423292/?fundraiser_source=external_url

Music by RoyaltyFreeMusic Nver Avetyan from Pixabay Technology Dubstep

Music by John_Kensy_Music from Pixabay Mindfulness Relaxation & Meditation Music

Music by To Hot to Play, Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive (CC)

Music by Khruangbin Live at Boulder Theater on 2019-05-08
https://archive.org/details/Khruangbin20190508017/Khruangbin2019-05-08-008.flac

Day 30 – Push-Ups for St. Jude

I am feeling better today than I did yesterday. It got down to 65 degrees here in Saint Louis, MO so I decided to do the pushups outside. I am trying to trim the videos down shorter now so there is less dead time and less talking time.

My goal is to do 50 pushups every day for August 2023. My stretch goal is to do 50 quality pushups in a single set. Today I did two higher-quality sets of 25 pushups, for only 50 quality pushups in total! I think this is the best approach overall to do an actual set of 50 by the end of August.

I did a 5-minute breath work session between the two sets, which is available to view after the two sets of pushups. In this video, I do the basic 4-count in, 4-count hold, and 4-count exhale. Then when that feels comfortable I up it to 8-counts for all three. Normally I would do a 4 or 8-count hold after the exhale but having just done pushups and preparing to do more pushups I do not tend to hold on the exhale.

I’m Doing more than 1,550 Pushups for St. Jude – Please donate to my fundraiser!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1690575421423292/?fundraiser_source=external_url

Music by RoyaltyFreeMusic Nver Avetyan from Pixabay Technology Dubstep

Music by John_Kensy_Music from Pixabay Mindfulness Relaxation & Meditation Music

Music by To Hot to Play, Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive (CC)

Music by Khruangbin Live at Boulder Theater on 2019-05-08
https://archive.org/details/Khruangbin20190508017/Khruangbin2019-05-08-008.flac

Day 28 – Push-Ups for St. Jude

It was especially nice outside so I decided to do my daily 50 pushups on the deck behind our house. It was windy and I got a lot of pops and clicks on my microphone. I had the foam wind guard on my mic so I am wondering if it was the wind that caused that. I have never had that issue before.

I did a 5-minute breathwork session between the two sets, which is available to view after the two sets of pushups. In this video, I do the basic 4-count in, 4-count hold, and 4-count exhale. Then when that feels comfortable I up it to 8-counts for all three. Normally I would do a 4 or 8-count hold after the exhale but having just done pushups and preparing to do more pushups I do not tend to hold on to the exhale.

In this video, I brought my small digital kitchen timer to help time the breathwork. I have been using my laptops for timers but that is cumbersome and a few times I have left the computer in random spots in the house and then not known where it was. I recall my time at Wat Chom Thong, in Thailand’s Chiang Mai province where I did a 10-day Vippisana Meditation retreat. We used timers like these at that meditation center. More information about that center here: https://northernvipassana.org/en/

After the breathwork, I place my hands together and raise them to my forehead, and as I do that the church across the pasture rang its bell for 2 PM. I was not anticipating that but for some reason it tickled me. I went on a tangent about how small moments of coincidence or magic like that should be allowed to make us happy. All things are connected in ways we can not understand. I go on to claim that the world is a single organism and we are like the microbes living in that organism. I then made a statement that there are more bacteria in the human body than human cells, but I edited that part out because I looked it up and technically it is not true. If you take into account the red blood cells, the human body is 50% bacteria and 50% human cells. If you think about that, that’s still incredible. The mass of the bacteria is smaller than human cells, so the mass is not 50/50 but the number of human cells to bacteria is estimated to be about half half.

Scientists bust the myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19136

I’m Doing more than 1,550 Pushups for St. Jude – Please donate to my fundraiser!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1690575421423292/?fundraiser_source=external_url

Music by RoyaltyFreeMusic Nver Avetyan from Pixabay Technology Dubstep

Music by John_Kensy_Music from Pixabay Mindfulness Relaxation & Meditation Music

Music by To Hot to Play, Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive (CC)

Music by Khruangbin Live at Boulder Theater on 2019-05-08
https://archive.org/details/Khruangbin20190508017/Khruangbin2019-05-08-008.flac

Day 27 – Push-Ups for St. Jude

Today again was a very rough day of doing 50 push-ups a day for Saint Jude. I make a good point in this video that you know if I was just healthier and if I had been doing this since I was young, this would be easy. I then get on my soapbox and preach how it’s never too late to start.

I’m going to be honest my cheat day has turned sort of into a cheat weekend. Saturday night, I had a couple beers, and a glass of wine and didn’t eat very well (Pizza, ice cream, Peach cocktails, etc.).

Normally, this really wouldn’t affect push-ups the next day, but since I am old, and I have been eating, very healthily and not drinking alcohol, I can really tell the difference when I do add these things back into my routine. You will notice that in the second set, my kids come down to help in my first set. You can hear them screaming upstairs in the bathtub, but please don’t worry my wife was watching them.

I am doing 50 pushups a day for August 2023. I am now including all my breathwork in these daily video updates and owning the fact that this is a form of meditation. I am sharing my experience with the practice and the benefits I receive from it.

I’m Doing more than 1,550 Pushups for St. Jude – Please donate to my fundraiser!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1690575421423292/?fundraiser_source=external_url

Music by RoyaltyFreeMusic Nver Avetyan from Pixabay Technology Dubstep

Music by John_Kensy_Music from Pixabay Mindfulness Relaxation & Meditation Music

Music by To Hot to Play, Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive (CC)

Music by Khruangbin Live at Boulder Theater on 2019-05-08
https://archive.org/details/Khruangbin20190508017/Khruangbin2019-05-08-008.flac

Day 26 – Push-Ups for St. Jude

I am doing 50 pushups a day for August 2023. My goal is to do 50 pushups every day for August 2023.

I completed an iteration of my new logo so I added that to this video.

This is my first time using a PNG file with a transparent background of a logo I designed over video. So, all pretty exciting for me on this side of things… I am feeling incredibly good about it. I also found some very good open-source music from the Psych Rock group Kruingbin for the breathwork session today.

I’m Doing more than 1,550 Pushups for St. Jude – Please donate to my fundraiser!

https://www.facebook.com/donate/1690575421423292/?fundraiser_source=external_url

Music by RoyaltyFreeMusic Nver Avetyan from Pixabay Technology Dubstep

Music by John_Kensy_Music from Pixabay Mindfulness Relaxation & Meditation Music

Music by To Hot to Play, Lobo Loco, Free Music Archive (CC)

Music by Khruangbin Live at Boulder Theater on 2019-05-08
https://archive.org/details/Khruangbin20190508017/Khruangbin2019-05-08-008.flac