What is a habit? A habit is something you do consistently. I have lots of habits. Actually, we all have habits like brushing our teeth every morning and night, or something like going to the gym and working out for 1 hour a day. The compound effect is when we just added small amounts that built up over time. That’s what I’m going to be talking about today – My journey planking.
As you can see in my habit tracker, I colored in the days of the month from October 24th until December 14th. December 14th was the day of “The Challenge.” The Challenge is something that this Language Arts class does every year, so basically those days I colored are the days I planked. When we started our planking in October it was only 30 seconds. Every week we added 15 seconds so after 7 weeks we were planking for two minutes and 15 seconds. In the final challenge, we competed against each to see who could plank for the longest. I got second place with an 11 minute plank. At the time of this blog writing my arms are still a little sore.
When we first started doing the planking it was a little hard to remember because I just wasn’t used to planking every day. My friends and I helped to remind each other to plank and sometimes we did it together during advisory time. The more time that passed, the easier it was to remember to plank because it just became something I did every day. Over the whole challenge I noticed that it was easier to do it every day, not only because it was becoming a habit but also because I got stronger so it wasn’t hard.
For my new habit I decided to to stick with an exercising habit and go with 10 pushups a day. When I can easily do 10 pushups, I’ll add 5 more. I hope I’ll be adding one or two times each week until I finally reach 100 pushups a day. Once I get to numbers over 50, I’ll include that it will be okay to do the pushups more than once a day to fit them all in if I need to. I’m pretty excited about trying to create this new habit. For one, I know that if I can do this, then I can also practice creating other good habits, and also, I really like the idea of getting stronger doing pushups.