Doing 100 bodyweight reps every day for a month is a popular fitness challenge on YouTube. So when vlogger Travis S decided to bite the bullet and get over his reluctance to train abs, he reasoned that committing to a month of situps might not be the worst idea.
For the next 30 days, he did 100 situps every single day, while keeping his diet exactly the same, to see what kind of effect it would have on his abs.
For the first week of the challenge, Travis breaks down his reps into 5 sets of 20.
“The overconfident or maybe naive side of me really thought I wouldn’t have any problem getting my sets in for the first week or so, but by Day 3 I was already fighting to stay disciplined,” he says, adding that he learned an important lesson during this early stage: don’t leave all 100 reps until the end of the day.
Moving into the second week, Travis begins to focus more on improving the quality of his technique in each rep.
“Rather than just lifting myself up mindlessly, I was consciously focusing on both the eccentric and concentric portion of the reps,” he says. “This one tweak made situps suck even more than I originally thought… One thing I’ve learned is that if you don’t hate training your abs, you’re probably not training them right.”
At the end of the 30 days, he states that while the physical output wasn’t too bad, it was more of a mental challenge. He adds that the relative high volume of situps without a rest day added some strain to his back, but there were some visible physical results.
“I do think I have a bit more definition, I look a bit tighter,” he says. “I’m not walking around with the most shredded six-pack in history, but I don’t think anyone expected that to happen.”
Via Men’s Health.
