30 Day Challenge: Mixed-Ups

You know when someone says they’re ‘in between jobs’? Well, that’s currently me… but with gym memberships. I hope to get one again very soon, but have been trying to stay active on my own in the meantime.

Last year, my roommate had a pull-up bar at my apartment, and I would regularly hop on that thing and do some reps. Ever since I moved out graduated, I’ve wanted to continue doing them but didn’t have a bar.

So I fixed that one quick. I went to Dick’s and finally bought myself my very own pull-up bar.

And to celebrate the purchase, I decided to do a 30-day pull-up-turned-into-chin-up-and-hammer-grip-pull-up challenge. HEY-O! So that’s why I’m calling it a mixed-up challenge 😉 Basically, the pull-up grip is really wide on the bar that I got, and I couldn’t really even do one. I thought I would build up strength doing the other grips and work up to the regular joe pull-ups another time. I am happy to say that I can do them now after the challenge! I haven’t counted exactly how many, but I did 2 sets of 4 reps last night just for the heck of it, and I’ll surely keep doing them just because they are totally cool.

Now, this challenge was just for fun so I was really flexible with the rules – if you can even call them that. I basically started out doing 3 sets of however many I could do. I switched to 4 sets, and eventually 5, later on in the month. That was pretty much the only consistent rule (guideline?) that I followed. I didn’t put much thought or research into this little activity before doing it so I know there are a couple things I would change if I were to do this again:

I wouldn’t go to failure (or close to it) everyday and would do consistent reps at about 60% of my max reps if I was going to do them everyday. The way I did it, I should have given myself rest days instead of going at it every single day until I couldn’t do anymore. Then I probably wouldn’t have had to be bringing my legs up so much towards the end. hehe. Nothing bad happened to me at all by doing it the way I did, but that may have been better because it would have given my body a little bit of time to recover before doing it again. I say this because there were a couple days here and there that I couldn’t do any, and I think those days off were good for me because they helped me come back and do more (and they didn’t feel as hard) the following day.

However, I did see a lot of growth from the beginning to the end of the month as far as how many I could do. It was exciting to see what happened when I diligently stuck to it and did the mixed-ups consistently. There is power in commitment!! And that’s really what I want to show in this video. I also felt that it helped me tone up overall, which is always a bonus.

Anyway, enough commentary. Watch for yourself:

What kind of 30-day challenge would you like to do?!