22-Day Push-Up Challenge!

I was recently nominated on Facebook by a friend who was performing 22 push-ups for 22 days to spread awareness via social media about veteran suicide rates due to struggles with mental health issues. As someone who wanted to help continue to spread the message, and who can’t turn down a fitness challenge, I was “all in” and started my own 22 days of push-ups.

“Every day, 22 of our vets take their own lives due to post traumatic stress. This is unacceptable. Raising awareness, we are doing 22 push-ups a day for 22 days.” #22pushupchallenge #22kill

If I haven’t already tagged you to nominate you via Facebook and you’d like to participate, I invite you to copy/paste the message above into your social media posts for the next 22 days and nominate a friend each day to start their own push-up challenge. I added my own guidelines when nominating others:

1) Don’t worry if you can’t do 22 push-ups. Instead, I challenge you to perform as many push-ups as you can in proper form and alignment. 

2) If you aren’t comfortable filming yourself (I know not everyone likes the public feel of posting video of themselves on social media, especially when it comes to body image and personal fitness abilities), don’t worry; just do the push-ups on your own, share that you did them, and nominate someone else to begin their #22pushupchallenge

3) I will be showing different progression and regression options for push-ups throughout my Challenge. Try what you feel comfortable with (i.e. that you can perform safely for your own body). You are certainly welcome to perform the same type of push-ups every day throughout your Challenge if you want to.

I, personally, took the opportunity as a Trainer to add a fitness spin to this and educate others about push-up variations. I challenged myself to come up with 22 different push-up options to give others more ideas to choose from than either the standard straight-leg or above-the-knee types that come to mind for most of us. Check them out here:

Whether or not you choose to participate in this 22-day Challenge, I hope you find these ideas for push-up variations useful to potentially implement yourself when performing push-ups in the future!

Don’t use social media or feel comfortable publicizing your 22-Day Push-Up Challenge? No worries! Just do your push-ups daily, taking into consideration what I’ve shared in this article, for 22 days. Have fun!