Working on your fitness is crucial to becoming a complete soccer player. But soccer fitness does not just mean pounding the pavement putting in mile after mile of running.
You need also need to work muscles including your core, shoulders and legs. Push-ups are a great workout. Not only do they work your chest, shoulders and triceps, but you need to engage your core, quads and glutes to keep your body straight as you lower your chest to touch the ground and lock your arms out at the top to achieve perfect form.
Famous NFL player Herschel Walker is one athlete who understood this well: he would routinely do hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups a day instead of lifting weights in the gym. In addition to push-ups, crunches and bodyweight squats are great exercises to add to your routine, and the big benefit is that you can do them at home or anywhere else you have a little space. No need to travel to a gym or buy any equipment.
Your Workout Challenge
Our challenge for you is to perform a circuit of push-ups, crunches and bodyweight squats with a total of 25 reps every day for one month.
A “circuit” means that you perform a chosen number of reps for each exercise (pushups, crunches, bodyweight squats) one after the other in quick succession with no rest, if possible. If you feel you do need to rest, try to keep it under a minute.
This challenge may sound easy to you, but it will give you a mental challenge as well. It takes commitment to stick to any routine for a whole month without slipping even once. Can you commit to accomplish this goal? Once you succeed, you’ll be able to continue that dedication to more advanced workouts. Once you accomplish your goal of 25 reps of push-ups, crunches, and bodyweight squats, you could bump the number of reps up per day to 50, 75 and then 100. But I guarantee you will feel stronger at the end of the month with this challenge.
Here are a couple of circuit routines you could try to help you accomplish your goal of 25 reps a day and eventually 100 reps a day.
Get the reps done any way you want – You can perform as many circuits of the three exercises as you want until you reach the number 25 for each exercise. For example, you can perform 5 circuits of 5 reps. You could perform 2 circuits of 10 reps with one circuit of 5 reps. You can perform one circuit of 15, 10, and then 5 reps. You could even just perform one circuit of 25 reps.
Pyramid circuit – A pyramid circuit is a great way to get in a lot of reps in a short period of time and also allows you to learn to keep proper form while fatigued.
A pyramid circuit will have a top number, such as 5, 6, or 10. You start by performing one rep of each exercise (a pushup, a crunch, and a bodyweight squat in our example). Then you go to two reps for each. Next you do three reps in the circuit. You work your way up to the top number of reps in the pyramid, and then you work your way back down to 1. To total 25 reps, you would do a Pyramid 5 (increase number of reps from 1 up to 5 and then back down to 1.)
No matter the details of your circuits, your challenge is to achieve 25 reps each of bodyweight squats, pushups and crunches every day for a whole month.
Try it out, and let us know in the comments below if you achieve it!
And do you have any other bodyweight exercise routines that you like? We’d love to hear about those too.