If you are feeling a bit stuck in your training routine fitness challenges are a great way to give your workouts some variety and to find new motivation. But of course, they also serve to discover what your own body is capable of and perhaps even to extend your physical limits. Trying these challenges together with a friend will maybe create some competition which can help you to be more ambitious. It is not advisable to include fitness challenges in your normal routine but trying them every few months can be helpful to track your overall progress. So have fun trying the challenges below and try to push yourself! They are sorted from easy to hard.
1 Pyramid workout
For this challenge, you simply pick one exercise such as squats, push-ups, or even burpees, and start by doing 1 repetition. After a short break of approximately 10 seconds, you do 2 reps of the same exercise. Then you continue adding one rep every time until you reach your maximum. Now the whole procedure has to be performed backward until you finally reach one repetition again.
2 Bring Sally Up
The Bring Sally Up challenge is one of the most well-known fitness challenges. The classic version of the challenge requires you to do push-ups but alternatively, you can also choose squats. While listening to the Bring Sally Up song, which can easily be found on YouTube, you need to do push-ups to the rhythm of the song. The challenging aspect is that you always need to hold the lowest point of the push-up for a couple of seconds.
→ from my experience, the bring sally up challenge gets easier if you press the elbows close to the
body
→ beginners can start by doing knee push ups
3 Burn Calories
Just set a timer for one hour and try to burn as many calories as possible. Ideally, you should use a smart watch to track the burned calories accurately but otherwise, you can also calculate them afterward by inserting the activities into an online calorie calculator.
4 1000 Push-ups in one hour
This challenge is as demanding mentally as it is physically. To perform as many push-ups as possible in one hour I would suggest you choose a number of reps that you can do pretty easily and perform them every minute again. The remaining seconds of the minute can be used to rest. If you can complete more than 400 push-ups in one hour you can already consider yourself an intermediate athlete. More than a thousand push-ups per hour are very advanced and require a lot of training.
5 Clapping Push-up
Basically, you are doing a very explosive push up and when your hands are at the highest point you clap in front of your body. Should this variation feel too easy you can try to clap your hands behind the back instead.
6 Balancing Pull-up
While doing a regular pull up you try to balance a water bottle on top of your head. Slowing the movement down will increase your chances of balancing the bottle but at the same time, it will make the pull-up more demanding.
7 Magic Push-up
This challenge was pretty popular in the internet and has been attempted by many fitness influencers such as ‘browney’ and ‘NEXT Workout’. It is called magic push-up because your hands don’t touch the ground at all while doing the push up which makes it look very spectacular. For this challenge, you need a stable stick for example a broomstick. Then you place one end of the stick on the ground and basically do a push-up on the broomstick. The farther you spread your legs apart and the more you incline the stick, the easier this challenge gets.
