Just shut up and get down on the floor.

It’s not going to matter if I’m sore, if I’m tired, if I’m already late for work. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be doing pushups every morning before I leave the house.

I’m starting with 3.

Every week I’m going to increase that number by one. Every pushup is going to be done slowly, deliberately, with perfect form and no cheating. That should keep me from injuring my shoulders. I’m starting with 3 because I just now determined that that’s the number of perfect-form pushups I can do without feeling like I’m straining. Granted, this is starting pretty small, but I’m pretty weak in the upper body, and I always have been, and I’m tired of it.

Adding one rep a week seems to me to be an extremely gradual progression that should allow my body plenty of opportunities to lay down the structure to support the increasing workload. With luck, I won’t really notice the added rep and I’ll always stay at that level of effort without having to strain. It’s also an unstoppable progression that will have me doing more than 50 pushups per morning in a year. By the time the number of reps starts has reached a point where it’s inconvenient because of the time it takes, I’ll imagine I’ll have started replacing a few dozen regular pushups with one one-arm pushup.

Maybe things will get easier with time and I won’t want to wait a week before adding a rep anymore. That would be great. For now I’ll just stick with something that seems so easy, and therefore makes me think of any excuse to avoid it as a pathetic cop-out, that I have to stick to it, for my own pride’s sake. And this is a public announcement of it to anyone who reads this blog — not that anyone else does, or should, care about it. Yes, both of you are now aware of my “You’re Pathetic If You Don’t Do Your Pushups Today, Jordan” plan, a.k.a. YPIYDDYPT: “yippie-dipped”…hey, I kind of like that.