100 Push-Ups, 200 Squats, 200 Sit-ups

Right now, I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to fit any more gear in my house. For one thing, I plan to move soon, so it would be ill-advised to be buying big unwieldy things like power cages or bar-bells. That said, I hope to eventually give 'Starting Strength' a try, by Mark Rippetoe, a complete body strength building programme focused around bar-bell training. Whether that will come about by buying a bunch of stuff or getting a gym membership remains to be seen, but until then, I'm interested in programmes that require no equipment, save the floor beneath my feet.

I have woeful upper body strength, and suspect that the strongest parts of my body are the legs. It's a pretty unbalanced system, and I want to correct it. There's a few programmes I've researched, and plan to start tomorrow, having completed their initial stress tests yesterday. The programmes are: The 100 Push-Ups Programme, the 200 Squats Programme, and the 200 Sit-Ups Programme. Programme, programme, programme. There's other programmes from the same series, for dips and pull-ups, but I'm not interested so much in those right now. Pull-ups are an especially distant dream right now, I imagine.

The average length of each regime is eight weeks, and each one begins with an initial test to see how many 'good-form' (correctly performed) push-ups, sit-ups, squats, etc. you can do. Then, depending on your performance, you either start at week 1 with a set of reps appropriate to your test results, or if you're really good, week 3, again, with sets appropriate to your test. Take a day off between sessions to let those micro-tears and whatnot heal.

Every couple of weeks, you take another test to calibrate how well you are doing, and make sure you're doing the right number of reps in the following weeks. When the programme is over, you take a final test to try and push out your maximum number of reps, hopefully hitting the target number. If you don't, redo the last week and try again!

It's all fairly straightforward, the websites have the complete regime breakdowns, and even provide printable schedules you can cut up and fold in to a neat little booklet. Some of the programmes have 'alternate' methods of performing your reps. For instance, I am so weak I can't do more than two ordinary push-ups before succumbing to fatigue. Instead, the website suggests I perform knee push-ups, where you let your knees touch the ground and you perform the push-up using your upper body only. Provided the program seems to work the first time around, there's definite incentive go back and do it again with ordinary full-body push-ups instead.

Unfortunately, the websites gloss over the fact that all this requires a proper diet if you're planning to build muscle or strength. Nutrition is beyond the scope of this blog post, but there's an excellent primer over at the Bodybuilding forums relating to building muscle and gaining weight under the 'Starting Strength' program, and most of the advice is pertinent to working out in general (note: The language can be a little coarse at times), and another at the 4chan /fit/ wiki (note: more bad language!). Once I get a little better at this, I might make a post with what I've learned.

So that's all the theory out of the way. How did I do in the initial tests for my three chosen programmes?

• (Knee) Push-ups: 11
• Squats: 33

As I said before, I am very poor at ordinary push-ups, so I'm doing knee push-ups. However, I'm pretty good at those, and will start the first week working with the largest sets. If that turns out to be a bust, I can downgrade, it's early days yet! My squat performance suggests I should start off at week 3. I'm not so sure myself, but again, it's early days; I can give it a go and if it's a bust, I'll go back down to week one.

I'm a little anxious about these results. For the squats, I was able to watch myself perform them, and have convinced myself they were good-form. My good performance might be attributed to my endurance training with the C25K programme, or maybe I've just always had good legs? Or, and I'm hoping it's not this, I've been doing bad-form squats! This sort of thing needs to be corrected right away so you don't end up throwing away all your effort.

I've yet to properly take the initial test for sit-ups, as I find I'm able to do over 100 without any real strain apart from boredom, pointing towards bad-form. I'll do them another time, paying proper attention to form, probably on the same day I start the other programmes.

Indeed, I was surprised by how many push-ups I could do, even if they were supposedly at 50% body weight. It's a little harder to check this myself, so I'll have someone check my form during the first session, or I'll record myself and see. I'm new to these exercises, I can probably expect to get better at them over time, but it would be good to start well too!

That about wraps up the introduction, time to get exercising!