Why 100,000?

Because 274 a day for a year is boring, and boring is the part I wanted to test.

A number this size cannot be finished in a good week. Spread across 365 days it works out at 274 pushups a day, every day, which is small enough to do after work and large enough that a skipped week puts you 1,918 behind with no way to borrow the time back.

I picked it because it is arbitrary. There is no physiological reason for 100,000 rather than 80,000. What it does have is a size that makes motivation irrelevant: nobody stays enthusiastic for a year, so the challenge has to survive the months where it is just a chore.

Getting to 274 means breaking the work into sets. For men in their forties, 30 pushups in one go is already an excellent score. Even at 30 a set, it would take 10 sets to reach the daily target, with a shorter final set. Being able to do 30 once does not mean I can keep repeating it all day.

I'd start with 15 to 30 reps per set where possible, taking breaks between sets and adjusting as I go. More when the sets feel comfortable, fewer when they get harder. The 50-rep floor leaves room for a lighter day; the 274 average is something to work towards over the year.

Why every day

A weekly target would let me do nothing until Sunday. A daily one removes the negotiation, because the only question each evening is whether it is done, and the answer is visible in the log.

The floor is 50. That is deliberately low: it is a number I can hit while ill, travelling, or after a bad night. As of 1 October 2026 it had come up 2 times in 243 days, which is the point of having it. A floor you never touch is set too high, and a floor you touch often is really the target.

The average over those days was 293, well above the floor. Most days are ordinary, and the ordinary days are what finish this.

Why film it

Memory is generous about work that was not done. A count typed into a spreadsheet at the end of the week is a count I have negotiated with myself about twice.

The video is not for an audience. It fixes the date and the number so I cannot revise either later, and publishing it means lowering the standard would be a thing I did in public rather than a thing I got away with. If nobody watched, I would still film it.

Every session is on YouTube. The sessions worth starting with are picked out, and each day in the full ledger links to its own.

What happens if I miss a day

The challenge ends and the page says so. There is no reset, no adjusted target, and no rule about making it up later, because a target you can renegotiate mid-attempt is not a target.

That is the whole appeal. The number does not care how the year goes.