Unschoolery

  • Leo
  • Nov 27 2013
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The Family Pushup Challenge

By Leo Babauta

I love issuing challenges to my family.

This past weekend, I issued a Pushup Challenge. Basically, it's a 6-week challenge where we follow a program, doing 5 sets of pushups for 3 days a week.

We started with a pushup test on Sunday -- see how many pushups you can do in a row in one set. That's just for assessment.

Then, based on the assessment, we follow the plan on 100pushups.com. Is the goal to do 100 pushups? No, it doesn't matter how many you can do by the end of the challenge. Is the goal to beat our other family members? No, we're just trying to stick to the program to see what kind of progress we make. It's a lesson in habits and self-discipline.

We're doing it as a group. We set up a Google Spreadsheet to track our progress, and we can all see if everyone is sticking to it. We have a reward (Cinnaholic for breakfast, and lasertag & miniature golf & go-carts and batting cages after) but we have to all complete the challenge to get the reward. We'll have to encourage each other, remind each other, push each other.

It's a great team-building exercise, great bonding, great learning experience.

Everyone is doing it, from me and my wife to my 20-year-old to my teen-agers to my 7-year-old and 9-year-old. And yes, Noelle the 7-year-old is doing full pushups, which surprised me!

We're learning about ourselves, and our boundaries, and what we're capable of.

Does it have to be a physical challenge? Hell no. Feel free to do a drawing a day challenge, or learn as many digits of pi as you can. It doesn't matter what the challenge is. Do it for fun, do it together, and learn along the way.

Update: Here's a copy of our Google Spreadsheet log.

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One of the more difficult, and therefore more interesting, problems in unschooling is the problem of motivation.

In other words, unschooling is just like regular life (in fact, shh don't tell, but "life" and "unschooling" are the same thing!).

The problem that many unschooling families face is: if you don't force the kid to learn certain things in certain ways, that's all well and good, but what if the kid doesn't feel like doing anything? Can they just lay around and watch TV all day? What if the kid wants to do some things but isn't motivated to work hard on them?

So how to solve this problem?

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On February 14th, Dan Edwardes, Stephane Vigroux, Chris Keighley, and Julie Angel came down to Central Park for a day-long workshop. Artem, Charlie and I showed up at Heckscher Park (an area in Central Park) around 10AM, and there were already a good 20 or 30 people there. We warmed up, did some small balance and precision drills for a while, until around 11. A group of four people walked up to us, and one spoke in a British accent "So.. are you guys Traceurs?"

After a (long) series of introductions, we hung around Heckscher for a bit longer, waiting for more people to show up, and then the day began.

We began with some light joint work: neck, shoulder, elbow, knee and ankle stretching. We then went for a short jog forwards, backwards, and to both sides. We slowed to a stop then Dan dropped to his hands and feet, and began to QM around the area we had just jogged. At about the halfway point, we continued QMing backwards.

Then we ran into our first problem. The Park Police decided that what we were doing 'could endanger the kids (of which there weren't any around...)' and 'adults weren't allowed to play in the park.' So we asked them nicely where we could train, and they directed us towards a baseball field. So we moved there.

After doing some (read: a lot) of squat work, we went back to some more QM. This time, we were doing a couple different levels of sideways QM. We started by just moving left and right in the QM position. We later incorporated leg lifts, both holding it still and moving the leg up and down, into the workout. About this time we ran into problem number 2. The Park Police came by and decided that we were "risking the children" again (keep in mind, this was a fenced in field, and there were no kids in sight, let alone on this side of the fence.)

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