I discovered an article about famous online poker player Tom “durrr” Dwan and a unique way in which he goes about settling debts. Although he and most of his friends have won hundreds of thousands of dollars from gambling, they choose a healthier way to settle debts amongst one another.

Dwan and his friends like to bet on anything and everything, including when the lights will come back on following a power outage. The stakes? Not very high. The loser has to do ten pushups.

While this might seem like nothing more than a quirky story, I there’s more to it than that. Since reading that article, I decided to start making pushups more than just something I begrudgingly force myself to do each day. I discovered that using pushups as a social tool lead to not only pushups being more enjoyable, but also to doing a higher number of pushups!

For example, my friend and I recently watched a speech delivered by Barack Obama. I got the idea that every time Obama said the word “change”, I would do five pushups and every time he said the word “hope”, my friend would do five pushups. Well, if you’ve been following politics at all this year, you might be thinking, “you guys should have picked some different words!” By the end of that speech, we were exhausted!! My body was so tired that I would have sworn it felt like he was just saying “change, hope, change, hope, change, hope,” over and over again just to spite us!

The purpose of this example is to plant a seed of creativity regarding your pushup regimine. Pushups don’t have to be something you arbitrarily force yourself to do! By incorporating them into your life in a fun, competitive way, you can do more pushups and have more fun doing them.

Some ideas on how to incorporate pushups into your daily routine:

• Use them to settle small disputes amongst friends (ie: whoever is wrong does 20 pushups).
• Do a pushup for every point the opposing team scores on your favorite football team.
• Force yourself to “pay” the penalty of 20 pushups each time you can’t say no to dessert.
• Stop and do 10 quick pushups every 10 minutes during your walk or jog.
• Every time you’re late for a date or an appointment, force yourself to do a pushup for each minute you were late (advice: wait till you get home to settle a pushup date for being 6 minutes late to a fine restaurant!)
• If you’re counting calories, force yourself to do a pushup for every 10 calories you ate beyond your daily limit.

You get the idea!

The point is… pushups don’t have to be dreadful or boring. Spice up your pushup routine by adding some fun and uncertainty to the whole thing!