Image Credit: Deven (me)
In Language Arts class this year, we did a planking challenge. The basic premise was that each week, we would add 15 seconds to our planks. We started with a 30 second plank on October 24, 2023. We ended the challenge on December 14, 2023. The challenge lasted 7 weeks, and ended with a planking time of 2:15. To finish off the challenge, we had a planking competition. Whoever had the longest plank won. The winning time was more than 4x the time we spent on that week’s in class plank. The finalist had 10:53 for their time.
The effects of a compound effect are great, but hard to understand. I’ll explain them in the context of the plank challenge. If you forget to plank, you will lose more practice than just 15 seconds. If you plank every day, not only will you be able to plank for 2:15, you might be able to plank for more. There were several weeks where I forgot to plank many times during that week. I would show up to the class the next week and try to do a plank that’s 15 seconds longer than the first. But I could barely do the first plank, and trying to do this new, longer plank was really hard. Something I learned is that every week, if I didn’t practice one day, it would be harder and harder. If I forget to practice on the first day every week, it’ll be okay on the first week, but on the tenth week, it’ll be insanely hard. This is going back to the compound effect, and this is the side where you actually lose progress and regress in this physical activity.
Hard, pain, ahhhhhhhhhh, and new found strength. These are some words that described my experience doing the plank challenge. It was really hard to plank every day, and as we quickly added time, planking became more painful. However, I do think I got stronger, both physically and mentally. If my body went out, I was able to rely on my mental strength to keep me going. This applied to outside life, too. Before the plank challenge, if I was playing a challenging video game, I might get mad at the game. Now, when I get upset, instead of getting frustrated, I take a deep breath and look at what I’m doing, how it could be possible to do it, take a second to look at it from a different perspective, try it in a new way, or just try again. Before this plank challenge, this is something that I wouldn’t have been able to do at all.
The challenge I faced every day was that it was super hard for me to remember to plank. On days when we had Language Arts it was fine, we did it in class. However, on the weekends and the one or two days that I didn’t have Language Arts, it was hard for me to remember to plank. At the beginning of the challenge, I easily remembered, but as time went on, it got harder for me to remember to plank. Eventually, I just didn’t think about it outside of class, and so I only did it three to four times a week. This brought me down in class, making it harder and harder to continue doing the planks. My new habit is going to be writing a paragraph of a book every day. I have tried several times in the past to write a book, but after a couple days and two or three days, I get bored and forget about the book. Hopefully, this goal will help me achieve my 2 year old goal of writing a book.