Push-ups, Pyramids, and You


The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2500 BC. Its individual stone blocks weigh up to 50 tons, and its base contains roughly 2,300,000 blocks, measuring 592,000 square feet. This combined with its height, 481 feet, would be enough to earn the pyramid a spot on the Seventh Wonders of the World, but it's even more impressive at second glance.

The ancient Egyptians installed the pyramid's cornerstones in a special ball and socket configuration, allowing it to flex slightly in case of an earthquake. Indeed, the structure survived just such a quake in the 14th century, although the tremors loosened its smooth outer covering, which is mostly no longer with us. (Some believe the local population took advantage of the freed stones, carting them away for a variety of purposes. Who wouldn't want a pyramid souvenir?)

When that limestone facade was intact and polished to a full shine, it would have been so bright that some have theorized it would be visible as a twinkly dot from the moon. Scholars believe it took over 20 years to build, and an army of workers that totaled somewhere between 14,000 to 300,000, depending who you want to believe.

The pyramid was built so that each side aligns with one of the four cardinal directions, with such precision that it's only 3/60th of a degree off. Even with modern equipment, this is a remarkable feat.

And perhaps the most remarkable feat of all: 4500 years later, it's still here.

And now for another kind of pyramid, one designed to build your core muscles and help out your brain. I'm talking about—drum roll, please—a push-up pyramid. It may not be as exciting as the one at Giza, but it's far more accessible for most of us, and it can have quite an impact.

You might be surprised to hear this, but strength training is one of the most beneficial exercises you can do for your brain, according to John J. Ratey, psychiatrist and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Developing your muscles can increase your cognitive skills and reduce your chances of dementia.

A push-up pyramid works like this: do one push-up and then sit back on your heels and rest for three seconds. Then do two and sit back on your heels for another three seconds. Add a third push-up next time, and rest in the same way. Continue this pattern all the way up to ten push-ups, and then all the way back down. If you counted correctly, you've knocked off a total of 100 push-ups.

If you aren't much of a weightlifter, this may sound like a Giza-sized goal. The thought is not to start out with an entire pyramid, but to simply do as many as you can, and then take a day's break. The priority is to use good form and take your time. As you get stronger, you can work your way up to that 100.

If even one push-up eludes you, start off by doing push-ups off your knees instead of your toes.

It's a slow process. Nobody would ever say pyramids were easy—least of all those workers at Giza, operating without such flashy modern technology as the wheel. Still, history shows they were successful.

When working on your own push-up pyramid, here are five building tips we can take from the ancient engineers of Egypt.

1. Build with a clear goal.
2. Build up your base first.
3. Build slowly and incrementally.
4. Build with an eye towards perfection.
5. Build with the future in mind.

So tomorrow morning, you might consider dragging yourself out of bed and getting to work. And the good news is, in this case, it only takes an army of one.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more