YouTuber Tyler Oliveira lives to subject himself to grueling physical challenges in pursuit of swoledom, whether it’s running for 24 hours on a treadmill without stopping, or training like anime superhero One Punch Man for a whole month. In his latest video, Oliveira levels up and takes on a whole month of one of the toughest workouts there is: CrossFit’s Murph.
The Murph workout consists of a 1-mile run, 100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 air squats, and another 1-mile run. Oliveira vows to complete the Murph every single day for the entire month of April — a choice he soon regrets.
“Being healthy is a choice, sadism is a lifestyle,” he says after the first workout. Things only continue to get worse over that first week; Oliveira describes the prospect of having to do a Murph every day as a “dark cloud” that is constantly hanging over him. “It has, without a doubt, increased my stress levels by at least 300 percent.”
Subscribe to Men’s Health
SHOP NOW
He reaches a turning point after seven days, finding the physical difficulty has been replaced by a more existential one. “At this point, the Murph was no longer difficult, it just had to be done,” he says. “While my body acclimated to the intensity of the Murph, my diet and sleep schedule gradually dissolved.”
Halfway through the month, and he is able to get through the Murph more quickly and efficiently: he’s able to do 40 pushups at a time without stopping, and is able to crank out 20 pullups per set. But he’s not seeing any visible results, which is disheartening at a point when he needs every ounce of motivation to make it to the end of the challenge. “I have 10 days to go, I’m not looking like a Greek god, this is not enjoyable,” he says.
At the end of the 30 days, Oliveira looks pretty much the same as he did at the start, a fact which could be put down to the fact that he didn’t alter his nutrition at all.
“There are no gains to show for this entire struggle. I didn’t even look that much better after this,” he says. “It wasn’t for the good of my body, it wasn’t for the betterment of my mental health… it was self-punishment for the sake of self-punishment.”
“This challenge was never about getting swole, it was a challenge of mental willpower and dedication,” he continues. “Or at least, that’s what I told myself to justify the fact that I have no real visible gains… The fact I had zero days to recover is very frustrating, so consider that I’m getting no sleep, I’m not recovering, and I’m eating like garbage, it doesn’t add up to a very fruitful formula for shredded god-tier bodily status, but it is what it is.”
Source: Read Full Article