Practice what you preach

The most important muscle to build is discipline.

I spend a lot of time asking students to practise, persevere and trust what consistent effort can do. Eventually I asked myself a simple question: am I following my own advice?

The Discipline Counter
— strength and conditioning exercises completed — — blocks of 300.
Mission 300K

300,000 exercises by age 50.

Target: 18 January 2028

—days to go
—exercises remaining
—needed per day
Running medals

Showing up adds up.

The medals aren't the point. They're evidence of all the days that came before them.

What counts?

Not one exercise. A lot of different work.

The total is built from strength, bodyweight and conditioning exercises. Running is part of the wider challenge too, with targets from 5 km and 10 km through to half-marathon and marathon distances, but the Discipline Counter itself records exercise repetitions.

Pull

Pull-ups · Chin-ups · Muscle-ups · Dead hangs

Push

Press-ups · One-arm press-ups · Extension press-ups · Chest press

Strength

Deadlifts · Kettlebell squats · Shoulder press · Banded crossovers

Conditioning

Burpees · Monkey bars · Running alongside the repetition targets

— blocks × 300 exercises = —
Why I started

Consistency.
Discipline.
Hard work.

As a teacher, it is easy to tell somebody else that improvement comes from practice. Keep turning up. Do the difficult thing again. Accept that progress is usually accumulated rather than sudden.

At some point I thought: am I actually following my own advice?

So I started keeping score — not of appearance, but of work. Seeing one of my students consistently turn up and put the effort in further inspired me to keep doing the same myself. The number above is simply the accumulation of those ordinary decisions — one block of 300 at a time.

The waypoints

A journey with something to aim for.

The progression system I built in Excel turned consistency into a series of tangible targets.

🥉111 × 300Bronze · 33 300
🥈222 × 300Silver · 66 600
🥇100 000Gold · 100 000
🍀432 × 300Irish Green · 129 600
✈️633 × 300Cabin Pressure · 189 900
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿751 × 300Everton Blue · 225 300
🇵🇱966 × 300Polish Red · 289 800
🎳🧊1000 × 300300k by Age 50 · 300 000
🍏1234 × 300Beatles White · 370 200
🏍️1441 × 300ZZR Black · 432 300
🖖1701 × 300Enterprise-D · 510 300
👨‍🚀1968 × 300Apollo 8 · 590 400
🚀2403 × 300Apollo 11 · 720 900
🌷2507 × 300Jasmine · 752 100
🪽Long-range targetTornado · 1 000 000