Steve Roh’s Hypnosis Blog

Google Scholar is a neat tool. Google describes it as:

…a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

It didn’t occur to me until just now that Google Scholar could be an interesting source of information about hypnosis: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hypnosis&hl=en

These articles can be hard to understand unless you have a scientific or academic background, but fortunately most of them have abstracts that summarize the research in semi-plain English. It’s a good resource because it’s legitimate, peer-reviewed research and not just “stuff someone made up that sounds vaguely scientific”… you may have noticed that the latter is unfortunately common on the internet when it comes to subject of hypnosis.

PS. I don’t waste a lot of time trying to convince people that hypnosis is “real”. If, for some reason, a person refuses to believe that hypnosis exists in spite of the research done at places like Stanford University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, Mt. Sinai Medical Center, etc. etc., then there’s little chance that I can convince them!

No, that doesn’t mean 100 push-ups over the course of six weeks… that means 100 consecutive push-ups!

One Hundred Pushups is an interesting site that has the single-minded goal of training you to be able to do 100 push-ups by following a simple training program. I accept this challenge!

Like most modern humans, I need to work on building up my physical strength, anyway. Sometimes I wonder how I’d be able to handle myself if I ever ended up in prison. At the very least, it’d be nice to be able to change a 5-gallon water jug without struggling. Being prepared for these kinds of scenarios is part of prudent risk mitigation.

Plus, this is going to be an interesting exercise in self-discipline; this program requires only 30 minutes per week. As a hypnotist who helps people build mental strength to achieve their goals, I expect success. If I can’t manage to do this for myself, then I deserve a kick in the butt!

My starting point: I can do 20 push-ups at once before collapsing into a heap. Updates to follow…

Give it a try yourself, and feel free to post updates or comments below.

UPDATE:

Well, I haven’t been able to get to 100 Pushups at once yet… the most I can do so far is a little over 80. Here is a video of my latest attempt:

Now, I know what you are going to say: “Those are the wimpiest pushups ever!” I was going to blame it on the camera angle, but yes you would be right — these pushups won’t qualify me to join the Navy SEALs anytime soon. I didn’t realize until I video-recorded myself that these pushups were so lame, they are nowhere near good-form (where the chest touches the ground each time). Believe it or not, I’m not in the habit of videotaping myself doing pushups, and it sure felt like they were real pushups while doing them.

But here’s the thing: if I was only able to do 20 of these pushups before, and with just a bit of effort am now able to do over 80, well, I think that is still something interesting. For one thing it means I’ve been operating at much less than 1/4 of my physical capacity, which is kind of sad.

Anyway, I look forward to continuing to work towards getting to 100 at once. Maybe then I will concentrate on improving my form. ^_^