The first day our class did a plank, I was confused and a little annoyed. After all, this was our Language Arts class, why were we doing a plank? Every day, starting from October 24, we planked, and increased our time by 15 seconds every week.We talked about a book called Atomic Habits and how “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.” This is a quote from James Cleary, the author of Atomic Habits. A daily habit with a compound effect lets us keep growing every week. If we had done 30 seconds every week we wouldn’t have been able to get to the times we have gotten to now. We kept track of which day we planked, and which days we didn’t, on our habit tracker. I had a lot of trouble remembering to plank every day, especially on the weekends. We planked for 7 weeks, so the last week, we were planking for 2 minutes and 15 seconds. On the very last day, we had a plank challenge where we all planked for as long as we could. I listened to music while planking and it was really helpful in staying up. I was able to plank for three minutes (and four seconds!) but I think if I did it again I might be able to go longer. The longest plank in my class was around eleven minutes and the longest plank in the grade was twenty seven minutes. They said they could’ve gone longer but the class ended.
My new habit is to stretch once every day. This is a habit that will help me reach my goal of being able to do a split. I’ve always wanted to be able to do splits, but I was having trouble. If I stay consistent with this habit, I hope to be able to do the splits. The daily habit was definitely a learning experience and one I’m glad I did.