In 2020, when we got locked in, we started really doubling down on our acrobatics training. Sometime shortly thereafter we were encouraged to add a 'conditioning' routine to the end of our workouts. Essentially, after working on all of our acrobatic tricks, when it's no longer safe to hold a person in the air, we do all the exercises that we have typically considered "boring" and had avoided. Push ups ended up being part of that conditioning section.

For quite some time we just did 3 push up varients, and then I found a list online of something like 80 push up varients. I was inspired!

Many of them were completely outside of our capability, but we built a list of about 20 push ups that we could more-or-less do. Finally a use for my old gaming dice! We rolled a d20, and selected 2 'fun' varients each work out, and then did a 'basic' push up in either the wide handed "T" style, or the narrow 'elbows in' style, depending on which sets of arm muscles had been used in the randomized two.

Eventually, as these things go, I started finding even more push up variations, that I felt like were within our capability, and worth giving a try.

I got stuck for quite some time trying to figure out a good way to randomize from the extended list I'd made. One day, my acro partner Russ was logging into his laptop and shared with me the 'words of widsom' quote that he'd gotten on boot. I asked him how he'd accomplished this, and he said he was using a 'fortune' file!

... I'd found my solution.

I re-wrote my text list of push ups and weblinks to videos explaining how each were done into the fortune file format, which just required a % on a new line between each entry. I then ran strfile to create a fortune.dat file, since the program fortune needs one in the same folder as the fortune file that's called. I added an alias to my shell to run fortune on my new file, and now I just have to hit the command line with "Pushups" and I get a randomized pushup in reply! Now, instead of each of us rolling the dice once, we each run Pushups once for our 'fun' push ups.

I'm not going to share my current push-ups fortune file here, as it's currently a list of a bunch of links to videos I have absolutely no rights to whatsoever, but I am intending on making my own instructional videos of each push up, as I get to the point where I can cleanly show how they should be done, and when I do so, I'll add those videos here and create a fortune file for anyone to grab with the list of push ups that I've made explainers for :)