Pavel Tsatsouline, a former Soviet Special Forces instructor and the man credited with bringing the kettlebell to the West, believes “strength is a skill.”

One way of training that skill is, in Pavel’s words, to ‘grease the groove.’

What’s that mean? Say you want to do a set of 10 pull-ups but you can only do 3 before dropping.

If you have a pull-up bar in your doorway, and every time you walked by that door you did 1 pull-up, by the end of the day you’d have accumulated 20-30 pull-ups. Before long your max set of pull-ups will sky rocket.

That’s greasing the grove, and that’s this week’s challenge.

It doesn’t have to be pull-ups and walking by a door doesn’t have to be a trigger. Do a push-up. Do a squat. Do a sit-up.

The point is small actions add up to big changes.

Now one thing my techie side has not found is a good app to cue this as a habit throughout the day. Most habit apps I’ve found are about ticking something off for the day. But I haven’t found something that would mark off my progress of doing, say, 50 push-ups in a day in sets of 10 and randomly pinging me 5 times during the day.

If you know of something like this please let me know. But I digress. The tech isn’t necessary.

Set an alarm. Set a timer. Use the “Time to move!” notification on your watch. This is a great way to break up long periods of sitting (hint, hint).