Challenging

Me and this buddy I went to high school with (who is in the navy now) are doing this "push up push" workout that's supposed to increase the amount of push-ups you can do in one set. You do 200 push-ups a day for 10 days, alternating doing them in large set all at once and spreading them throughout the day.

Yesterday I spent 60 minutes doing 5 push-ups each minute. It turns out to be fairly challenging. It's a decent workout, pretty intense too.

_{I'm doing this in addition to everything else I do, which makes it a bit more challenging on days when I'm already spreading my energy pretty thinly}

Moral of the story: Do more push-ups folks. Or discuss how self-absorbed I am to post this on the forums.

Quote :

alternating doing them in large set all at once and spreading them throughout the day.

Wait what?

I don't think it's that self-absorbed...spreading out tips on how to get buff.

Jay.J wrote:

Quote :

alternating doing them in large set all at once and spreading them throughout the day.

Wait what?

I don't think it's that self-absorbed...spreading out tips on how to get buff.

I thought about editing in the words "each day", I probably should have. Basically the first day you group them, second day you spread them out, and so on, alternating.

Ahh, so it's a wide range of stuff. Endurance and I guess strength.

Sort of.

Basically, you're trying to work your muscles in two different ways. I don't want to say anything that I'm not entirely sure about...

Basically, more repetitions and fewer sets usually works on tone/cut of the muscle being worked whereas more sets with fewer repetitions will work size. The other variable that is not addressed with pushups is weight being lifted. A pushup will work the same weight each time (unless you add weight to yourself). Anyhow, less weight with more repetitions is for tone whereas more weight with less reps is size.

I assume it works about the same way with push ups minus the weight variable.

The last thing that I can recommend to help with both boredom and results is to vary the way you do push ups. Try doing "diamond" (where you make a diamond with your fingers/hands and thus have your arms very close); try doing push ups off your fists rather than just palms; lastly, if you're doing the 5/minute for 60 minutes, then do an "explosive" push up at the end where you sort of launch yourself off the ground on the last push up (think "jump" clapping push up). That will work on sudden muscle use and increase your work and will get incredibly difficult by the end of the workout.

I took Fitness & Weight training...I just don't remember what does what .

AquaAscension wrote:

Basically, more repetitions and fewer sets usually works on tone/cut of the muscle being worked whereas more sets with fewer repetitions will work size. The other variable that is not addressed with pushups is weight being lifted. A pushup will work the same weight each time (unless you add weight to yourself). Anyhow, less weight with more repetitions is for tone whereas more weight with less reps is size.

I'm not sure if I'm 100% correct on this, since weight loss and getting fit products/methods are hot for commercial scamming nowadays. But you're only partially right. Increasing the resistance or reps per set will result in higher muscle bulk gain than increasing the number of sets or decreasing resistance and increasing reps because the muscle damage will occur over a shorter period of time to a greater degree.

Tone/cut on the other hand, cannot be directly increased through certain workout strategies. It is the combination of muscle bulk and low body fat. If you want to produce muscle definition then the best bet is to use resistance and reps per set that fit your size goal and build towards that, and at the same time incorporate aerobic exercise to reduce body fat to the point at which your muscle mass will be clearly visible through the skin.

This isn't to say that spreading 300 pushups into 60 sets of 5 isn't going to build muscle. It is just more focused on endurance than bulk. My heart rate was decent for that hour too, so it was a half-decent aerobic workout too. I was more sore after the 300 in sets of 5 than after 200 in sets of 20-30.



tl;dr version: Weight+Reps=Muscle Mass, Tone=(Muscle Mass)/(Body Fat), Exercise=Always good

WHAT EXERCISE ISN'T ALWAYS GOOD !

What if you're dying? Or if you haven't slept for 96 hours? Or you have a lack of food? Or you're paralyzed? Etc.

But really, Ummm have you noticed any actual difference Pyth? Have you gone from buff to tank?

Since i started the push up thing?

I just realized you started yesterday. Get back to me in 10 days.

Today is day #4 actually, I think it's going well so far.

How can you do any exercise when you are paralyzed?

That was the point, that exercise wasn't good all the time, or even possible for that mater. It was just a nit-pick of the word "Always". I wasn't being serious.

Oh but we're missing a huge component to this whole discussion: Nutrition.

If you don't eat enough protein to replace the muscles that are "ripped" then you won't get any extra muscle mass.

But I don't know much about nutrition beyond the basics that are talked about for my own chronic health-care.

And then you'll start to get into calories and such... which are also important, but not something I completely understand (at least enough to be able to talk about confidently).

But, yeah, nutrition is important for your test as well, so what is your diet like, Pyth?

I just realized that your nickname of "pyth" sounds much like the word "Pithy" which are short, condensed one liners that are kind of zingers.

AquaAscension wrote:

Oh but we're missing a huge component to this whole discussion: Nutrition.

If you don't eat enough protein to replace the muscles that are "ripped" then you won't get any extra muscle mass.

But I don't know much about nutrition beyond the basics that are talked about for my own chronic health-care.

And then you'll start to get into calories and such... which are also important, but not something I completely understand (at least enough to be able to talk about confidently).

But, yeah, nutrition is important for your test as well, so what is your diet like, Pyth?

I just realized that your nickname of "pyth" sounds much like the word "Pithy" which are short, condensed one liners that are kind of zingers.

Well, I'm a vegetarian for the most part, because I don't like the taste of meat, I am not in any way opposed to the slaughtering of animals for food. I drink a lot of milk, mostly skim, it has an incredible protein/mass ratio compared to most other foods. Peanut butter sandwiches are a staple, of course. A lot of bread and pasta as well. Fruits are vegetables occasionally, orange juice when I have access to it. Poptarts, nutri-grain type bars. And finally, protein powder.

Diet is a difficult thing to change for most people, which is why miracle style weight loss crap is actually well funded enough to advertise on T.V.

DOUBLE POSTING ZOMG:

Today's (day #5) gimmick was also based on a minute timer. 1 pushup for the first minute, and one additional pushup added each minute, such that on the second minute you do 2 pushups, and on the fourth you do 4. I made it to 15 minutes before being unable to complete the set, with 116 pushups total.

Interesting sidenote, the formula for the total number of pushups done by this method is the integral from 0 to time in minutes of (x+0.5)dx, also known as (x²)/2+x/2

Okay... so why are there 116? Shouldn't there only be 16 at 15 minutes?

Also, I did the 5/minute for 60 minutes this morning and started to get bored... didn't really feel it until I hit the last set and decided to do a set of 50 to cap it off. It was a good exercise but time consuming otherwise.

BTW, please don't read top as bragging... Eight years of martial arts and almost always doing push ups over the years... yep.

116 was the total, 14*14/2+14/2+11=105+11 on the last set, or 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+11=116 in 15 minutes.

I finished the remaining 84 over the next 30 minutes or so.

It's impressive that you can do a set of 50 push ups. The 5 per minute may not have been as heavy as it seemed to my and my friend if it is done on a fresh start. He had spent 8 hours pushing people around in gurneys and I had just finished the rest of my workout, which is pretty upper body intensive. That probably had an effect on our performance .

50 after you just did 5 a minute for an hour? I don't think I could do a fresh 50. Either you're really fit, or I'm really out of shape....I can do like 30-40 in a row tops :S and that's fresh. I should start working out again....*Sigh*

Okay, I'm still trying to figure out Pyth's formula and the rationality behind it. I also have gotten 7 hours of sleep over the past 2 days. And I'm an English major

So minute one you do 1. Minute two you do 2. Minute three is 3. Minute 4 is 5? Then 8, then 13, then 21.... like the Fibonacci sequence or what?

Editing some insomnia-induced typos.

That's how many push ups he does in that minute. By minute 15 he should have done a total of 120 push-ups. However he falls 4 short and can only manage 116 I believe.

1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. 7
8. 8
9. 9
10. 10
11. 11
12. 12
13. 13
14. 14
15. 15

Correct me if I'm wrong? However....Starting at such a low number? Seems pretty boring. Doing one push-up for a whole minute? How do you stop yourself from boredom? I mean at least until minute 10...

Well, the whole time I'm on MSN with my buddy, we just chat in the downtime. Play some solitaire or something in between, or start at a higher number and iterate at a different rate. Basically when we first proposed this sequence of sets i was like "so we're going to integrate x?" and it turned out to be fairly close, but off slightly, so we just figured out that what was missing was a linear function of x with a slope of 0.5.

half of x squared plus half of x is the total number of pushups you will have done by minute x

Lol, I see....So it could be like, I start this post. Do a push up....end it, and do 2 more kind of thing .