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Archive for the 'Muscle Building' Category
Total Body Push-Up
Author: Tommy Leung
To follow up my previous post about push-ups and to continue my love for this particular exercise, Men’s Health has a great article about the different variations of the push-up for a more total body exercise. By the time you’re able to do 50 straight push-ups, you should employ some of these variations to your routine to keep things fresh. Muscles respond best when you shock them with new and different exercise routines.
The push-up has the wonderful quality of being able to not only work your chest, shoulders, and triceps like the bench press but, also your back, abs, and glutes. These variations will work even more muscles as they’ll force you to use the often ignored stabilizing muscles.
read comments (0)The 50 Push-Up Benchmark
Author: Tommy Leung
Push-ups are considered the best exercise you can do without any equipment. I personally love the push-up and all the variations of it that you can do. I don’t know where the 50 push-up benchmark came from but, being able to do 50 push-ups has always seemed like a feat of fitness. I feel the 100 push-up mark is more impressive than 50 but, I don’t always maintain the endurance necessary for that feat.
Men’s Health has a nice article on just this topic. This particular article uses the bench press to help get you to 50 push-ups in 10 weeks. How long you’ll need to be able to do 50 straight push-ups is largely dependent on where you are now on the fitness scale.
If you don’t want to use bench presses to get to 50 push-ups, I have an alternative. I learned of this technique with pull-ups but, it can applied to anything. It is basically an upside down pyramid. Let’s say you can do 10 push-ups. You can take that down by half to 5. You would say 5 push-ups, rest 10 seconds, do 4, rest 10 seconds, do 3, and so on until 0.
With this technique you’ll have done 5+4+3+2+1, or 15, push-ups. You can reduce the rest period or start with more push-ups. The idea is that this will allow you to do more repetitions with small amounts of rest–almost like doing them straight. You can keep increasing the number of push-ups you start with as it gets easier.