The Surprising Benefits of Doing 100s of Push Ups (And Variations)

hey guys so i've come to a nice scenic location today to do some training and to talk to you about push-ups now you might think that push-ups have already been done to death they're all over youtube but they are a staple of my training and so i really wanted to talk about them and also i think i have some unique perspectives and ideas to bring to the discussion so without further ado let's go [Music] [Music] randomly one of the questions i get most often on this channel is should i do a hundred push-ups a day or what would happen if i did 200 push-ups a day or should i do thousands of squats a day and this seems maybe a bit strange on the surface why would somebody want to do hundreds of the same exercise when they have enough trouble sticking to a normal training plan but i think the appeal of something like this is that it's so simple when you look at different training programs and advice it can be really overwhelming there's so much conflicting advice and just remembering all those exercises and getting access to the equipment can be really challenging so many people just think it would be easier if they could just choose one or two exercises and bash out tons of repetitions and of course they're following the logic that if a few push-ups is good then tons of push-ups must be really really good but is this true the surprising answer is yes as long as you're also training other parts of your body you need that rotational strength to always talk about all that core stability in both directions and in the transverse plane etc but if you're doing those things then doing high repetitions of body weight exercises can be one of the very best things you can do for yourself in this video i'm going to focus on push-ups why they're so brilliant why doing high repetitions is so brilliant and some of the variations that you can incorporate as well there are a few cues to keep in mind when performing a push-up the first is obviously you don't want your core to sag so you don't want your waist to travel towards the ground you want to keep your body entirely nice and straight this is obviously also a core exercise that has the same benefits as the plank and you won't get those benefits if you let your core if you let your waist droop also just doesn't look pretty likewise you want to make sure you aren't flaring your elbows and this is an interesting point because i actually think a lot of people over egg this point so flaring elbows looks like this so you're in a kind of t pose but anything below that really 75 degrees 45 degrees is fine as long as you have more of a triangle position than an upright position then you're fine so you see a lot of people trying to correct for this because they're so hot on flaring elbows and as such they keep their hands here right down by their sides that's fine if you want to train your triceps but it is a different exercise essentially you can't produce as much force from this position if you want to go and push someone off something you would always do it from about here you wouldn't naturally go into a t-pose and you wouldn't naturally push from here either so just do it feels comfortable your body knows obviously if you watch back some footage and you think your elbows are too high then bring them down but most people are probably going to be fine the tip is that at the top of the movement if you can should try and protract your shoulder blades that means push them out so you're not sagging like this and that will correct a few other things as well it provides additional shoulder protection and you also want to maintain a full range of motion so you're lowering yourself all the way to the ground so your chest touches the floor almost and then you push yourself back up but again you don't need to be insane about this if there's about an inch between you and the ground doesn't mean that the rep didn't count i mean maybe it does if you're in some kind of competition but in real life the research actually is a bit contradictory and inconclusive when it comes to how important range of motion is if max strength is your main goal we know with isometric training with overcoming isometrics so there's about a 30 spillover so that you can train in just one position like this and you'll actually get benefit here and here just not all the way and i imagine it's something similar here at the same time you rarely push anything from that position so there are varying different results from different studies some suggest it might even be muscle specific but as well as essentially allowing you to perform more repetitions than you otherwise could using a more partial range of motion might also actually contribute to hypoxia and metabolic stress which is some things i'm going to talk about in a moment and which have their own unique benefits you always hear all this about slow and controlled movement you don't always want to move slowly and so you shouldn't always train slowly just as there's benefit to high bar speed when bench pressing you can also develop your rate of force production doing a push-up so sometimes blasting out fast repetitions can actually be a really useful thing and a way to think about this is that it's essentially becoming a more plyometric exercise it's like an explosive clapping push-up except you're not actually leaving the ground but you're getting that same stretch shortening cycle to a degree but you're using it more in an endurance a strength endurance fashion so to be clear i'm not saying you should never perform a slow controlled repetition of a push-up in fact that's a very important thing you should absolutely be doing it but at the same time don't rule out sometimes doing faster slightly more bouncy push-ups for higher rep ranges because these have their own benefits as well what are the benefits of doing lots and lots of them well like i say there's actually quite a lot when you perform lots and lots of repetitions of a closed chain movement like this what you're basically doing is you're maintaining a constant tension in those muscles a continuous time under tension and what this does is it causes the blood to pull in that area because blood's being brought there but the contraction is making it harder for the blood to then fully escape it works a little bit like using a tourniquet and using blood flow restriction training and what this does is it leads to the buildup of metabolites metabolites include things like growth hormones that then trigger hypertrophy so surprisingly doing very high repetitions of just your own body weight can be a good way an effective way to build big muscle and actually i attribute my own pecs which are by far my strongest suit in terms of aesthetics to doing loads and loads of push-ups because that's how i started training and one way the body responds to this kind of training is by increasing blood flow permanently to the area through vascularization it builds up blood vessels capillaries that supply the muscles with more blood and more energy allowing you to perform sets for longer this is the said principle specific adaptation to impose demands if you want to do something better do it more and in terms of building work capacity the ability to exert strength over a long period of time strength endurance it of course doesn't get much better than doing high repetitions of a movement like this because what you're essentially doing is just testing the ability to exert strength for a long period of time causes all kinds of changes not only the vascularization also the addition of new mitochondria which are the energy factories of the cells basically means you can go harder for longer and that increased work capacity translates to better performance in the gym and better performance overall and i've said many times on this channel that on the whole strength endurance is probably more important than max strength when it comes to general performance in life in sports because you very rarely have to lift the heaviest thing you can possibly lift once more often you need to be quite strong for a long time and not only does this supply the muscles with more energy thus allowing you to go for longer it also encourages the clearing of waste so all these things make you better at performing and lead to you looking bigger and what's really cool is that increasing vascularization increasing blood supply to a muscle might also increase your myonucleic count in other words it's going to add more nuclei to the muscles which in turn increases protein synthesis and your overall potential for growth and because myonuclei which means muscle nuclei don't disappear when you stop training this also gives you bounce back ability basically it means that you can stop training and whilst you might lose muscle you'll be able to put on much easier in future because you have those additional my nuclei which stick around and then allow you to build more muscle some of this is a little bit hypothetical but i say it completely gels in my own experience from me and from people that i've trained and it makes a lot of sense when you kind of look between the lines at some of the research at the same time it might even be a useful way to increase max strength not only because increasing work capacity in this way allows you to train for longer and harder but also because as you fatigue muscle fibers the slow twitch muscle fibers it's highly likely that the body is then going to switch to the faster twitch muscle fibers your body only uses the most energy efficient muscle fibers necessary for the job in the case of push-ups because you're only using about 70 of your body weight that's going to be the type 1 slow twitch muscle fiber which doesn't equate to explosive power when these fatigue when they run out of juice all your body now has left is the type 2 muscle fiber the explosive fast twitch muscle fiber of course it's not just going to stop you doing the exercise if you still have one in the tank so it's going to switch to those and in theory training with 100 repetitions of your 100 rep max could eventually feel a bit like training with one repetition of your one rep max not the exact same but there are definitely parallels so you can build some strength and again this rings true for me and for others i know that alpha destiny talks about this who is capable of incredible feats if you don't have access to a bench press then performing high high high repetitions of push-ups and exercises like that can help you to maintain some strength possibly even gain some strength and if you look at prison workouts and military workouts we see this repeated over and over people like the great gamma for instance as well something else to remember as well is that even max strength isn't just about physical changes in the muscle it's also about building neural pathways and improving your muscle fiber recruitment and so by performing lots and lots of repetitions you're practicing strength as a skill as pavel tatsulin would say so what do you do if you can't do a push-up yet you shouldn't feel bad about that a lot of people can't perform a push-up but that means you're the exact kind of person who could really benefit from doing them ironically because this is how you'll build that core strength that power in the chest that can then allow you to do all kinds of other movements not to mention keeping you guarded and stronger in your everyday life so the easier variations are of course to perform push-ups on your knees or to put your hands up on something slightly higher if you can only do a few push-ups should you just practice five and call it a day and that's your push-up workout done instead consider using mechanical drop sets so mechanical drop set means that you're going to perform as many push-ups as you possibly can and then as soon as you reach failure so you can't perform another repetition you're going to switch to the easier variation so you might perform as many push-ups as you can say that's five then you're gonna perform push-ups on your knees with no rest in between and then once you've done those you might even start doing some wall push-ups this means that you can fatigue all of those muscle fibers you can use proper form at the beginning but at the same time you're still building those neural pathways still flooding the area with blood and causing muscle damage etc which is hard to do when you can only perform a couple of repetitions i'm gonna go somewhere now where the floor isn't covered in sharp pieces of wood why did i choose this is the spot to film about plyometric push-ups i don't know but it toughens up the hands for those of you who are looking for some variations that are perhaps a little bit more difficult i run through a bunch here so often this is going to involve changing the lever arm or moving just onto one hand one of the most obvious ways to perform a more difficult push-up is to do a one-handed push-up like so this is awesome not only because you now have to basically lift twice the amount of weight because you've only got one arm but also because you now have to resist rotation because you're missing one of your supports your body wants to twist towards the ground and you have to brace the core on the transverse plane to prevent that from happening another one that's really good is the archer push-up where you move from one arm to another whilst keeping your other hand on the ground this adds a nice stretch onto the pecs which may even encourage muscle damage in the positive sense and therefore hypertrophy and again it's a great way to build up towards the one arm to push up i like to sometimes just stay on one side over one half of my body and support myself gently with the other hand and you can call this an assisted one-armed push-up or you could call it a rocking push-up i sometimes use that and that basically looks like this if you want to get a really good pump going in the pecs then performing these assisted one-arm push-ups is a really great way to do that especially because you can provide more resistance with that arm as you start to fatigue on that side thereby turning this into a more conventional drop set and yeah this is what i'm talking about so you might perform as many one-armed push-ups as you can once you reach failure switch to an assisted one-armed push-up help yourself less and less do the same on the other side and immediately switch to regular push-ups now i've got grass going in my face and this is going to give you a huge pump and builds tons of strength endurance and it just adds variety to your training as well and something else you can do is actually just vary the cadence and the tempo within a single set so you might perform a few really slow controlled push-ups and then switch immediately to fast and explosive push-ups and thereby you're essentially targeting both types of twitch muscle fiber and at the same time just extending that set even longer this builds a massive pump and it'll build both that kind of slow controlled strength finesse and that explosive and high repetition strength endurance at the other end of the spectrum in fact if you want to go really slow and controlled you can try performing what's called a quasi-isometric push-up here you're going to perform the movement as slowly slowly as you possibly can so it might take you a whole minute or perhaps even longer or maybe just 30 seconds to begin with what you're doing here is you're exerting just the necessary strength to hold yourself at that particular position you're making sure that there's no momentum to help you through the range of motion there's no strength curve you're just controlling every single bit of that movement and you can perform this in a passive manner which means that you relax any muscles that aren't directly involved or you can do it in a more active manner where you're tensing the whole body throughout the movement either way the passive option can help to build more efficiency whereas the active version is a more intense workout and you're plugging those kinetic leaks and of course we can't talk about more explosive push-ups without discussing or explosive push-ups clapping push-ups and what have you these are essentially a plyometric form of push-up where you're launching yourself up in the end you do all sorts of things around the world where you spin around and land back on your hands or clap behind your back or clap three times or throw your arms and legs up in the air get your whole body off the ground keep in mind though that none of this is necessary that's going to create a lot of impact on your wrists and it can actually take the focus away from the movement itself all you really need to be doing and this tip i think came from varva fitness is just pushing yourself off the ground and if you make it so that each rep is a launch so that you're not pausing and bobbing in between but just launching straight back up then you're turning it into a form of shock training which basically means you're using the myotastic stretch response to immediately return that energy and this can build a lot of explosiveness i said clapping your hands and spinning around things like that can be a lot of fun and it's a great way to test yourself and check your progress of course there's many many more push-up variations there's things like the pseudo-planche push-up which is great for building straight arm strength and more core control and obviously a great progression for planche itself there's pike push-ups which are a more vertical version and these are all great but these are different exercises essentially that target different muscle groups and perhaps i'll do a list of push-up variations in future but but for now i wanted to talk more about how to integrate those variations and why you should rather than the variations yourself so yeah using these mechanical drop sets is not only a great way to train everything to go past fatigue and to test yourself whatever level you're at but it's also a fantastic way to get variety in your training and to mix it up so you're getting more benefits so yeah just vary up and mix it up mechanical drop sets is one way of doing it or you can just do what i really like to do as well which is just to completely mix up the order and turn it into a kind of improv which is fun it keeps you actively focused on the workout and it can offer tons of benefits i hope you found this video useful and interesting guys if you did then please leave a like and share around that would help me out immensely i'd greatly appreciate it likewise comment down below and let me know your favorite push-up variation that'll be really cool actually i'd love to hear some of yours i get so many ideas for videos from your comments and so i massively appreciate that too i love talking with you guys um subscribe if you want more like this hit the bell button if you want notifications every time i upload a new video if you want an introduction to functional training and how to train so that it improves your sports and your life then check out my book functional training and beyond available from amazon and from bookstores there'll be a link in the description if you want a ebook and training program then check out super functional training that's the book that discusses how to train your body and your mind and your mobility all at the same time and has a program at the end as well as some freebies that's on discount right now during the pandemic so check out the link in description below for that one too either way thank you so much for watching this one guys and i'll see you next time bye for now

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 578,718

Keywords: push ups, press ups, benefits of push ups, 100 push ups, 100 push ups a day, calisthenics, bodyweight training, the bioneer

Id: je2Q360Ltxc

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021