500 pushups daily

[Ivan]

I just finished my first day of attempting 500 pushups daily in one go. I have done 500 pushups in a day as a challenge multiple times in the past but I have always split them up throughout the day. Today is my first time attempting to do them all in one sitting. I managed to squeeze out 361 pushups in a total time of 55 minutes. I was willing to do more, but it honestly felt like my chest muscles were going to be torn apart. I am going to see if I can keep this up as a daily routine, but it will be very difficult since I am already training BJJ twice daily almost every day, and have other matters such as university work. I also can't bear to imagine how badly it will feel to attempt this tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after... Here is the routine I am striving for though:

500 push-ups
50 pull-ups, or 500 rows (still unsure about an appropriate number of rows but I've been told they are approximately a 1:1 ratio with pushups)
100 Hindu squats + 300 air squats (I will start off with just the hindu squats first until I am confident my knees can handle the load properly)

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. I have had the desire to do this for a while, but the main thing that held me back was my ego. I have very underdeveloped chest and trap muscles, so for a while now I've been attempting to grow them to almost no avail. I am a bit insecure about this, but I am ready to let it go. A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that. Even if this training routine harms my body more than it strengthens it, I am confident it will at least help me to become more resilient and disciplined. In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
Anyway, wish me luck, and please, as always, feel free to provide your input on this.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

500 push-ups may be too many. If you can do 60 push-ups and 60 sit-ups daily for the rest of your life (I don't know why, 60 is my favor number), you are doing better than average. To me, doing for the rest of your life is much more important than what you can do today.

I like to walk/run 4 miles daily. Along my walking/running path, there are 8 benches. Every time I reach to a bench, I will do 20 push-ups, leg stretching. I like to integrate workout and daily life together.

 

[Cynik75]

I would like to ser those pushups. I rarely can see somebody doing correct pushups.

 

[Oily Dragon]

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. ?

You dont have to fit 500 in an hour. Just break it up into a set every hour etc. If 50 a set is no problem you could crank out 500 over a 10 hour span. I personally favor regularity/routine vs PRs. Lifting a lot of weight last week doesn't help as much as lifting a moderate, functional amount daily, imho.

That said, both are obviously important, I just think 500 in an hour is overkill and could lead to overtraining injury, depending on your mass.

 

[MetalBoar]

I just finished my first day of attempting 500 pushups daily in one go. I have done 500 pushups in a day as a challenge multiple times in the past but I have always split them up throughout the day. Today is my first time attempting to do them all in one sitting. I managed to squeeze out 361 pushups in a total time of 55 minutes. I was willing to do more, but it honestly felt like my chest muscles were going to be torn apart. I am going to see if I can keep this up as a daily routine, but it will be very difficult since I am already training BJJ twice daily almost every day, and have other matters such as university work. I also can't bear to imagine how badly it will feel to attempt this tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after... Here is the routine I am striving for though:

500 push-ups
50 pull-ups, or 500 rows (still unsure about an appropriate number of rows but I've been told they are approximately a 1:1 ratio with pushups)
100 Hindu squats + 300 air squats (I will start off with just the hindu squats first until I am confident my knees can handle the load properly)

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. I have had the desire to do this for a while, but the main thing that held me back was my ego. I have very underdeveloped chest and trap muscles, so for a while now I've been attempting to grow them to almost no avail. I am a bit insecure about this, but I am ready to let it go. A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that. Even if this training routine harms my body more than it strengthens it, I am confident it will at least help me to become more resilient and disciplined. In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
Anyway, wish me luck, and please, as always, feel free to provide your input on this.

There are several things I'll unpack here, but I want to start by saying that I'm all for experimentation. If you're bored with your resistance training program I think it's great to try something else. I will also have some things to say about boredom in training down below. This is going to be a long post and I hope you find this useful. If not, you are of course welcome to completely ignore me if you wish and I won't be offended! And I do wish you luck!

Long post after the break... TLDR; Go for it if you want, but I don't think it will be any more effective than a good low rep/high weight resistance training program, it definitely won't be as efficient, and I think there's a good chance that it will constitute overtraining for you. You're young, if you pay attention to your body it probably won't hurt you. Do know who Uncle Rhabdo is, how to avoid him, and what to do if he comes visiting (especially if you're doing any cutting to drop wieght for competition).
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As Kung Fu Wang already said, this is a high volume to do on top of all your other training. I do recommend journaling about your progress, including things like fatigue, emotional state, subjective energy levels, frequency or illness, frequency of trivial/minor/major injuries, etc. to get the best results. I believe you've posted before that you seem to get sick more often than others in your peer group and that can be a strong sign of over training (my apologies if I'm confusing you with someone else). Having notes documenting things like this can give you a better picture into not only how your fitness may be progressing but also whether your routine is having a positive or negative impact on your health. The relationship between fitness and health isn't a linear, upward progression. At some point you end up trading some of your health to eek out small improvements in fitness.

So to start off, there's evidence that high volume training can be effective for improving strength but there's also evidence that it may not be as effective for improving bone density and connective tissue strength as lifting heavier weights. If this is accurate then you'll be doing more work than you would with a high weight/low volume weight lifting routine to get lesser benefit in this regard. Most fitness research is of mediorce quality, (though it has been improving) so I wouldn't take this as proven yet, at least as of last time I looked into it, but I've also seen nothing to suggest that high volume training is more effective at anything.

From my perspective, if you have to do 500 reps, or in some other way spend excessive (IMO) time under load to stimulate a growth response you're simply not using enough resistance. To some degree this is a matter of personal preference. I vastly prefer to lift as heavy as I can while still able to control the weight and maintain form. Some people really hate heavy weights for one reason or another. Both will produce strength gains, one just takes a lot less time than the other (and may have greater associated benefits as noted above). If you really like high volume training or really dislike training with high resistance, then you can probably get most, if not all, of the benefits of resistance training from a routine like this, but it is very unlikely to be more effective than working with greater resistance.

In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.

A good barbell/dumbbell routine can hit every muscle in the body and contrary to what some want to claim, even quality machines can do this. That being said, I do think there's some benefit to supplementing tradional weight lifting with activity that engages the whole body in strenous activity in a more organic context. I don't think it needs to be excessive or formal to achieve ideal results. All your essential strength training needs can be met with either free weights or quality machine weights. The rest is just optimization. In my opinion, BJJ ought to be far more than sufficient for this purpose.

A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that.

It's worth the experiment, but I'd also like to point out that it may go the other way around. You may have already been overtraining and thus preventing yourself from achieving optimal growth. The super important thing to keep in mind, especially if you're looking to make size gains (without the use of PEDs), is that exercise is just a stimulus. It produces nothing by itself. It's just a way of communicating with your body that its current capabilities are insufficient to handle what the world is asking of it and asking it to get stronger in response. The body needs time, sufficient nutrition, and rest to actually produce those adaptations. If you break it down again before it gets the chance it can't actually adapt. It's a little like if your boss comes in and tells you to do something and then everytime you start doing it they call you into their office and tell you that you need to do the thing. So, more rest and recovery may get you more of what you want.

For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.

First off, I agree that rsistance training that spends much time on isolated, rotary, movements is less than ideal. Big, compound, movements are more effective and efficient for all but the most specific of aesthetics goals. There is no reason you can't build your weighted resitance routine, whether free weights or machines, based completely on these large, compound movements and in fact I'd encourage it unless you have some pretty demanding, appearance based goals.

The next piece is a bit more nuanced. Muscular endurance is the product of a number of factors, some of which you can control, some of which you can't. The simplest and most broadly applicable ones that you can influence are strength, metabolic adaptation (underwhich I include what is generally referred to as cardio), and skill. Another big one, that can be more complicated, is body weight. The things you have either little or no control over are things like your proportions and distribution of fast twitch vs slow twitch muscle fibers, body size and proportions, myostatin levels, and even (most likely) to some degree how much you can really improve your personal V02 max.

As far as strength is concerned, the stronger the muscle the fewer muscle fibers and the less effort it takes to perform a given activity. So, the stronger your muscles the more endurance you're going to have, oustide of extremes like running a marathon, in which the extra strength may be offset by the added weight. It's largely irrelivant how you acheive this strength, whether by high volume or low, light weights or heavy. If you lift weights and increase your strength by 10% you'll get exactly the same benefit as if you did pushups and increased your strength by 10% - outside of the skill component, which I'll address below.

Metabolic adaptations tend to be fairly specific, so if you want to have endurance for BJJ you don't want to train like you're going to run ultra-marathions, and vice versa. For the most part, you're better off training with greater intensity in something like the format in which you want to accel rather than extending the duration of the activity greatly. What I mean by this is, if you're training for a competition format that's based around 3, 5 minute rounds with a 1 minute rest, you'll get greater benefit from focusing on training at increasing intensity in that format than you will by training at lower intensity for 5, 10 minute rounds with a 3 minute rest that you will never actually be facing in competition. Doing 500 pushup is an hour is going to improve your metabolic adaptations for doing activities that last an hour and require similar kinds of effort, with similar kinds of breaks, with similar muscles, much more than it will activities that require much shorter or longer periods of activity and/or which use different groups of muscles and have different rest profiles.

Skill is also a big factor in endurance and often what we percieve as strength, actually. Learning how to perform a movement more effectively and more efficiently greatly reduces the amount of effort and energy that you have to expend to continue with it. So, you are going to be effectively stronger and have greater endurance at any activity that you have practiced than for activities that you haven't. If you and your hypothetical, identical, twin both developed (theoretically) identical levels of absolute strength and metabolic adaptations and were in all other ways truly identical, but one of you had developed this strength by doing pushup and the other by lifting weights, the weight lifter would have less effective strength and endurance at pushups and the reverse would be true for the pushup-er. You'd both likely perform very similarly (in terms of strength and endurarance) when it came to something that neither of you had ever done before.

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training.

If you're bored you're bored, but in my experience the best way around this is to up the intensity until you can't be bored with the act of weight lifting and then cut the frequency and volume back until you look forward to (or at least don't feel bored by) the prospect of lifting. I train to absulute, trying not to puke, hard to get out of the seat afterwards, complete failure. I do 1 set per exercise, with 3-5 large, compund, movements, with no rest between exercises, once a week, maximum. An entire session, not counting setup, lasts less than 10 minutes.

I lift heavy enough that for a long time I was in near fight or flight from the moment I took the weight. I've been doing this for > 20 years now, so I've acheived a more meditative/focused, rather than panicked, state but still, the mental work required leaves no room for boredom, or in fact any room for thought outside controlling the weight with good form. Being 52, if I take up BJJ or something similarly taxing I may cut back to 2 strength training sessions a month, or reduce the volume to something more like 2 exercises/workout. Even at my current volume and frequency, there is simply no point at which boredom is possible.

Not everyone will enjoy this kind or strength training, and not everyone who does it can acheive the same level of focus, but having performed 1000's of training sessions with clients ranging from low level pro-athletes to 85 year old retired school teachers, I can say that nobody has ever quit because they were bored.

In my opinion, strength training should support your life and your chosen activities. Do just enough to stimulate a deep adaptive response in as little time as possible and spend the remaineder of your life either resting and recovering or in developing your skills and metabolic adaptations for your chosen activity. Or having fun!

 

[GiveYourPaw]

I just finished my first day of attempting 500 pushups daily in one go. I have done 500 pushups in a day as a challenge multiple times in the past but I have always split them up throughout the day. Today is my first time attempting to do them all in one sitting. I managed to squeeze out 361 pushups in a total time of 55 minutes. I was willing to do more, but it honestly felt like my chest muscles were going to be torn apart. I am going to see if I can keep this up as a daily routine, but it will be very difficult since I am already training BJJ twice daily almost every day, and have other matters such as university work. I also can't bear to imagine how badly it will feel to attempt this tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after... Here is the routine I am striving for though:

500 push-ups
50 pull-ups, or 500 rows (still unsure about an appropriate number of rows but I've been told they are approximately a 1:1 ratio with pushups)
100 Hindu squats + 300 air squats (I will start off with just the hindu squats first until I am confident my knees can handle the load properly)

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. I have had the desire to do this for a while, but the main thing that held me back was my ego. I have very underdeveloped chest and trap muscles, so for a while now I've been attempting to grow them to almost no avail. I am a bit insecure about this, but I am ready to let it go. A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that. Even if this training routine harms my body more than it strengthens it, I am confident it will at least help me to become more resilient and disciplined. In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
Anyway, wish me luck, and please, as always, feel free to provide your input on this.

You can do 500 pushups and I can do barley

 

[Ivan]

As Kung Fu Wang already said, this is a high volume to do on top of all your other training. I do recommend journaling about your progress, including things like fatigue, emotional state, subjective energy levels, frequency or illness, frequency of trivial/minor/major injuries, etc. to get the best results. I believe you've posted before that you seem to get sick more often than others in your peer group and that can be a strong sign of over training (my apologies if I'm confusing you with someone else).

Yes, that was me I get quite ill very often. I highly doubt that overtraining is the issue, as I took all summer off only going to the gym once weekly, and BJJ 4 times and still getting ill. Also, I am recording videos of all my pushup sessions to keep track of my progress.

So to start off, there's evidence that high volume training can be effective for improving strength but there's also evidence that it may not be as effective for improving bone density and connective tissue strength as lifting heavier weights. If this is accurate then you'll be doing more work than you would with a high weight/low volume weight lifting routine to get lesser benefit in this regard.

I can see how bone density would definitely come into play since your bones would not be handling such a high load. However, there are some bodyweight exercises that I will eventually move up to that have very good benefits for connective tissue and are simply better for the dynamic movements of martial arts. One-handed pushups are a good example (incorporating core strength, shoulders as well as the chest), and Hindu squats are great for strengthening the knee in ways that barbell squats and hack squats simply cannot. I am not yet sure what the parameters for me would be to make my exercise variation more difficult. For pushups, my goal is to be able to punch out 100 in a single set without stopping. Once I can do that, I will probably change my pushup variation to clapping pushups, and so forth.

A good barbell/dumbbell routine can hit every muscle in the body and contrary to what some want to claim, even quality machines can do this. That being said, I do think there's some benefit to supplementing tradional weight lifting with activity that engages the whole body in strenous activity in a more organic context. I don't think it needs to be excessive or formal to achieve ideal results. All your essential strength training needs can be met with either free weights or quality machine weights. The rest is just optimization. In my opinion, BJJ ought to be far more than sufficient for this purpose.

A good barbell/dumbbell routine can indeed hit every muscle, but it can't do so in unison. That's a key issue. I can do as many deadlifts as I want, and it will hit many muscle groups, but at the end of it, I have optimized my body to lift a certain amount of weight in a straight line, whilst the weight is in a comfortable, easy-to-grip manner. In contrast, weighted pull-ups allow me to train a similar chain of muscles, but in a more dynamic range because the weights attached to me will swing side to side due to momentum, and I will need to balance them using my core strength. Realistically, I think that training with kettlebells and Bulgarian bags with a combination of calisthenics is the optimal way to tackle martial arts strength training. I don't particularly have a reason for doing the high volume of reps I am currently doing, instead of working out a routine using the aforementioned equipment, other than being unsure how to program such exercises, and enjoying the challenge. Even better if you can get a live person to train with; instead of deadlifting a perfectly even weight, it would be much more realistic to lift up a training partner and carry or swing them around.

It's worth the experiment, but I'd also like to point out that it may go the other way around. You may have already been overtraining and thus preventing yourself from achieving optimal growth. The super important thing to keep in mind, especially if you're looking to make size gains (without the use of PEDs), is that exercise is just a stimulus. It produces nothing by itself. It's just a way of communicating with your body that its current capabilities are insufficient to handle what the world is asking of it and asking it to get stronger in response. The body needs time, sufficient nutrition, and rest to actually produce those adaptations. If you break it down again before it gets the chance it can't actually adapt.

I am aware of this. I have been following Mike Mentzer's training routine for a little over 4 months now. Once a week, I would hit just one set of bench press at an extremely intense rate. I would begin by lifting 90% of my 1RM and then take off 5kg of weight every time I failed a certain weight until I was just benching the bar. This routine increased my 1RM from 90kg to 100kg, and I almost hit 105 on the same day, but even with a caloric surplus and plenty of protein, I had zero aesthetic improvements in my pectorals.

As far as strength is concerned, the stronger the muscle the fewer muscle fibers and the less effort it takes to perform a given activity. So, the stronger your muscles the more endurance you're going to have, oustide of extremes like running a marathon, in which the extra strength may be offset by the added weight. It's largely irrelivant how you acheive this strength, whether by high volume or low, light weights or heavy. If you lift weights and increase your strength by 10% you'll get exactly the same benefit as if you did pushups and increased your strength by 10% - outside of the skill component, which I'll address below.

I am not quite sure I follow you on this. Total strength is the maximum amount of weight you can lift. Assuming I understand you correctly, by your logic, lifting a 1kg weight 100 times, is equivalent to lifting 100kg once - which is simply not the case. That last 100th rep in the former might feel the same way as lifting 100kg once, but the message being sent across to your body is different.

 

[JowGaWolf]

High repetition + Ferequency will allow you to give your body some recovery time in between sessions. High rep is 20-30 Reps. If that is too easy then increase the set or increase the the number of sets you do in a day

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

Looking at things purely from a time-efficiency standpoint, I wouldn't particularly want to do an hour of pushups. Find a way to make the pushups more difficult (common ones are one-handed/one-legged pushups, slowing down the pace of each individual pushup, or inclining to eventually a handstand pushup), and you can get the same workout with less overall pushups, meaning you can spend that extra time doing the hindu squats or rowing, or whatever else you want from your list.

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

I just finished my first day of attempting 500 pushups daily in one go. I have done 500 pushups in a day as a challenge multiple times in the past but I have always split them up throughout the day. Today is my first time attempting to do them all in one sitting. I managed to squeeze out 361 pushups in a total time of 55 minutes. I was willing to do more, but it honestly felt like my chest muscles were going to be torn apart. I am going to see if I can keep this up as a daily routine, but it will be very difficult since I am already training BJJ twice daily almost every day, and have other matters such as university work. I also can't bear to imagine how badly it will feel to attempt this tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after... Here is the routine I am striving for though:

500 push-ups
50 pull-ups, or 500 rows (still unsure about an appropriate number of rows but I've been told they are approximately a 1:1 ratio with pushups)
100 Hindu squats + 300 air squats (I will start off with just the hindu squats first until I am confident my knees can handle the load properly)

I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. I have had the desire to do this for a while, but the main thing that held me back was my ego. I have very underdeveloped chest and trap muscles, so for a while now I've been attempting to grow them to almost no avail. I am a bit insecure about this, but I am ready to let it go. A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that. Even if this training routine harms my body more than it strengthens it, I am confident it will at least help me to become more resilient and disciplined. In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
Anyway, wish me luck, and please, as always, feel free to provide your input on this.

Man that’s an awful lot. Careful not to overdo it.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Repetitive Motion Injuries​

Repetitive Motion Injuries​

My opinion, 500 a day, is not good for you and will only lead to inflammation and injury and likley lead to the inability to do even 1 pushup a day

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

Shoulders hurt just reading that.

 

[MetalBoar]

Yes, that was me I get quite ill very often. I highly doubt that overtraining is the issue, as I took all summer off only going to the gym once weekly, and BJJ 4 times and still getting ill. Also, I am recording videos of all my pushup sessions to keep track of my progress.

I can see how bone density would definitely come into play since your bones would not be handling such a high load. However, there are some bodyweight exercises that I will eventually move up to that have very good benefits for connective tissue and are simply better for the dynamic movements of martial arts. One-handed pushups are a good example (incorporating core strength, shoulders as well as the chest), and Hindu squats are great for strengthening the knee in ways that barbell squats and hack squats simply cannot. I am not yet sure what the parameters for me would be to make my exercise variation more difficult. For pushups, my goal is to be able to punch out 100 in a single set without stopping. Once I can do that, I will probably change my pushup variation to clapping pushups, and so forth.


I am aware of this. I have been following Mike Mentzer's training routine for a little over 4 months now. Once a week, I would hit just one set of bench press at an extremely intense rate. I would begin by lifting 90% of my 1RM and then take off 5kg of weight every time I failed a certain weight until I was just benching the bar. This routine increased my 1RM from 90kg to 100kg, and I almost hit 105 on the same day, but even with a caloric surplus and plenty of protein, I had zero aesthetic improvements in my pectorals.

I am not quite sure I follow you on this. Total strength is the maximum amount of weight you can lift. Assuming I understand you correctly, by your logic, lifting a 1kg weight 100 times, is equivalent to lifting 100kg once - which is simply not the case. That last 100th rep in the former might feel the same way as lifting 100kg once, but the message being sent across to your body is different.

Wow! I was sleep deprived when I made this response and re-reading it I wasn't as coherent as I'd have liked. I'm still short on sleep and short on time so this response may not be a lot better, but here we go!

I am aware of this. I have been following Mike Mentzer's training routine for a little over 4 months now. Once a week, I would hit just one set of bench press at an extremely intense rate. I would begin by lifting 90% of my 1RM and then take off 5kg of weight every time I failed a certain weight until I was just benching the bar. This routine increased my 1RM from 90kg to 100kg, and I almost hit 105 on the same day, but even with a caloric surplus and plenty of protein, I had zero aesthetic improvements in my pectorals.

I like a lot of what Mike had to say and he was a HIT enthusiast as I am, but I think that what you're describing there constitutes over training or at least excesive training for the vast majority of those of us who do not have the... assistance that Mr. Mentzer had. I definitely beleive it constitutes excessive training when combined with 4 or more BJJ session/week for most people. If you've really had zero aesthetic improvements in 4 months at your age then it very likely represents over training for you. Did you see continual, documented, strength gains in the later part of those 4 months, or were your weights staying pretty flat too?

On a side note, have you been documenting your size objectively? Do you take measurements of your chest? Did you take before and after photos in the same pose in the same lighting at the same distance from the camera, wearing the same clothes, before you started? How do your clothes fit in comparison to when you started? I don't usually talk about this on this forum because most people don't seem to care much (or don't admit to caring much) about aesthetics, but having trained a lot of people who do care about it I really can't emphasize this enough. Lots of people suffer from what the bodybuilding crowd refers to as "bigorexia". They don't see how much they've improved becuase it was a gradual change and they don't yet look like the guy in the Marvel movies (who was taking steroids most likely) yet. Without objective measures it can lead to a lot of frustration and disappointment even when solid improvements are being made. I've had clients put over 1.5 inches on each arm and claim that nothing had changed until the measuring tape came out. I know I bang on about documentation, but the more you document the easier this journey becomes.

I don't believe in doing multiple sets when doing high weight, HIT training. I would use the heaviest weight I could while still maintaining good form for something in the neighborhood of 1 minute (or less, there's a lot of nuance here that's a whole discussion to itself) before complete failure. I would do 1 set per exercise and be done. If you have reasonable grit (which I really beleive you do) and are able to approach something close to physical failure, rather than emotional failure, this is more than sufficient stimulus to produce good gains. Further inroad isn't going to improve your results significantly, but it will impact your recovery time negatively, sometimes very negatively. Once you've provided the stimulus for adaptation further stimulus is at best wasted and at worst detrimental if given before recovery has occured.

plenty of protein

How much do you define as plenty and how were you tracking it? I was a vegetarian for ~15 years and had done some reading and thought I was getting "plenty" of protein. As a vegetarian, I could not consistently keep my protein intake above about 80g/day (when shooting for 100g/day) without really working at it and I'd invariably slip. I saw huge gains in the gym when I increased my protien significantly. A lot of bodybuilders are crazy on this front and advocate stupid amounts of protein, but current research suggests that for optimal results you should be getting at the minimum 1.4g/kg if you're looking to add muscle and a little more will still probably provide meaningful benefit. For a 71kg guy thats 100g/day for about the minimum they'd need to make reasonable gains and 71kg isn't a big guy. I know that many people, even big, meat loving Americans, aren't getting 100g of quality protein a day if they aren't kind of working at it.

A good barbell/dumbbell routine can indeed hit every muscle, but it can't do so in unison. That's a key issue. I can do as many deadlifts as I want, and it will hit many muscle groups, but at the end of it, I have optimized my body to lift a certain amount of weight in a straight line, whilst the weight is in a comfortable, easy-to-grip manner. In contrast, weighted pull-ups allow me to train a similar chain of muscles, but in a more dynamic range because the weights attached to me will swing side to side due to momentum, and I will need to balance them using my core strength. Realistically, I think that training with kettlebells and Bulgarian bags with a combination of calisthenics is the optimal way to tackle martial arts strength training. I don't particularly have a reason for doing the high volume of reps I am currently doing, instead of working out a routine using the aforementioned equipment, other than being unsure how to program such exercises, and enjoying the challenge. Even better if you can get a live person to train with; instead of deadlifting a perfectly even weight, it would be much more realistic to lift up a training partner and carry or swing them around.

What are you hoping to get from this?^^ I'm going to make some assumptions, but please understand that I'm assuming I understand what you mean here.

In what way, related to strength development, do you think that working the muscles in this fashion will provide an improved stimulus for adaptation or other benefit? I have seen some claims, but I have seen no credible evidence that muscles care how they are stimulated in this regard. There's likely some benefit to using something close to a full range of motion (easy to do with free and machine weights), but if you provide sufficient stimulus to trigger an adaptive response I do not believe that it matters how you do it, whether in the controlled path of a machine nor if you do something that requires more dynamic control. It's just simply a lot more efficient to do something where you can lift more weight with more safety and achieve a deeper inroad with reduced wear and tear on the body.

Most of these claims seem to come down to people confusing skill acquisition with strength gains. And this is an understandable thing to get confused about because we don't have many very good tools for measuring absolute strength and most people, including fitness experts, don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It is true that if you practice doing kettlebell work you'll seem stronger with kettlebells at the same level of absolute strength than someone who doesn't practice with kettlebells, just as you'll seem stronger at bench press if you practice a lot of bench pressing and they don't. For most people, that skill isn't going to transfer from bench pressing or kettlebell swinging to other activities, but the absolute strength that you develop from the activity will. Getting stronger from swinging kettlebells, or doing calesthenics isn't going to make you significantly stronger for BJJ than lifting free weights or machine weights, but it will make you effectively a lot stronger for swinging kettlebells or doing calesthenics (as the case may be), because you have more skill at those things.

I think that a lot of martial arts people and a lot of gymnastics people are drawn to (perhaps even hypnotized by) these kinds of exercises because they find it fun and interesting to do things that are physical challenges and require the acquisition of new and complex motor skills. Then, because they don't think about how they're measuring strength (and often don't really give the nature of metrics much thought, period), they assume that the skills they've developed represent gains in absolute, generally applicable strength. This is compounded by the fact that some people (a large minority of the population - and often those who are drawn to this sort of training) are able to transfer some of these skills to other activities and thus get a broader benefit from the skill developement than the rest of humanity (the small majority). Even these people will get better results from seperating skill development from strength developement.

To sum up, if you want to be better at BJJ or other martial art, the shortest path is to do the minimum amount of strength training necessary to achieve the greatest gains in absolute strength and then spend all or your remaining training time and systemic resources (your body's ability to recover from inury/exercise) on skill acquisition in BJJ or your art of choice. This doesn't have to be your goal and even if it is, it's OK to take a less effecient path to get there if that path excites you. Some people get excited by mastering novel physical skills, I get excited by figuring out how to streamline the process.

I'm not saying that your interest in other forms of strength training is wrong/bad, I just think it's important to know what your own goals are and how your routine is going to help you achieve them (or not). If you want to be good at calesthenics or gymnastics or kettlebells, for the sake of being good at it and a secondary goal is to be stronger for your life as a whole and martial arts, then training in calesthenics (or whatever) is the best way to acheive that goal. If your goal is it be stronger for your life as a whole and martial arts and you just really enjoy doing calesthenics (or whatever) that's great too, just know it's a longer path. I'm thinking about learning to do planche pushups myself (I used to do one armed pushups but I think the risk/reward relationship of unilateral loading is our of whack) because they're a show off exercise and I think it would be a fun flex when I reach my middle 50's. A lot of this will be skill development, but it will also motivate me to drop some fat I gained during the pandemic. I'm just really clear with myself that the point of this is to be able to show off, not that it's going to give me some secret sauce to greater strength.

I am not quite sure I follow you on this. Total strength is the maximum amount of weight you can lift. Assuming I understand you correctly, by your logic, lifting a 1kg weight 100 times, is equivalent to lifting 100kg once - which is simply not the case.

Yeah, I was sleep deprived and didn't write that very well. I can understand your confusion. I absolutely don't mean that.

Strength as a component of endurance:

Muscle fibers contract in an all or nothing fashion. The body only recruits the number of fibers necessary to perform a physical task. Once exhausted, muscle fibers drop out of the activity and need to recover before they can be recruited for further work. Strength training increases the strength of individual muscle fibers, which means that fewer fibers need to be recruited to perform the same work. Recruiting fewer fibers to do a task means that there are more fresh fibers to continue the task and do other tasks than there would be in a weaker muscle and thus you have greater endurance. It does not matter significantly how you made these fibers stronger.

This is just one component of endurance, but it is an important component.

That last 100th rep in the former might feel the same way as lifting 100kg once, but the message being sent across to your body is different.

Absolutely! This is part of why I advocate lifting heavy and to failure. Not only does the body engage the minimum number of muscle fibers necessary to perform a physical task it recruits slow twitch fibers preferentially. They produce less force and recover more quickly. In order to recruit and thus train faster twitch fibers it's necessary to either significantly exhaust the slow twitch fibers to the point that they can't recover sufficiently to perform the motion or select a resistance that requires the recruitment of the fast twitch fibers from the start or at least very early in the movement. The latter is faster/more efficient, more certain to succeed, and produces less wear and tear on the body leaving more resources for your BJJ clases or whatever.

I could go on about the relationship of these things but this is long already and I'm out of time.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

I can do 10. I used to do 50, but that was 10 years ago. Yay you for being able to do so many.

 

[JowGaWolf]

Repetitive Motion Injuries​

Repetitive Motion Injuries​

My opinion, 500 a day, is not good for you and will only lead to inflammation and injury and likley lead to the inability to do even 1 pushup a day

That's why you have to break it up.

 

[Holmejr]

500 push-ups may be too many. If you can do 60 push-ups and 60 sit-ups daily for the rest of your life (I don't know why, 60 is my favor number), you are doing better than average. To me, doing for the rest of your life is much more important than what you can do today.

I like to walk/run 4 miles daily. Along my walking/running path, there are 8 benches. Every time I reach to a bench, I will do 20 push-ups, leg stretching. I like to integrate workout and daily life together.

Now that I’m pushing 70, It’s a marathon not a race

 

[punisher73]

Just one point to consider if you want to combine bodyweight training with strength training.

At some point, the excessive amount of pushups will do more harm than good (or any type of exercise like that).

So, possibly consider variations of pushups that make it more challenging strength wise. Such as, working up to a one-arm pushup.

There is a lot of free information on pushup variations that progressively work to harder levels of strength if you are interested. The same goes with variations of bodyweight squats and other bodyweight exercises.

 

[JowGaWolf]

Just one point to consider if you want to combine bodyweight training with strength training.

At some point, the excessive amount of pushups will do more harm than good (or any type of exercise like that).

So, possibly consider variations of pushups that make it more challenging strength wise. Such as, working up to a one-arm pushup.

There is a lot of free information on pushup variations that progressively work to harder levels of strength if you are interested. The same goes with variations of bodyweight squats and other bodyweight exercises.

Variation within safety is always better. I do 3 mountain climbers as a break between each set. I also plank for a few seconds after each push up. My push up rep count is. 1st push up do 1 pushup then mountain climber. 2nd push up do 2 push-ups then mountain climber. 3rd pushup do 3 push ups and so on

For me rest often means not working a different set of muscles or working the same muscles switching between dynamic and static