Stop Doing 100 Pushups a Day - I’m Begging You!!

There are lots of 100 Pushups a Day Workouts available, but should you be doing them. That is the question that gets answered in today’s video. The attraction of a simple to follow, easy to remember exercise plan that has the ability to deliver bigger chest and arm gains is definitely something that cannot be denied. That said, is it the best use of your time?

To start, it’s important to realize just why 100 pushups a day is something that has been done and tried by many. Some perform this routine for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days or even an entire year. If there were no results to be had from doing it, it is hard to imagine that people would continue to spend their time doing it. But what if there were something better.

Here I’m going to show you something better than 100 pushups a day.

The first issue with making the number simply one hundred is that it will only match the ability levels of about 3 percent of those watching. In order for an exercise to be progressive, it should have the capacity to challenge the person that is doing it. Now, the benefits to this technique are almost wholly due to the dramatically increased volume of the pushup exercise that comes with doing them daily.

Over time, the sub maximal volume, done in much greater amounts, is enough to drive muscle adaptation and size gains in the chest, arms and shoulders. That said, not all increases in volume can do this. Many times, the excessive volume becomes simply junk volume. That is, an accumulation of reps that are so below your capability levels that they serve to do nothing to progress the muscles that you are trying to build and more often only cause irritation, inflammation and aggravation of the joints involved in the exercise.

No exception here with pushups.

People who engage in pushup routines that require daily pushups for more than 3 weeks will often times see a decrease in their muscle output and strength as well as development of poor posture from rounded shoulders. These are caused by the muscle imbalances that occur when focusing all of your efforts on chest development.

In my 22 Days to a Bigger Chest Routine, we not only propose plan involving pushups but important variations of the move that shift the focus more to your triceps or shoulders to offload some of the work being done by the chest. As always however, with the daily recommendation of doing face pulls you will be sure you have enough posterior chain training to counteract any postural issues that could come from an abundance of push ups.

Here, what is suggested is to not only perform your pushups in sets rather than as a firm fixed number of 100 but to shift that fixed number of reps to another exercise - the Superman Pressout - to avoid any of the imbalances that could come. So, with the fixed number of sets rather than pushups we are able to accommodate to a person’s ability level much better.

For example, someone that can do 60-75 reps of pushups in a given set is going to be far less challenged by a 100 pushups a day routine than someone who can only do 5-10 in a set. Here, we equalize the stress by having each person do 5 sets, 5 reps short of failure. It’s important to keep these sets short of all out muscle failure. This will help with the recovery from these workouts as the consecutive days start to pile up.

The next most important element however is that immediately following each of these 5 sets you will perform 20 reps of the Superman Pressout exercise shown. This will work the often overlooked and important muscles of the rotator cuff and rhomboids, helping to prevent postural shoulder rounding that could come from overworking the pecs.

You can perform these sets all at the same time or break them up over the course of the day. Just be sure to include the set of 20 reps of Superman Pressouts immediately following each of the sets to ensure that you get your 100 reps of that exercise in throughout the day.

Try this out and let me know how you do in the comments