Are they worth incoporating into a workout or what?
Do they have any good effects?
I never had much success with pushups. Affects is they would help you get better at them, build your pecs, back, and triceps mainly. But once they get easy, there is no point, so DB bench is far superior because you can get the weight lower than front of your chest and can always increase the weight. I have seen people put 45 pound plates on their backs, but I think that it would be bad.
Pushups may be in technical terms of engaging a lot of chest muscles without screwing with one’s shoulders, but they get boring pretty damned fast. Once one starts to get strong it takes a hell of a lot of pushups to matter much, and there are better ways to spend one’s time at the gym.
Advantages of pushups, imho:
You can move your scapula freely. Plus it is a closed-chain movement, so it is supposed to have more “real-world relevance”, according to one definition (see
http://www.T-Nation.com/tmagnum/readTopic.do?id=1732752 or http://www.T-Nation.com/tmagnum/readTopic.do?id=802700 )
Plus you’re basically doing “the plank” and therefore some nice stability work.
EDIT: And you can do them explosively, which is a bit dangerous with BP barbell throws (unless you’re using a smith machine, and nobody wants to be seen near that, eh?).
Disadvantage:
You can have a lot of trouble getting plates on your back. I sewed myself a jacket for that purpose and I am not happy with that solution, because putting it on involves kind of a turkish get-up, only with not being able to move the weight…
Note: I would recommend doing pushups on handles or dumbells, so you can go as deep as with a DB BP or cambered bar.
Do hand stand push ups , one arm push ups, clapping push ups ,
When you are more advanced planche push-ups (thats with your feet in the air touching nothing), and one arm hand stand pushups
Sure they’re good in a workout. Sure they have good effects. You just need to be creative to get the most of them because the plain old pushup isn’t that flexible.
Try pushups with your knuckes, with your arms perpendicular to your body, arms clipped to the side, planche pushups, pushups with a hot momma on your back. I also consider dips as some sort of pushup as well.
I can’t imagine why someone thinks pushups are no good. If you can’t rip out sets of 50 with ease or get up to 100 in one set then you could most definitely benefit from them.
One arm, handstand, clapping, planche (hard as HELL), and external resistance (I like my 115lb younger bro) are awesome.
The only ‘bad’ thing is don’t have it as your only chest/tri exercise, but with 50 different curl variations I see in the gym I’m sure people know to use 50 different bench variations to hit these muscles as well.
The argument that push-ups are good for increasing pectoral strength is, in my opinion, obviously not based on personal experience.
At 140lb, I could do 103 in a row. I was maybe benching 190lb at the most.
At 160lb, I could do 100-ish in a row. I was benching maybe 230lb.
At 180lb, I could do 96 in a row. Benching 280lb.
Now, at 198-ish, it’s still roughly 95 in a row.
A 120lb kid could potentially do twice as many as your 230lb meathead. All the push-ups in the world won’t increase your bench, I don’t honestly care how much it’s theorized.
do you still train them at all? Or do you just lift?
Depends on your goals; is size or strength your concern? Push ups will get easy and will stop giving you hypertrophy after a certain amount of time yes… But look at the guys in the army… they do thousands of push ups over their career and you can’t tell me they aren’t damn strong.
I agree with most of DanErickson’s comment.
But, (I myself being in the Army) most of us get big because it’s sort of an unwritten rule in the Army/Marine Corps that you’re required to hit the weights. The push-ups are just to balance out strength/endurance.
I was curious because I know someone who never trains them and just lifts weights and can do 50-75 pretty easily. Can you maintain a high number of pushups (75-100) with just lifting weights?
[quote]superhero#1 wrote:
I was curious because I know someone who never trains them and just lifts weights and can do 50-75 pretty easily. Can you maintain a high number of pushups (75-100) with just lifting weights? [/quote]
I have never focused on a pushups only program. My chest gets hit from weights and dips only. However, I can do between fifty to sixty good form pushups when fresh. On chest day we sometimes throw pushups in at the end of the chest workout, but can only do fifteen to twenty at that time.
D
I did tens of thousands of pushups in the Marines. They’re great for improving the number of pushups you can do, and some strength-endurance, but you’re not going to see much hypertrophy as it’s too hard to load them properly. I feel I can comment on the whole intensity of effort related to pushups issue since I’ve actually done so many I ended up in a puddle of my own sweat before.
[quote]superhero#1 wrote:
I was curious because I know someone who never trains them and just lifts weights and can do 50-75 pretty easily. Can you maintain a high number of pushups (75-100) with just lifting weights? [/quote]
I can go about a month or two without doing them and still get in the 80s. But come PT test time, I have to start doing them a week and a half out to get back in the upper 90s.
I suppose a lot of it is strictly dependant on the person.
I plan on doing them with TTT http://www.T-Nation.com/readTopic.do?id=476508
They’ll be my “explosive” upper body lift.