The Power of One Push-Up
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
That's ridiculous - I know tons of 'obese' people who can do a hundred pushups in one go.
I went through the http://www.hundredpushups.com/ program when I was at peak fitness (on multiple sports teams) and it tooks everything out of me over 10 weeks to hit the hundred push up in one set milestone.
Not the parent, but that's really easy. Much easier to know a ton of obese people than a ton of anorexic people.
For instance, I'm on the low end of obese (by American standards). If you take myself and about 5-6 of the people I see at Friday Night Magic, that's one ton right there.
100 push ups is just practice. I used to do 1000 free weight squats every morning. I do exercise a fair amount, but if you don't have any physical problems and are healthy, 100 push ups is like walking up a hill.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.h...
Edit: also focus on your form!
The technique is discussed here for pushups.
BMI is rejected because it tells people they're obese and since its unhealthy, they need to change themselves. Noone likes hearing that. The truth hurts.
You'll see these common rejections: 1. Bodyfat loss is hard, so its claimed as not a good measure. 2. BMI has outliers so _mine_ being bad doesn't count. 3. Because not being obese does not provide data about health, they attempt to deny obesity as a poor health marker. This is almost always "you can't tell a skinny person is unhealthy" retort as an excuse to reject obesity as unhealthy.
They will not escape the evidence-based scientific truth that obesity is unhealthy.
Isn’t this entire conversation about unreliable indices?
"The 7% guy is definitely following a very strict regimen,” he explains. He’s probably eliminating certain macronutrients, like being Paleo with no carbs, and is definitely paying very close attention to what he eats.
Meanwhile the 10 to 12% guy is in constant flux—some weeks he’s at 9 percent, others he’s at 12%. “He might have a cheat meal—splurging on wings instead of steamed asparagus when out with the guys—but not necessarily a cheat day,” McCall says.
Someone at 15% is having a cheat day. “He’s paying attention and making certain decisions—no fried foods, burger without the bun, no accidental break room pastries. But he’s not uber health conscious,” he adds."
BMI requires simple passive equipment to measure, the subject doesn't really have to participate and the subject is not at risk.
But it really can be misleading and counter-productive when you start exercising when fat is replaced by muscle.
We really need more accurate static measurement devices that don't need to weigh you underwater. Fatbit maybe? :)
Waist-circumference-to-height ratio is a proven predictor of cardio health, and is only slightly harder to measure than BMI. Waist-to-hip-ratio is another strong predictor for health outcomes, and can flag people with a normal BMI that have an elevated mortality risk.
Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that
correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a
person’s overall health—which can otherwise be totally
impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly.A group of friends and I just started a challenge to do 10K pushups in 1 year.
Six months ago, I tried doing a 100 pushups in 1 hour. Couldn't do it. Got spaghetti arms, couldn't move them the next day.
After doing this challenge for 3 weeks, I can do 60/minute and can easily top 150 in one hour, without breaking a sweat. The 10K goal seems too easy now, so setting we've set our sights on 50K for the year. It's been purely about consistency and a smidgen of testing our limits every once in a while. There's no schedule or set limit each day -- just as many as possible given your day.
Oh and for fun I added a Twilio/Flask app so we can text in our push-ups to a Google spreadsheet, which sends out a daily email (through Apps Script) with a few fun analytics (average, estimated end date etc.).
First chart under 'figures / tables' https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
It's called an outlier.
I say this as somebody who is barrel chested, short legs (28 inside leg in inches) and large upper torso for somebody who is 6 feet 1 inch high and size 13 shoes (UK size, so size 14 in America). I always fall foul of many norm's in society. Always failed a BMI, even when you could count my ribs. Yet come across so many medical professionals who use it as gospel that it's almost religious with them. Same with calori intakes.
But then society often loves to define normal and project that. Be that imposing lark hour mentality upon night owls and leverage disdain upon them, or just calling somebody obese because of some legacy data metric that does not take into account that nobody is perfectly normal. Equally ignores that muscle is heavier than fat, just picks an arbitrary weight based upon gender and height and fills in all the blanks with norm values.
BMI as a metric needs improving - anybody aware of more refined and granular methods that can or are being used?
Wow, I wonder how that percentage has changed over the lifetime of the nation, as well as the figure globally over time.
Solution - do pushups at an angle, so use a chair pushup from that (a comfy sofar arm rests even better and perhaps safer as well). This does mean you are using less effort, but you are still working those muscles and will be able to gradually lower the angle. Bigger the angle, less effort (yay science). So even those with extremely weak muscles involved in a pushup, can do them without struggling and exerting themselves as well as possible injury trying the usual style push ups.
TL;DR Push Ups involve muscles that you may not use in other sports and activities. Push Ups at an angle can aid those with weak muscles who struggle to do a normal pushup and aid them in building the muscles up to the level that will enable them to do a normal pushup.
For things like walking speed, it's a little harder to game it without actually increasing your cardiovascular health. But without knowing why something is a proxy, it might be useless/less-useful. For example, if fast walking speed is due to a healthy cardiovascular system, and you notice that your walking speed is low, you might train your walking speed. With effort you might get your walking speed up to 'very fast for non-athletes'. But if you had poor CV health for some underlying reason, you wouldn't have addressed that reason, you would just have masked the proxy. Of course, training walking speed is likely to have positive effects on your CV health, so I'm not saying "don't bother walking faster", I'm just saying that it may cause it to be a much more flawed indicator.
What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health.
For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably very well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.