Why We Do Pushups
markpeterdavis.com
markpeterdavis.com
we’re a tech co - meatheads are nowhere to be found
you want to help your employees stay in shape? commit to making sure they have time to get some exercise, however way they enjoy doing so.
I still remember one time that I almost killed an interview candidate by mistake. Ran down to pick him up in the lobby, and then started talking to him on the way up to our offices... realizing at the second of five floors that we needed to move this discussion to the elevator before he had a heart attack. We used the elevators so rarely that it hadn't even occurred to me!
Of course, there were strange things about it. Many people got season-long Mt. Baker lift passes, and you could basically write off schedule estimates for the first week of the season that there was enough powder on the ground.
Although, as shown by your story, some people just aren't able to!
Of course, I totally agree that they aren't a good enough form of exercise.
Push-ups are, at-best, a difficult exercise to get right (see http://thetoptwoinches.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/100/). Do them in bad form and you can injure yourself. Is the team leader going to be both an expert at management AND an expert at physical education? Does the company want the lawsuits if an employee is injured exercising at the direction of their team leaders? Are investors aware that their money is being used for this stuff?
Oh, and considering this stuff is not related to the job at hand, you could also argue for a discrimination lawsuit considering it's creating a "hostile work environment" for anyone without a lot of shoulder strength (women, old people, the disabled).
Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Something to watch for but not something to stress unduly about.
[0] Remember, hostile work environment is not about any specific protected class (age, race, etc), but about general feelings of harassment and discomfort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_work_environment
http://www.eeo.wv.gov/Pages/FAQ.aspx
In most states fat people are not a protected class. So mocking the weaklings and chubbies who can't do pushups is probably still legal.
This is surprisingly true. On Monday, I tested my one-rep max on shoulder presses, which involved a couple of balls-out failures with a weight I couldn't lift. Two days later, I feel fine. The last time I tried to find out how many pushups I could do in a row, I hurt my shoulder and didn't feel right again for two weeks. I'm pretty sure on any given day I could simply get on the floor and do pushups (with decent form) until I hurt myself. It's much safer to stick with exercises where you can safely work until failure, since you never know when you're going to accidentally exceed your limits. It's doubly true for people who don't exercise a lot.
Even worse, in the cases that I'm experienced with (for various martial arts) these pushups are done on mats that make it even worse because the wrist is even more over-stretched (because the ball of the hand sinks into the soft mat, while the fingers do so less); and doing push-ups on the knuckles is considered something 'for the hard core'.
I don't think he wanted this to recreate the gym experience at work. It's just a little work break for exercise that they wouldn't get throughout the day. I think we can all agree, some pushups > no pushups at all. I don't see why it has to be an all or nothing philosophy.
Also, you should respect the pushup more than you are. They're surprisingly difficult and much more varied than they first appear. :)
Aside from the above, where opinions may and probably will vary, doing just a single exercise very often is actually detrimental to health in many ways. Additionally, push-ups are exactly the wrong the exercise for most computer people, who tend to have rounded shoulders and contracted chest muscles - they are primarily a chest exercise, further exaggerating the rounded shoulders, where actually chest streching is needed and rowing exercises for the back. You might make fun of meatheads, but you actually should think a bit about what you are doing to your body, or it won't really do any good.
I think there's value to team-building exercises when the participants want to be on the team, because just wanting isn't enough. But I agree that those sorts of exercises are certainly not sufficient alone.
Push-ups are well within my wheelhouse (and if you do a few hundred a day it's not a bad one-exercise regimen to keep some minimum level of upper body and core strength), but I'd still feel really stupid doing them with my team mates, especially in our business.
These kinds of team-building rituals make certain people very uncomfortable and anxious. This is no doubt lost on a lot of the empathy-challenged type-A personalities that tend to infect middle management.
When it comes to push-ups I wouldn't personally have a problem performing them, but I'd really hate to see the weaker guys suffer. In the eyes of team building gurus, that kind of suffering and struggle is supposed to lead to a death-and-rebirth bonding experience. But for many people, it's the kind of thing that will make them dread going to work every morning.
Edit: That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience with what seems like a terrible job.
The job itself wasn't that bad. Korea has some cultural quirks from a Western point of view. The drinking and prostitution culture around the workplace are chief among them. But most of the blame falls on me for not setting the right expectations from the beginning since I was the guest in a foreign country. Lessons learned and all that. But if something analogous were to happen to me in a Western workplace, I wouldn't let culture shock take the blame.
If you want your employees to work out, give them an hour off in the middle of the day, a well-stocked gym, and showers.
In my experience one of the most positive is eating meals together. One of the most negative is playing favorites or improperly assigning credit for accomplishments.
Similarly, team-building exercises can be stunningly effective. The military takes a couple months to make you willing to sacrifice your life for a group of what were recently strangers.
The military takes a couple months to make you
willing to sacrifice your life for a group of
what were recently strangers.
In case my management decides to do this kind of team-building exercise, I think I would be willing to give them benefit of doubt, but the very cheesiness of it all will likely wear me out before I give up and call it bullshit. Conflict with the management will then be almost inevitable. The opposite of team building! Maybe it is just me; I see comments that sound positive.
The amount of time that is put into taking away individual identify and replacing it with a group mentality in combat troops like e.g. US Marines or Foreign Legion legionnaires is huge (from what I know of reading books and watching TV - it's not like really know anything about this).
Conscripts are not at all like 'proper' soldiers.
Conscripts are just there to sit out their time.
I spent two years of service performing mostly bullshit tasks (or doing nothing). When I was in training I received some kind of basic education of driving, uh, amphibious transporter medium - modified (ПТС-М, плавающий транспортёр средний - модифицированный). Was kind of fun.
All right, it's completely off-topic now.
If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say an "Us against the world, for better or worse, whether we like it or not". That's a classic foundation for strong relationships.
Improperly defining that can be dangerous. It can create too much adversity in the workplace where teams spend more energy thinking how to beat the other team vs how to improve the product (sometimes the two goals are not equivalent).
I guess it is a bit safer to identify the competitors as "them" but in a niche market people always jump ship and all the negative attitudes and comments end up finally being exposed.
Out of curiosity, were they in the front lines? There's plenty of jobs in the armed forces I could see that camaraderie never forming, particularly more bureaucratic sections.
I'm not here to defend the team building side (nyeh, it's alright for team building) but pushups are a great exercise to do.
By themselves? No, of course not, but they're good by themselves anyway (full body weight exercise.)
However, in the middle of a long day at your desk, it doesn't hurt to take a 2 minute break to go down and do a bunch of pushups with a couple co-workers. It gets the blood flowing and it gives you an excuse to socialize.
Doesn't seem like a bad idea at all to me.
"BTW, a lot of these people are pretty committed athletes. If you're not, and you're looking for something that's easy and obvious, try doing some pushups throughout the day. When I'm feeling antsy, sometimes I get up, do 20 pushups, and then go back to what I'm doing. Start small: two pushups count if you're not used to them.
I like to run, and if you're starting out, it's relatively easy to buy a pair of running shoes (try going to a running shop with a pair of shoes you already own; the staff should be able to look at your wear pattern and adjust the shoe they recommend accordingly) or a pair of Vibram Five-Fingers. Start easily: go out running for five minutes. Or ten minutes. Build up little by little.
Otherwise, I think the meta-advice of this article is that we make time for things that're important to us, which most of us probably already know, or know on some level."
Don't get "barefoot" shoes unless you are an experienced runner.
VFFs are awesome, but take your time, get used to them and stretch a lot. They're worth it.
You high five at the end, eh? Let me guess... you're North Americans. Pretty ridiculous. If you want to do push ups, do push ups... it doesn't have to be some ridiculous cult-like group thing.
Our strongest person does about 120 pushups in a row (he is really strong); the least strong does about 10; the least strong male does about 40. We try to beat our old personal records but there's not really any competition between people.
We haven't experienced the problems predicted by others in this thread. It's not explicitly a team-building activity - it's just something some of us do. It's not led by a manager, and managers participate somewhat less than non-managers. It's not mandatory and if people are engrossed in a task, they choose not to join in that day.
In that light (a self directed, non-mandatory common group activity), I don't understand how it could come across as a bad thing.
Only perform this exercise if you are at an advanced fitness level.
The hand position required for wrist push-ups places increased stress on the wrists, increasing risk of injury
Yoga or tai chi might achieve the same goals with less injury. Programmers risking wrist injury seems unusually ill thought out.
Huh, oh look: he isnt a programmer. Now it all makes sense.
"I am currently the CEO & Co-Founder of Kohort.
"Prior, I was a VC at DFJ Gotham Ventures, where I invested in information companies. "
Fancy that.
Someone the other day said that he "heard" that sitting in a chair all day long for years is just as bad for your health as smoking. Not sure I get the correlation, but surely we have enough data points to have several credible studies.
Thanks to Fog Creek providing adjustable-height desks for every employee, this was really easy to do. I started with 2 hours each day one week, then 3 hours the next week, etc., until I'm now standing the whole day. I love it.
Hacker News these days has all the links you need, and more:
Sitting for hours can shave years off life (cnn.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702384
What happened to come to work to, well, work?
OP isn't saying everyone has to do 50 or else they're fired. It's a voluntary exercise (any exercise is better than no exercise) and they like to do it as a team. They're not embarrassing anyone or making fun of other people.
Pushups are a great workout. If you can't do 100. Do 1. Then do 1 more the next day. Then one more. No weights. No gym. No excuses. Just you and your body. Commit to it and then do it. When pushups get easy, there's a ton of variations you can try. One of the greatest and simplest exercises ever.
A quick round of push-ups, or other exercise, can open the mind to new possibilities, opportunities, and solutions. The diversion could very well help to break the road-blocking thought patterns that often crop up when one is faced with tough problems.
Beyond that, it seems to me that such a practice builds solidarity in the team and inspires the participants to push for their best result, and to improve over the course of future sessions (iterations, perhaps?). I cannot see how fostering such a spirit could be a bad thing, especially in the context of a tech startup.
No responsible person would force a co-worker or employee to damage their health through participation, nor to participate if they did not feel comfortable doing so. The implication that the author would advocate or enforce the exercise to the contrary seems nit-picky and contentious.
Isn't the benefit of the push-ups at least a bit greater than that of the often-present case of beers in the office fridge, especially when the practice becomes a regular part of the culture?
But I dont like the idea to do it as a group. I like to take my time and do the max repetitions that I could possible handle. Do it as a team would be limiting.
The other thing I would add is core work, and not just strengthening, but also correcting posture (pelvic tilt).
All of the above just scratches the surface on how to correct the bad things that happen to your posture when sitting at a desk for hours each day.
All of this only gets worse if your typing at a keyboard because of the 'natural' position you assume.
I brought a rocking chair for naps to work.
The defacto nerd position is seated and hunched. Developing the pectorals will only exacerbate this. If you want to engage in group exercise, find a routine which is more balanced, or at least balanced against what you do the rest of the day. Just do some calisthenics and stretch out those tight chests.
You're not in the Army. You aren't going to balance out your strength training with a long day of running, climbing, etc. You're going to get your chest good and pumped, then plop right back down and hunch.
I would love to see some medical studies of people who've been seriously debilitated by doing pushups throughout the day. There's a difference between being in pain (sore) and being hurt. If you're doing enough pushups at the office to get hurt, you might be taking the team-building exercise a little too seriously.
If you were so inclined, you could find all the information you desire about injuries caused by unbalanced musculature. But you seem like the invincible type who's going to ignore caution, so good luck to you.
Even in the case of minimal physical exertion, neglecting muscular balance will lead to injury. Stretching, while good, will not overcome muscular imbalance. How many people do you know who do any back-specific exercise?
As for posture, look at any of the photos that make it up on HN, such as photos of new startup locations. I haven't seen a single person in any of the photos sitting with proper posture. In over a decade of professional work experience, I have only ever seen one person sitting with correct posture, and he was an ex-Olympic athlete.
Are you aware, by the way, that shirts are cut differently now than in the past? The shoulders are rotated forward, because that's how people carry themselves now. People, on average, simply do not maintain proper posture. It requires concerted effort, stretching, and, usually, focused weight training.
Look up kyphosis and upper cross syndrome.
Any time you're doing strength training, you want to balance your movements. If you're doing push (presses, push-ups), do pulls (rows, pull-ups, inverted pull-ups). Work your legs and your upper body. Do bilateral and unilateral movements (single arm or leg). Do strength and cardio. Mind your exercise and your diet. Oh: and rest and recovery are also key.
For many people in tech, sitting at desks, hunched in front of a screen, you're chronically tight on the anterior (front) of your body, and loose on the posterior (backside). If you look up exercise/fitness literature, you'll find a lot of reference to "posterior chain activation" or related terms, and exercises like deadlifts, power cleans, pull-ups, rows variations, kettlebell swings, etc. All work part or all of your backside, and can really help balance our your body (it's done amazing things for me, reducing back pain and other issues).
I don't know that doing 10 push-ups every day or two is going to cripple anyone, but if that's the only resistance work that's being done, it's certainly not going to help. Which is where a not of strength-training / fitness newbies get things horribly, horribly wrong: they come up with some half-assed, imbalanced, inappropriate training program / routine without understanding what they're doing or why.
Fitness activities, like technical problems, should be goal oriented. Identify your objectives, determine your resources, construct a program, execute on it, assess, modify, and iterate. It's really not all that difficult, but it does require a modicum of thought.
The point, however, isn't the muscle size. It's the imbalance in muscular strength and tightness. Yes, stretching will help, but given that the majority of people do nothing to strengthen their upper back, they will develop a significant muscular imbalance from doing mere pushups.
Simple logic dictates that this is is impossible with pushups. You cannot change the resistance without changing what muscles you activate, and an averagely built male can do more than 8-12 pushups per set from the very get go. The only way forward is to increase the amount of pushups you do in one go, and that throws hypertrophy out the window.
This is why pushups is a rather useless exercise, beside the fact that it's difficult to do correctly and causes injuries (doing them on your palms can fuck up your rotator cuff, and doing them on your knuckles can fuck up your hands and wrists).
But even without scientific proof, I think most people have this experience with pushups (whether they've thought about it consciously or not): the people who do them are rarely very big, they're the thin traditional martial-arts type, at best.
The disadvantage of push-ups from a training perspective is that it's hard to progress with them (increase resistance), though this can be done by changing body angle, changing hand position, adding weight, or changing to a more challenging variant (say planche push-ups).
The point that I and others have been making is that a naive and uninformed approach toward exercise and fitness may provide few if any benefits, could exacerbate an existing imbalance, and really shouldn't be touted as a genius inspiration. Much as, say, a naive and uninformed approach toward technology often has corresponding / similar / analogous negative outcomes.
Push-ups are fine, in the right balance with other movements. They're not a complete exercise routine of themselves.
As for getting big on push-ups, there are always exceptions. Hershel Walker comes to mind as a calisthenics devotee.
Doing 30 repetitions in a set is a surefire way to stagnate in your muscular development. This has been proven time and time again in scientific studies.
But whatever, let's just agree to disagree here. I'll continue to side with the scientific studies done in hypertrophy, and you continue believing in pushups.
Push-ups are sufficiently effective that they'll at best make the problem worse. Any untrained individual doing any resistance movement consistently will make gains in strength and muscle size (Google Mark Rippetoe's "The Novice Effect" or discussions of training complexity vs. training age). Sure, you'll plateau after a few months, but you're still going to be ahead of a very large share of the sedentary population. And you're doing nothing to address the intrinsic imbalance between anterior and dorsal and muscular development and overall tension.
If you're doing other movements at other times (including rows), the push-ups are fine. You don't have to balance your movements at the same time -- alternating days or workouts would be sufficient.