10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life
wjgilmore.com
wjgilmore.com
If it's any inspiration to other folks out there, or if my anecdotes are of any value, I went from 220lbs down to 165lbs over the course of about 2 years and have kept it off now for another 3 years so far.
The main things that worked for me: - Eating things that kept me full enough: I would wake up and have a light breakfast (one of: bagel, eggs, toast, yogurt), exercise mostly fasted (30min low-intensity run, 1hr bike ride), get home and have a protein shake (some say casein protein leaves you feeling fuller longer than whey, I experienced this), snack on healthy things throughout the day (eg: nuts, protein bar), drink lots of water, eat whatever I wanted for dinner but not to the point of feeling stuffed (I really like pasta), and going to bed around 10-11pm.
The shift for me was not working in the office anymore, which meant no shortcuts like burgers for lunch or expensive food trucks to fight the office depression.
Consistent cardio was also the other piece for me, not only did it help a ton with my mental health and stress, but the low intensity cardio day over day I saw producing weight loss results.
No gyms, no fad diets, just consistent daily-ish cardio, not eating too much, sleeping well, drinking water. Though I know everyone is different :-)
I’m not opposed to them (though I don’t take any). I used to be skinny and athletic as a teen so I knew my body could get back to that, but had I grown up and always had difficulty I wouldn’t have been opposed to trying it out, even if its just to get a kick start. It’s hard to exercise with a extra weight and low muscle, so getting some pounds off would be useful I think.
As a cure for food noise, though, they're massively helpful. I had forgotten, if I've ever known, what it's like to not think of food all the time.
> eat whatever I wanted for dinner but not to the point of feeling stuffed
Couldn't this have been achieved with the below? Just eating less.
> which meant no shortcuts like burgers for lunch or expensive food trucks
So the burger for lunch maybe wasn't the issue in isolation, but then when I got home I'd still be tired and hungry, maybe eat something else unhealthy/processed, and be too tired to exercise, either way still not in a calorie deficit. I think it's a chain reaction between these things, at least in my experience.
In my 20 working years, I never commuted other than self-powered: walking or cycling, depending on the distance. I understand not everyone has the luxury of this option, but the vast majority of people do, and yet decide to worsen the already bad traffic instead of a little exercise...
Seems to help to create systems that let us fall to the level of compliance we desire.
I think at the office my escapist tendencies just kick in: anything for a reprieve of the more stressful environment I was in.
When I work with nice colleagues and stress levels are okay, we would usually go out for lunch and I'd eat much better. I think it's a combination of stress and commuting downtown that made go for worse options. Dunno…
However I will add going to the gym can be fun just to keep some variety outside of cardio and also add some muscle mass. Either way its just another form of exercise.
Nothing helped me as much as learning this. Spend more time doing facepulls, rows, pulldowns, and any weird variation you can come up with which works your back muscles. I went from a hunchback to mostly not a hunchback and my shoulders are better for it.
There are few things that will blow up your shoulders as quickly as doing pressing movements wrong. If you want to embark on a pushup journey at least learn good form.
Fantastic exercise you can do just about anywhere.
I went an hour out of town to watch the Perseids a couple months back. I'm a bit of a gym rat, so I did sets of push-ups to keep my body temperature up, though I'm already shivering by the time I'm starting each set. So, I completely neglected to even think about the proper form (I made the classic mistake of squaring outward my elbows), and further aggravating the circumstances was dealing with the awkward road angles/grades.
With just a handful of sets, I'm pretty sure I permanently damaged my right shoulder. Ugh. The Perseids were fantastic, though :)
Couch potato zero to 10k anything physicality has to have a noticeable impact, and I am inspired. I like that even though you had multiple low times, there is still enough buffer in the year to hit the goal without having super saiyan discipline.
And yes agreed about the importance of continuing through the multiple lows! Sometimes the motivation just wasn't there but I kept plugging along and then suddenly everything came together.
To me it seems a lot of healthy people end up not needing discipline because they find healthy things they enjoy and want to do.
Like I wondered if someone copying this would be better off targeting 1000 air squats instead. But maybe that’s not as “cool” and wouldn’t have brought as much intrinsic motivation.
As someone with horrible back pain issues after a very intense block of training for a 1/2 marathon at the beginning of this year, I do hope you'll reconsider that first part of the quote above, since it's probably one of the causes of the latter. Took me a while to internalize the "run slow to run fast", but it does make a huge difference for injury prevention.
Do you have any concerns that you're only doing push movements? My physiotherapist told me that it's quite easy to build imbalanced muscles by excessively doing only push ups, without incorporating "pull" movements in my exercises too. It seems like you would've come across this in your research but don't think it's an issue seeing as you seem very healthy and happy with your current shape?
Personally I found it very very easy to come up with excuses to not go to the gym. Too tired, too far, it'll be too busy at this time, I don't have enough time, etc. The closest gym to me is 15 minutes. That's 30 minutes round trip + ~$260/yr + having to wait for most machines. Going 5 days a week would be 130 hours/yr in just driving for me!
I finally cancelled my membership and built a home gym. Best decision I've ever made. It costed me around ~$1200 in total for 300lb of weights, a power rack, an olympic barbell, a diy bench, and a full calisthenics "park" [1]. I've been a lot more consistent as I have zero excuses to not workout! The only thing I miss is the gym environment though; it's harder to be motivated when nobody is watching. I've found having a goal/routine to help with that though.
I still do 50 pushups per week with a mix of good and bad form (which is of course way less than 10k per year), but I found that I've mentally associated pushups with an exercise that I couldn't do well. It doesn't give me any dopamine boost. I'm much happier doing something else like barbell squats which I could do with good form and increasing weights.
https://brobible.com/sports/article/oregon-army-national-gua...
Once you can do 100 in a set though, that's just ten sets throughout the day. Totally doable if your employer can tolerate a sweaty employee.
And doing 0 pushups is 100% worse than doing 50 of your personally-defined push-ups
Besides, I can kick my (rather low) ceiling, and none of your experts will advise me on the correct form for this. Without their advice what am I supposed to do, just stop kicking my ceiling? Ridiculous.
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
There is no good reason to do pushups in a way that will cause joint problems. If you want to build your chest with pushups, the answer is wide grip pushups, not flared elbows. Your parent may find they are quite good at wide grip pushups, this is common because the chest muscles are bigger and stronger than the triceps.
Given sufficient time, a trainer worth their salt will teach you to develop every muscle. They might very well have you do wide grip. But there are definitely incorrect exercises, those are the ones that harm you. Dead lifting with rounded shoulders is a classic example, lots of people ruin their back doing this. I do both standard and wide grip push-ups. Though personally to build the chest I prefer the bench and other forms of chest press.
not sure about others, but I think this one is already controversial, having elbows close to the body shifts load to triceps. Canonical form is to have arms 45 degrees to body in kinda arrow form, this will engage shoulders and chest more.
After all, as soon as he points out something you can improve on and tells you how to do it better, you receive positive feedback from him and the reassurance that you didn’t hire him for nothing.
And regarding push-ups themselves: isn’t it rather one-sided to train only those limited muscle groups with such a high number of repetitions, to the point that it leads to anatomical imbalances?
Instead of 50/wk. Try 10/day. Just from my own experience, there's a benefit to a short concentrated burst of activity on a daily basis, versus a longer one on a weekly basis.
All that matters is area under the curve - do them daily and in quantity. Hungover? do them. Sleep deprived? do them. Headache? do them.
Form is so far in diminishing returns land it's hilarious that people bring it up, and in my experience often what's considered "perfect form" actually puts more strain on joints and increases likelihood of injury.
These foods are designed to push the yum button with a carefully chosen mix of fat, salt, carbs, umami components, sugar, protein.
It's not spaced out the way it would be eating the same ingredients slowly as a Greek salad with lamb, pita and feta, but the ingredient lists are not dissimilar, lamb for beef. The point is that ultra processed food inputs mainline all of the positive experience into a remarkably brief period of time.
Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth wrote about this in "the space merchants" in 1952. I don't think they expected it to come true inside their decade, but the seeds were laid by Ray Kroc and others across that time.
I don't deny your reasoning but I kind of say you're arriving at a rejection of the yum impact a long way after you've been hooked in.
Absolute nonsense, I feel amazing after eating fast food. I generally just get a chicken sandwich or burger or snack wrap, no soda or fries, maybe a milkshake - why would I not feel great after eating protein and fat? Dairy feels great for me too. This has to be utter nocebo on part of anyone who's convinced fast food is killing them, there's no way the food itself has that effect. The demonization of fast food is nonsensical in general - a burger made at McDonald's is not nutritionally different in any significant way from one made at home.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html#ac...
For one, you find it takes great concentration and continuous form checks not to do things that route 100% of the exercise through your shoulders instead of chest. Your elbows will want to flare out all the way, because our body just prefers shoulders for some reason and really really doesn't want the chest to be exercised, and pretty soon you'll have a shoulder impingement. At this point you have to give up on the exercise for a while to not inflame it further and make the injury permanent. Even trying my hardest to do the form perfectly I start feeling something in my shoulder eventually.
Besides the form, I just found them very hard to progress on compared to other exercises. For half a year or so a few years ago, I did them all the time wherever I was to pass the time, usually to failure. But I just never found that point where I could keep going and going like most people reach easily. When I started my form was wrong and I think I could get to 8 but once I corrected the form I never got that far. The number just rose to 6 or 7 and wouldn't budge. I tracked all my calories and macros - I was only very slightly below maintenance while making sure I had at least 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, every day. Here's the log from when I tried the 100 pushups program at the end:
Failed week 1 and had to redo it 1 time, failed week 2 4 times and had to go back to week 1, passed week 1, failed week 2 and gave up.
I got an optional free testosterone test recently out of curiosity. It was only 326 which is in "reference" but the consensus online seems to be that this is too low for 30 and men tend to feel much better at a level of 500+. So I'm strongly considering starting TRT and trying again, maybe with a generous calorie surplus this time to make sure there are no possible obstacles? Not sure what else I could do to move past such a plateau. I hit a similar one in the bench press too.
I'm guessing you're overweight if you're under 10 pushups. Just do what you can, do them daily, forget the form, the key at this point is to develop the habit of routine and the self-discipline to stick to doing the physical and annoying thing on a daily basis.
Beyond that focus on nutrition so your weight is reeled in, the pushups become easy when your weight is normal.
I am up for this! One question: do you accrue push-ups during the day in a 'greasing the groove' type approach and then stick in the total at end of day? Or more of a session? Just curious what was successful for you...
Because nobody knows how much do you need.
A good indicator is the colour of your #1 and the overall consistency of your #2
Can you share the final version of the sheet you made? I'm curious what your columns ended up being, in addition to the original push-ups column.
Congrats on the journey WJ!
I've done something very similar for about 8 years now. Push-ups and crunches (and sometimes burpees). I spent most of my life thin, just because of my lucky metabolism. In high school, people thought I was anorexic even though I ate junk food all the time. I'm someone who hates to break a sweat unless absolutely necessary, who would never go to a gym, and who also works a very sedentary programming job... and everything was just fine until alcohol and age caught up with me in my late 30s.
So, I remembered the stupid stuff they had us do in high school gym class. There were actual educational lessons there, right? Push-ups and crunches.
I use a Moka Pot to make my coffee in the morning, it takes exactly 9 minutes to boil on my stove. I started off with 30 push-ups and 30 crunches a day, before the pot boiled, before I got out of my underwear. I kept adding a few a day until I was at 100 + 100 (Initially I would take breaks in the push-ups at 25, 50, and 75 - but eventually I could just do 100 without stopping). The results of it were surprisingly good, for something that takes less than 9 minutes of your day.
Just a side note about McDonald's -- I've only ever gotten one rancid McDonald's meal in my life, and it was REALLY bad. I almost never eat fast food anymore either, except in a very particular case.
The author says:
>>When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food?
Me. I have some level of IBS - not debilitating, but enough that I don't want to leave the house sometimes. I also have lived in a lot of countries with questionable food sanitation, although now I'm just in America and eat a lot of Indian and Thai food. Anyway, for whatever reason, if I need to catch a flight in the morning, the sure shot 100% bulletproof way to know that I will not need a bathroom is to eat a Big Mac, nuggets and fries the night before. That meal can somehow completely stop a multi-day IBS episode in its tracks. I don't do it unless I need to, but somehow it completely calms my gut and binds up whatever's in there. I literally do it almost every time before I fly. My home cooking is much more likely to leave me stuck in a bathroom somewhere.
Make of it what you will.
One other thing - walking. This is what really caused me to lose a lot of weight and get back to within my optimal zone. I am (as reads the bio) an alcoholic. When I get done working at home, I go to a bar. I track my calories, and about 50% of them are alcohol. To motivate myself to walk, I started picking bars that were further away. And then much further away. So if I'm going out for 3 beers, I'll often walk 1.5 miles to the first bar, then have another beer each half-mile on the way back. This makes an astounding difference. You're actually hungry when you get home, still have a light buzz, listened to some interesting podcasts, and you sleep a lot better.
All of this is advice from a 45-year-old whose habits are very, very bad - I am not some paragon of health. I smoke like a chimney. I'll probably die young. A little bit of extra struggle goes a long way, though.
I have tried all kinds of advice from the Internet. I tried doing pushups against the wall or on my knees. I kept that up for quite awhile, but still never got close to doing 1 real normal push-up correctly. I don’t have the discipline to keep going when it takes that long to get any results.
Hold yourself in the top of the push up position then as slowly as you can drop into the lower position with your chest on the floor. The slower the better. When you’re on the floor, reset and go again.
Do 10 in the morning and 10 at night for 2 weeks and I guarantee you will be able to do at least one real push up.
I think there's some widespread misconceptions about how "starting" an exercise is supposed to go. The problem is that starting out is nothing like doing them once you can do them. (In no sense am I an expert on this; I just have some intuition about it and have coached some friends through trying pushups when they couldn't.) There is a whole chain of muscles involved in the motion--actually, there are a bunch of different chains, because there are a bunch of different kinds of pushups that use different muscles. The thing that goes wrong is usually that there are some "weak links" in that chain: muscles you've never really used before, and maybe don't even know how to activate. The actual pushup motion, the one you see people do online or whatever, is not really possible until you have these muscles linked up. It's just not going to happen. Maybe you'll eke out one with tremendous effort, but it won't look or feel like the pushups other people do.
Instead the way to start is to do anything at all that feels doable but a bit hard in that position. Yoga positions like down and up dog are great. Staying in a plank for a bit is great. Play around with the arms in different positions. Go down just a little bit but don't stay down. Etc. If you do things like this for 5 minutes a day, just pushing yourself to find things that feel tough each time, I think you will be able to do a proper pushup in 2-3 weeks. The thing to keep in mind is that the goal is to learn how your shoulders, chest, and back work together. For example, instead of putting your elbows out wide and trying to stay up but falling--try narrow elbows and then shove the ground as if are pushing a heavy grocery cart. Or, stay on vertical arms but rock forward and back. Or, stay on your elbows, but lift your feet up on something. Whatever is hard but doable.
(This is all 100% vibes, I don't know anything about anatomy or fitness. But I'm pretty sure it works.)
(Mostly I have coached people on the mindset about starting exercises with regard to climbing and particularly pullups. New climbers tend to not understand that there is just no way they're going to do a whole pullup if they can't do the first quarter second of the pullup, which is the hardest part, due to the awkward angle of your arm and shoulder giving a mechanical advantage particularly when you don't have much lats/scapular muscle. So train that first! They tend to cheat that part instead of working on it and don't understand why they're not making progress.)
No, they can't, not even close. Fatties need to lose weight first or start with bench presses. It might not even be the matter of strength, the belly is literally in the way.
If you do leg cardio (walking/treadmill/cycling, etc.) your leg muscle will likely never go away and you can use it to burn off as much fat as you wish. And once that is going on you can add other non-leg exercises.
Doing it like that (especially if you can do it as slowly as possible) can help get you strong enough to do one normal pushup.
Maybe you are not eating enough protein to grow your muscles when doing the knee pushups.
so yeah, that's kinda the whole game