What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athlenex.com. So 100 pushups a day, maybe you've been enticed
by the minimalistic, simplified approach to just getting down on the floor and banging out a single
exercise for 100 repetitions every single day. Maybe you've been enticed by the results that
people have talked about getting in as little as 30 days doing just this single exercise? Well,
guess what, guys, I've got a problem with this. But more importantly, I've got a better solution
for you. You see, today I'm going to show you a better thing that you can do than 100 pushups
a day. Now I get it, you might be thinking that Jeff doesn't like the pushup. I actually love the
push up, I put it in my most recent video for the twelve exercises that everyone should be doing.
My issue with the pushups is that when you can do 30, 40 or 50 of them in a set
that you're not choosing a hard enough variation of the pushup in order to keep the gains coming,
you're going to want to try to do something with that to something more difficult. We'll get to
that in a second. But when we're talking about this type of approach, we're really
talking about a volume approach accruing a volume over the course of a week that's going to add up
over the course of multiple weeks that's going to take you to a new level of development.
So I understand that we're going to approach this a different way,
but I still have a better way to do this. What I want you to do is think of it differently.
Instead of thinking of it as doing a hundred reps of a pushup over the course of a day,
think of it is doing five sets of pushups to your ability level. What that means is, five
sets taking five reps short of failure. You see, when you start to do a lot of volume like this,
you have to also be careful that you're not introducing some other
side effects the unwanted side effects, maybe some irritation and inflammation in your shoulders or
your elbows or your wrists. So what we have to do is stop a bit short again. Five sets, five
reps short of failure. And it all starts with what that looks like because some people actually just
don't have a real appreciation for what it looks like to be stopping five reps short of failure. So
here I'm demonstrating a set of pushups and you can see that I start to get fatigued and we all
know that common burn that we start to feel, throughout our arms up to our chest and we start
to want to stop the exercise. But I can guarantee you the exercise is simple enough that you can
actually crank out a lot more than you might be thinking you could at this point in the game.
So here I'm continuing to grind out some reps. But this right here is about five reps short for me.
This would be about three reps short for me if I had continued a little bit further.
And this right here is taking the set to absolute failure where I can really not even get myself
up off the floor at the end. So you need to make sure that you're stopping at that first point here
to really feel as if you're leaving some of the tank. Then you could do this one of two
ways you can either do all of your pushups in one session or you can break them up over the
course of the day and there's one plus and minus to each approach. If I were to break these up over
the course of the day, I better have pretty good discipline to be able to get back down there five
separate times. That being said, I'm going to likely have the benefit of having fresher
pushups every time I do them and likely going to be able to produce more pushups at every single
given attempt. So over the course of the week, my volume is going to be higher and again, it's going
to be more productive volume because they're going to be closer to that point of fatigue for me,
but of course, not reaching full fatigue. But it doesn't stop there because I always,
as a physical therapist, have that eye towards the other side of it, right? The repercussions.
We can avoid those by simply sticking to 100 of something else. You see, you can do 100,
but I want you doing 100 of these. This is a Superman Press Out easily done after every single
one of the five sessions that you're going to do in the day 20 repetitions. That's going to add up
to one hundred total reps. And what this exercise does here is it puts you in the same position you
are doing your pushups, so you don't have to really worry about changing positions at all.
And what it does is it works all those oftentimes overlooked muscles of the back. Look, even the
most ardent gym goer will train their lats and maybe their traps, but they're not really focusing
enough on the rhomboids or, more importantly, their rotator cuff. And what that does is it leads
to the postural imbalances that you oftentimes see from those that adopt these 100 pushups a
day routines. We're not going to let that happen. So with 20 repetitions done immediately following
the single session of pushups that you do or every single set within that session that you do,
we're going to do our part to counteract those imbalances before they ever start.
So again, how is this so much better than simply doing 100 reps
seven times a week? Well, guys, this is the problem. If you look at the number alone,
you might be deceived as to the effectiveness of that simplified 100 a day approach. Number one,
it's an arbitrary number. It's not going to match the ability levels of maybe more than 3% of the
people that are watching this video, some being able to do far less than that and some being able
to do far more. And in the case of the people that could do far more, let's say you're able to do 300
reps of a push up in a given workout session. Let's say you're following a push/pull legs
workout and you're push day twice a week, you do 300 repetitions. That's 600 accrued pushups over
the course of the week. If you did 100 a day here, those that advocate for this approach might say,
Well, that's 700 that's an increase in volume. But again, at such a sub maximal level,
at one third of your ability to perform this exercise in a given session,
you're not going to accrue a lot of effective volume. You just accrued more volume. With this
approach here, you're going to be able to more closely match your ability levels, allowing you
to get to the point where you want to be rather than being lumped in with everybody else.
Now if you have an infatuation with 100 pushups, what I would suggest is you do the following find
a more difficult version of the pushup one that allows you to do maybe 20 max in a single session.
If you're looking for more challenging variations, make sure you check out this video here. While I
go through 33 different variations, one is sure to match your ability level and put you in that
sweet spot. The bottom line, guys, because of its simplified approach and the fact that you
can do the exercise anywhere, 100 pushups a day is definitely an intriguing option for many. However,
this five-set approach that more closely matches your ability level is one that I highly recommend.
If you're looking for a step-by-step plan, guys, when we put the science back in strength,
you can find them all over at athlenex.com. If you found the video helpful, leave your
comments and thumbs up below. Let me know how you do if you decide to adopt one of these routines.
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