Makes sense sir!
But then what do you think about doing pushups during the week? Will this allow enough recovery or should it be either pushups during the week or your bench press?
edit: by the way, I am in on you guys with this one. I have always felt pushup were my biggest weak point, I am excited to get on the train!
Hi Lauren—well, the thing about pushups is, they don't really stress your resources all that much because, if you think about it, it's kind of like doing a bench press with your own body weight. So even going full range reps, for me a pushup would be nothing more than a 180lb bench press, which isn't going to be taxing enough to require much recovery time. The thing is, though, that if you do a large number of benches every day, you
will tire yourself out, but since you're restricted in the resistence you use to your own bodyweight, you aren't forcing your body to generate new muscle tissue; what you're doing is increasing muscle endurance, not explosive strength (which is where the real gain in muscle tissue comes from). Increasing muscle endurance has been shown repeatedly to
not entail muscle growth; instead, you in effect train your muscle biochemistry to handle lactic acid buildup more effectively (tolerate higher concentrations and eliminate lactic acid concentrations more quickly, so you don't feel a burn nearly as much from a give number of reps at a given weight). To increase muscle strength (and size, i.e., change your body composition to a greater % of muscle wrt total body weight), you need to activate the maximal number of motor units available and keep them occupied for enough time that the body registers an amount of discomfort sufficient to trigger new muscle growth (in much the same way that continued irritation of your skin will result in the formation of a callous). Since, these days, because of the time I lost recovering from a fairly bad weightlifting accident a couple of years ago, my maximum bench press weight is just under 300lbs, no amount of lifting 180lbs is going to put enough strain on my neuromotor pool to call for new muscle growth, even if I train pushups with my feet resting on a bench, hence higher than my head in starting position, which is more demanding than if they rest on the floor.
One thing you
can do, if you have a small child available, is get them to sit on your back while you do pushups; this will definitely add some serious extra strength demands to your workout. I used to do this with my son back in the days when I couldn't get to a gym with a power rack; the problem is, when they get to a certain size, they weigh enough that having them sitting on your back is definitely not good for your spine. But think of it this way: if you can do 50 pushups in good form with a 30lb child sitting on your back, you'll have
no problems knocking out 100 in one go when there's not extra weight!
One other note: someone, I think it was on another thread somewhere, was advocating lifting as a substitute for aerobic activity to burn fat, on the grounds that muscle fibers are always vibrating slightly and therefore over the course of a day burn enough calories to eliminate significant body fat. I just wanted to mention, because it's been bothering me ever since I saw that post, that it's unfortunately not true: a lb. of lean muscle tissue burns around 10–13 calories per day. The chap
here does the math for you:
Consider a man, 175 pounds and 10% body fat. This man has 157.5 pounds of lean body mass, and he has a resting metabolic rate of 2178 calories a day. Now, suppose this man wishes to lose one pound of body fat. Let’s compare how he does it using the two methods described above.
With Method A, the man begins his muscle-building program and manages to gain one pound of fat-free bodyweight in one week, increasing his lean body mass by one pound of extra muscle. He continues this for a total of 10 weeks, and he gains a total of 10 pounds of muscle. His body now burns about 130 additional calories a day. At this point, if this man does not increase his initial daily maintenance calorie intake by 130 calories, he will lose 910 calories from body fat in a week. At this rate of body fat loss, it will take him about 27 days to lose a pound of body fat. So, the grand total for the amount of time it takes him to lose one pound of body fat is 10 weeks plus 27 days, which equals about 3.5 months! And, this assumes he didn’t gain any extra body fat while gaining muscle.
With Method B, this man could lose the same amount of body fat in a few days simply by reducing his daily maintenance calorie intake by 500 calories, and increasing his daily calorie expenditures by 500 calories.
It's actually fairly optimistic to think one can add a lb of lean muscle in a week; if it were that easy, people would be able to add 52 lbs of pure muscle tissue in a year of conscientious exercise, whereas for most chemically unenhanced folk, a gain of 10 lbs of lean muscle mass in a year is a major victory. So the case is even worse than the writer assumes for using mucle growth as a substitute for aerobic excercise, especially high intensity aerobic exercise based on interval training. The ideal combination is a high intensity weight traning program combined with a high intensity, interval-based aerobic program: both are vastly more efficient ways to reach your muscle increase/fat loss goals than conventional programs. Their disadvantage is that high-intensity programs are not very pleasant, and therefore they're pretty hard on morale, and that gets
worse the longer you do them, not easier. You have to focus on the results you want to achieve and keep telling yourself, it'll all be over in twenty minutes or whatever....
