I just finished my first day of attempting 500 pushups daily in one go. I have done 500 pushups in a day as a challenge multiple times in the past but I have always split them up throughout the day. Today is my first time attempting to do them all in one sitting. I managed to squeeze out 361 pushups in a total time of 55 minutes. I was willing to do more, but it honestly felt like my chest muscles were going to be torn apart. I am going to see if I can keep this up as a daily routine, but it will be very difficult since I am already training BJJ twice daily almost every day, and have other matters such as university work. I also can't bear to imagine how badly it will feel to attempt this tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after... Here is the routine I am striving for though:
500 push-ups
50 pull-ups, or 500 rows (still unsure about an appropriate number of rows but I've been told they are approximately a 1:1 ratio with pushups)
100 Hindu squats + 300 air squats (I will start off with just the hindu squats first until I am confident my knees can handle the load properly)
I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training. I am interested in seeing my body's reaction to training an immense amount of reps just using my body weight, as opposed to what I have been doing for years since I first started my martial arts and gym journey - low reps high weight. I have had the desire to do this for a while, but the main thing that held me back was my ego. I have very underdeveloped chest and trap muscles, so for a while now I've been attempting to grow them to almost no avail. I am a bit insecure about this, but I am ready to let it go. A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that. Even if this training routine harms my body more than it strengthens it, I am confident it will at least help me to become more resilient and disciplined. In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
Anyway, wish me luck, and please, as always, feel free to provide your input on this.
There are several things I'll unpack here, but I want to start by saying that I'm all for experimentation. If you're bored with your resistance training program I think it's great to try something else. I will also have some things to say about boredom in training down below. This is going to be a long post and I hope you find this useful. If not, you are of course welcome to completely ignore me if you wish and I won't be offended! And I do wish you luck!
Long post after the break... TLDR; Go for it if you want, but I don't think it will be any more effective than a good low rep/high weight resistance training program, it definitely won't be as efficient, and I think there's a good chance that it will constitute overtraining for you. You're young, if you pay attention to your body it probably won't hurt you. Do know who
Uncle Rhabdo is, how to avoid him, and what to do if he comes visiting (especially if you're doing any cutting to drop wieght for competition).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As Kung Fu Wang already said, this is a high volume to do on top of all your other training. I do recommend journaling about your progress, including things like fatigue, emotional state, subjective energy levels, frequency or illness, frequency of trivial/minor/major injuries, etc. to get the best results. I believe you've posted before that you seem to get sick more often than others in your peer group and that can be a strong sign of over training (my apologies if I'm confusing you with someone else). Having notes documenting things like this can give you a better picture into not only how your fitness may be progressing but also whether your routine is having a positive or negative impact on your health. The relationship between fitness and health isn't a linear, upward progression. At some point you end up trading some of your health to eek out small improvements in fitness.
So to start off, there's evidence that high volume training can be effective for improving strength but there's also evidence that it may not be as effective for improving bone density and connective tissue strength as lifting heavier weights. If this is accurate then you'll be doing more work than you would with a high weight/low volume weight lifting routine to get lesser benefit in this regard. Most fitness research is of mediorce quality, (though it has been improving) so I wouldn't take this as proven yet, at least as of last time I looked into it, but I've also seen nothing to suggest that high volume training is more effective at anything.
From my perspective, if you have to do 500 reps, or in some other way spend excessive (IMO) time under load to stimulate a growth response you're simply not using enough resistance. To some degree this is a matter of personal preference. I vastly prefer to lift as heavy as I can while still able to control the weight and maintain form. Some people really hate heavy weights for one reason or another. Both will produce strength gains, one just takes a lot less time than the other (and may have greater associated benefits as noted above). If you really like high volume training or really dislike training with high resistance, then you can probably get most, if not all, of the benefits of resistance training from a routine like this, but it is very unlikely to be more effective than working with greater resistance.
In terms of physicality, however, my reasoning for this is that the above exercises activate more muscles than traditional dumbbell and barbell exercises.
A good barbell/dumbbell routine can hit every muscle in the body and contrary to what some want to claim, even quality machines can do this. That being said, I do think there's some benefit to supplementing tradional weight lifting with activity that engages the whole body in strenous activity in a more organic context. I don't think it needs to be excessive or formal to achieve ideal results. All your essential strength training needs can be met with either free weights or quality machine weights. The rest is just optimization. In my opinion, BJJ ought to be far more than sufficient for this purpose.
A part of me hopes these muscles will grow under this new routine but if they don't I am okay with that.
It's worth the experiment, but I'd also like to point out that it may go the other way around. You may have already been overtraining and thus preventing yourself from achieving optimal growth. The super important thing to keep in mind, especially if you're looking to make size gains (without the use of PEDs), is that exercise is just a stimulus. It produces nothing by itself. It's just a way of communicating with your body that its current capabilities are insufficient to handle what the world is asking of it and asking it to get stronger in response. The body needs time, sufficient nutrition, and rest to actually produce those adaptations. If you break it down again before it gets the chance it can't actually adapt. It's a little like if your boss comes in and tells you to do something and then everytime you start doing it they call you into their office and tell you that you need to do the thing. So, more rest and recovery may get you more of what you want.
For sports, I can't really think of situations in which conditioning muscles in isolation as opposed to group together is beneficial - furthermore, I would also argue that there is a bigger benefit in the ability to lift a heavy weight numerous amounts of times (training for muscular endurance) than the ability to lift an extremely heavy weight, just one time.
First off, I agree that rsistance training that spends much time on isolated, rotary, movements is less than ideal. Big, compound, movements are more effective and efficient for all but the most specific of aesthetics goals. There is no reason you can't build your weighted resitance routine, whether free weights or machines, based completely on these large, compound movements and in fact I'd encourage it unless you have some pretty demanding, appearance based goals.
The next piece is a bit more nuanced. Muscular endurance is the product of a number of factors, some of which you can control, some of which you can't. The simplest and most broadly applicable ones that you can influence are strength, metabolic adaptation (underwhich I include what is generally referred to as cardio), and skill. Another big one, that can be more complicated, is body weight. The things you have either little or no control over are things like your proportions and distribution of fast twitch vs slow twitch muscle fibers, body size and proportions, myostatin levels, and even (most likely) to some degree how much you can really improve your personal V02 max.
As far as strength is concerned, the stronger the muscle the fewer muscle fibers and the less effort it takes to perform a given activity. So, the stronger your muscles the more endurance you're going to have, oustide of extremes like running a marathon, in which the extra strength may be offset by the added weight. It's largely irrelivant how you acheive this strength, whether by high volume or low, light weights or heavy. If you lift weights and increase your strength by 10% you'll get exactly the same benefit as if you did pushups and increased your strength by 10% - outside of the skill component, which I'll address below.
Metabolic adaptations tend to be fairly specific, so if you want to have endurance for BJJ you don't want to train like you're going to run ultra-marathions, and vice versa. For the most part, you're better off training with greater intensity in something like the format in which you want to accel rather than extending the duration of the activity greatly. What I mean by this is, if you're training for a competition format that's based around 3, 5 minute rounds with a 1 minute rest, you'll get greater benefit from focusing on training at increasing intensity in that format than you will by training at lower intensity for 5, 10 minute rounds with a 3 minute rest that you will never actually be facing in competition. Doing 500 pushup is an hour is going to improve your metabolic adaptations for doing activities that last an hour and require similar kinds of effort, with similar kinds of breaks, with similar muscles, much more than it will activities that require much shorter or longer periods of activity and/or which use different groups of muscles and have different rest profiles.
Skill is also a big factor in endurance and often what we percieve as strength, actually. Learning how to perform a movement more effectively and more efficiently greatly reduces the amount of effort and energy that you have to expend to continue with it. So, you are going to be effectively stronger and have greater endurance at any activity that you have practiced than for activities that you haven't. If you and your hypothetical, identical, twin both developed (theoretically) identical levels of absolute strength and metabolic adaptations and were in all other ways truly identical, but one of you had developed this strength by doing pushup and the other by lifting weights, the weight lifter would have less effective strength and endurance at pushups and the reverse would be true for the pushup-er. You'd both likely perform very similarly (in terms of strength and endurarance) when it came to something that neither of you had ever done before.
I've honestly become quite bored with traditional weight training.
If you're bored you're bored, but in my experience the best way around this is to up the intensity until you can't be bored with the act of weight lifting and then cut the frequency and volume back until you look forward to (or at least don't feel bored by) the prospect of lifting. I train to absulute, trying not to puke, hard to get out of the seat afterwards, complete failure. I do 1 set per exercise, with 3-5 large, compund, movements, with no rest between exercises, once a week, maximum. An entire session, not counting setup, lasts less than 10 minutes.
I lift heavy enough that for a long time I was in near fight or flight from the moment I took the weight. I've been doing this for > 20 years now, so I've acheived a more meditative/focused, rather than panicked, state but still, the mental work required leaves no room for boredom, or in fact any room for thought outside controlling the weight with good form. Being 52, if I take up BJJ or something similarly taxing I may cut back to 2 strength training sessions a month, or reduce the volume to something more like 2 exercises/workout. Even at my current volume and frequency, there is simply no point at which boredom is possible.
Not everyone will enjoy this kind or strength training, and not everyone who does it can acheive the same level of focus, but having performed 1000's of training sessions with clients ranging from low level pro-athletes to 85 year old retired school teachers, I can say that nobody has ever quit because they were bored.
In my opinion, strength training should support your life and your chosen activities. Do just enough to stimulate a deep adaptive response in as little time as possible and spend the remaineder of your life either resting and recovering or in developing your skills and metabolic adaptations for your chosen activity. Or having fun!
