I’m going to be away on vacation for the next few weeks and can’t get in a proper bench press workout. Will doing high volume push ups help maintain and possibly even increase bench pressing performance? It will of cource increase work capacity (im doing really high volume), but how will it effect pressing performance and strenght? Thoughts?
Depends how good you are at push-ups, if you are really good already I doubt doing a whole load of push-ups is going to touch your benching performance, if you aren’t very good (let’s say you can do less than 15 pu’s) it might have an impact.
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It’s better than doing nothing - which presumably is your only alternative?
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Have someone sit on your back
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It is, at least for the next 3 weeks. What about hypertrophy, say if i do 2-300 push ups 5 days a week, will it have an inpact or what do you think?
You’ll likely hit fibers your usually don’t and possibly engage a more metabolic pathway to stinukte muscle growth due to how many pushups you’ll likely accomplish. whether that can offset any potential loss of time away from your traditional training is a toughie to guess on.
S
Wide, close, triangle, knuckle, neutral knuckle, inverted knuckle, legs elevated, plyo, clapping, legs elevated, one-armed, etc.
Yup, pushups are awesome. How many can you currently do?
During my first police academy my life was run by the people in charge. My only PT was theirs and that consisted of running and push ups. We did nearly 1000 push ups every week.
I didn’t get any bigger (could’ve been subpar nutrition) but I didn’t get any weaker or smaller either. And when I finally got to lift again (after 12 weeks) I bounced back quickly.
I’m also replacing bench with push ups for awhile because they’re about the only thing I can do without shoulder pain. I think we’ll both be fine.
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Nothing you do over a 3 week period will make much of a difference in the long run. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I think the most important thing would be just staying in relatively decent condition so that when you get back to the gym, you’ll be able to slide right back into your ‘regular’ workouts. I doubt you’ll see any substantial hypertrophy or strength gains from the pushups in such a short timeframe, but if this is a much higher volume of work than you’re accustomed to, you could push your work capacity up, which is never a bad thing.
Also, I don’t know what your current programming looks like, but doing 300 pushups a day 5 days a week indicates to me 1 of 2 things. Either: a) you’re not great at pushups and you’ll burn out fast, as this will be very taxing, or b) you’re already accustomed to this sort of workload, and you’ll handle it just fine, but it won’t likely lead to any physique changes.
I don’t know what level you’re at on anything, as I’ve never seen you post in here before, but I can tell you that if I was just trying to maintain while on vacation, I wouldn’t be doing anything close to this much volume. I might do like 5 sets of 20, 3ish times a week, in your position. But it’s a vacation, dude. You don’t want to be sore or fatigued from workouts while you’re on vacation, do you? Enjoy your trip, and rest assured that taking it a little easy for a few weeks won’t kill your gains, I promise.
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Do you have some push up bars ? You could try to put your feet higher than your hands to increase the load.
Or maybe try to do a break ?
If you have something like a very sturdy broom handle or a plank of wood you can use that to effectively lengthen your body and and alter the leverage of the movement so that it’s harder in every way from the pressing muscles to the stabilizing muscles.
Think of it this way. “Girl Pushups” are where you do pushups from the knees instead of the feet and they make it easier by decreasing the length of the lever. What I’m suggesting does the opposite. Hell, you could even use this as a way to get in some ‘heavy’ work with a movement that’s easier on your shoulders every once in a while.