push-ups effective?

[sirmattu]

The most elite form of pushup is the planche pushup, which looks like the normal "American" pushup, only your feet are off the ground, so you just go up and down solely under arm strength. First you have to be able to do a planche though.

what the hell's is a planche? you mean like a push up in a hand stand?

[sirmattu]

pushups get you stronger but weights increase muscle mass and get you stronger. eventually your strenght will be maxed out on pushups.

even if you do like 200 hundred a day?

[Uncle Corny]

sirmattu's wins the round against tyson. keep it up, kiddo.

[FURIOUS]

start off by warming up with burpees or squat thrust both are different
vary your pushup in all angles use your imagination for upper chest elevate your legs on to a chair or sumthin then if you have push up bar handles use them or get a couple of concrete slabs or bricks anything to strech your chest when going down or have one hand on the floor and the other elevated bout 1footdo one push up then switch to the other hand and anther push up vary them feet on floor feet elevated or hands elevated and if thats not enough then i suggest u get a weighted vest for some or most of these routines if not fill your back with sand bags or bricks just suggesting thanks yall

[Broadsword2004]

what the hell's is a planche? you mean like a push up in a hand stand?

Nope, a pushup done in a handstand position is a handstand pushup. A planche pushup basically looks like a reg. pushup, but with an exception. The kind where if you walked up to Joe Schmoe on the street and said, "How many pushups can you do?" Joe Schmoe is going to be thinking of the reg. kind of pushup. The kind with a flat back, legs straight, on balls of feet, rising up and down. The exception is the planche pushup looks like this, but with your feet lifted off of the ground, thus making your body parallel completely to the ground. This is very very very difficult to do; just holding a full-on planche is a high-level strength move performed by serious male gymnasts. But anyone basically can get to a planche, you just gotta work your butt off and practice everyday. Go here:

http://www.dragondoor.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode3&articleid=229

This article is a fantastic article on learning how to do a planche. And planche pushups. It shows all the prerequisite steps you need to do. It also has pics of some neato other strength moves.

another really good upper-body strength move is the muscle-up. Also, lever-pull-ups. Lever pull-ups are a gymnastic type of pull-up, also described on the site I provided above. If you do lots of handstand pushups, planches, planche pushups, lever pull-ups, and muscle-ups, you will pretty much develop a body that has more strength then weights could ever provide. Just maybe not as much muscular definition.

[Thai Bri]

Thats a great article. Thanks.

[Broadsword2004]

Sure thing

[carter]

sirmattu's wins the round against tyson. keep it up, kiddo.

not really, doing pushups you will max out on strength gains after awhile. all your going to really be working on is your endurance if you do a crapload of pushups everyday. if you feel like sticking with bodyweight exercises alone then by all means knock yourself out, just dont be shocked when someone with better strength and endurance comes prancing around because they incorporated weights into their routine.

[nwtogame]

I've done various routines trying to train for boxing. Just my opinion but you really have to do both. Pushups are GREAT for endurance and WILL increase you strength but ........not like weights WILL. Weight training will increase your brute strength. You could try alternating days of weight training and pushups or mix between the two in your workouts. I'm one of those ppl who can lift as much and for as long as I want will never be huge without steroids. You will always continue to get stronger though with the proper routine. Weights are also not just used in say for lifting as much as you can. You can do a routine for ie: benchpress where your doing 40 reps instead of 4-8 reps for just strength. JUst thought I'd throw these out there. And yes you will get stronger doing pushups but NEVER have the equal strength of someone who is lifting for strength using weights......... If you don't believe walk into a gym after years of doing pushups and challenge somone to weight lifting session.......like one said though its ALL relativeto what you mean in upper body strength and what your goals are. Again though I believe (my opinion) to stay or gain strength and keep your endurance you must do both. IE: You won't find a boxer or ELITE fighter that doesn't do some sort of weight training. If you (board personnel) know of some please enlighten me.
P.S. Some exercises like squats are thought of generally for legs but will increase you total body strength. Its proven that squats put such stress on the whole body.

[Thai Bri]

Strength for what?

[nwtogame]

Strength for any apllication. You think just because you lift a weight a certain way that your getting stronger at lifting weight in just that form? Well this is the first I've heard this on. My opinion and experience is that doing squats improves everything, from strength to power how you'd like to apply it is up to you. From anything jumping in sports to a good base in wrestling (it a plyometric in a sense) drill? Did i say something wrong in my earlier posts?

[Thai Bri]

I'm just making the point that strength, and fitness in general, is very specific. People often use a circular argument. They Squat, and then say it makes them stronger. And do you know how they "prove" it? They squat higher weights!

Now that it great. But does it make me "stronger" at BJJ, or Thai Boxing? I've done loads of weights in my time, on and off. But guess what? Take hold of something a little awkward and things are much harder to do.

For example, I bought onew of these BIIIG televisions. Carrying it was a flookin nightmare, and it was no-where near the weight of the bars I could lift. I also helped take down a spiral staricase. I helped carry the iron bannister out and was cooked. But the thing was not really heavy at all. It was just an awkward shape, so it put the muscles under stress in a different way, and they weren't used ot it.

Weight training is fun and does make you stronger - but in a limited way. I still use it, but as part of an overall conditioning circuit programe that also incorprates body weight exercises.

[nwtogame]

So what the hell are you saying then? I mean what the hell good is a pushup then? I guess it would be good for pushing ppl around more? What you just said makes just about no sense at all. Sure.......you know what I don't even feel like wasting my time here, you'll see in time I guess. All I know that prolly if you had never lifted weights you may have not even been able to pick the TV up let alone negotiate it through winding stairs or whatever. Then again if you'd listen to ppls advie maybe you'd bougth the TV that came with free installation, lmao. You think lifting weights just strengthens you in those movements, yes and nor. C'mon your making the muscle stronger wether you use it other ways is up to you. Your also strengthening tendons and ligaments weight training something also very valuable. Your stabalizers like for instance when you bench that helps you steady the weight whiel pressing. YOu don't think those exercises might come in handy any other time?

[Broadsword2004]

You guys knocking pushups obviously don't know a whole lot about them it seems. Bodyweight exercises will produce strength far superior to anything weights will produce, including brute strength. It's just they take longer to do it. Reg. american-style pushups are equivalent to benchpressing about 40% of your bodyweight; if you can do 10 reg. pushups, you've got all the strength you'll get. The rest is like you say, endurance. Which is why you increase the leverage on your pushups and do other types. One way is to do the reg. American style pushups on your insteps. This increases the weight on your arms. If you do the re.g pushups on just one instep of your leg, and rest your other leg on top of the leg you're using for support, you increase the weight on your arms to about 80% of your bodyweight. Other forms are Hindu pushups, which are vastly more difficult then reg. pushups. Also, handstand pushups, which are of course going into a handstand and doing pushups from that position. If you're really good, you can do them without a wall. The most elite form of pushups is the planche pushup. The reason is because the leverage is so great for your arms, that it takes a huge amount of strength to overcome it and support the body.

Pull-ups, the lever pull-ups of gymnasts, and the muscle-up of gymnasts, combined with lots of planche pushups and handstand pushups and Hindu pushups, will after a while produce strength far more functional and equal to or greater than that of a fighter who trains only with weights (in the upper-body). Bodyweight exercises call into service certain stabilizer muscles and motor neurons and so forth that weights just won't give.

Now, granted, calisthenics combined with weights I still think is the best, but the weights should complement the calisthenics, not the other way around, unless you're into bodybuilding.

There's also one-arm pushups, INCLUDING ONE-ARM HANDSTAND PUSHUPS. That's a lot of weight you're putting onto one arm if you can do one-arm handstand pushups. It's all off your bodyweight minus however many pounds your support arm weighs, I suppose.

For the legs, you might want to use weights for like the hamstrings perhaps, but in general, you can build up tremendous leg strength by doing lots of Hindu squats, and single-leg squats. Single leg-squats where you hold your non-supporting leg straight out in front of you also taxes the hip flexors, lower back, and abdominals a good bit as well. And then of course you can also use the ordinary barbell squat as well.

My point though is that if you train solely with weights and then go against someone who trains solely with calisthenics, hardcore calisthenics, like the one-legged squats, Hindu squats, muscle-ups, lever pull-ups, planche pushups, handstand pushups, one-arm handstand pushups, etc....the calisthenics person will have the strength and endurance advantage. The great wrestler Gautama was enormous and all he ever did was calisthenics. All of those old Hindu wrestlers did calisthenics, and most of them would've kileld the average wrestler today; HOWEVER, they incorporated weights into their training to. For extra leg strength, they'd attack weights around their necks and do their Hindu squats. Hence, their regiment was calisthenics, but supplemented with weights. Even in pull-ups, weights are usually introduced. Once you can do like 12 or more pullups straight, if you want more strength, you add some weight to your body with a special weight piece of hold a dumbell with your feet or something.

Weights will not give the kind of strength calisthenics will. But sometimes, for certain areas, you just need weights. But in general, if you train with one or the other, calisthenics are the way to go. An example of needing weights is like for lower back strength. for lower back strength, nothing is better than the deadlift exercises. Except for maybe calisthenics like the reverse situp, where you may hold a weight while pulling up with your lower back muscles. But for tremendous lower back strength, deadlifts are great.

Look at Jackie Chan; he's never trained with weights either. It was intensive calisthenics, gymnastics, and martial arts training. The new, modern approaches to training are obviously better for each sport, as athletes are breaking records these days, however, I think in terms of strength training, weights have been given too much emphasis. And no, not all professional coaches know how to train properly; look at our female gymnasts at the last Olympics. They are thickly muscled, in the thighs, like borderline to bodybuilder musculature, almost. Yet, the gymnasts of Romania and Russia and other European countries that have better gymnasts then us, their gymnasts have legs with much less muscle on them. Which is because they know how to train properly for the sport and we still don't.

Weights are good, but only for supplementing the training, unless you're training for appearance. For appearance, nothing outdoes weights. Nwtogame makes the point about stabilizer muscles and weight training not training you just for the strength of that particular movement. That is right, if you do stuff like benchpress, barbell press, barbell squat, etc....the mass-building exercises. Isolation exercises pretty much just train the isolation movement.

Remember, the forces of the U.S. military are built on calisthenics. If the troop still wants increased strength, they either train with weights or they can do heavy-duty calisthenics. The military doesn't case, as long as you meet the requirments for how far to run and so forth. I read an article where a Navy guy, when out on a ship, said that calisthenics were basically all he did.

[Thai Bri]

So what the hell are you saying then? I mean what the hell good is a pushup then? I guess it would be good for pushing ppl around more? What you just said makes just about no sense at all. Sure.......you know what I don't even feel like wasting my time here, you'll see in time I guess. All I know that prolly if you had never lifted weights you may have not even been able to pick the TV up let alone negotiate it through winding stairs or whatever. Then again if you'd listen to ppls advie maybe you'd bougth the TV that came with free installation, lmao. You think lifting weights just strengthens you in those movements, yes and nor. C'mon your making the muscle stronger wether you use it other ways is up to you. Your also strengthening tendons and ligaments weight training something also very valuable. Your stabalizers like for instance when you bench that helps you steady the weight whiel pressing. YOu don't think those exercises might come in handy any other time?

Why the attitude?