Health and fitness is undoubtedly very important, especially if we want to live healthy, normal lives. As it appears, the world has in some ways made an attempt to become more connected to exercise over the past two years, starting from when the first lockdown was imposed by the British government.
 

We’ve all at one point probably seen countless fitness transformations online, but one that particularly stands out is the pushup transformations. Hundreds of these have been appearing online, but are there any real benefits to this?

A push-up is a calisthenics exercise which involves lowering your whole body to the ground and then pushing back up to the starting position, using the arms, chest, serratus anterior, the core muscles and shoulders, more specifically, the triceps, the pectoralis major muscles and the anterior deltoid.

This is one of the most fundamental exercises to test overall strength in fitness tests and military training etc.

 

Though it sounds too simple, many have been quick to see what happens if they perform hundreds of repetitions of this exercise everyday for a month or two. The pushup works your upper body and pushing muscles, and the process of being able to just do one is considered too tedious. It requires a lot of strength to be able to push your body weight back up multiple times, and also requires a lot of stability.

 

But this exercise can bring many benefits. Your upper body strength dramatically improves, and it is one of the best ways to gain strength and muscle as a beginner. It can also be done anywhere as it requires zero equipment. It improves your balance, flexibility, performance in sports, and much more.

 

However, like anything else, too much is dangerous. As for following the paths of those who do “100 a day for 30 days”, the negatives far outweigh the positives. Some benefits are that your entire upper body strength and tone will increase, but doing this many everyday with no rest days can bring serious problems.
 

Firstly, when we perform any sort of weight lifting exercise, be it with dumbbells or with our body weight (pushups), the breakdown of muscle fibres occurs. Through the process of consuming adequate amounts of protein and getting sufficient rest and sleep, it takes our body 48-72 hours to recover and for our muscles to be ready to work again.
Thus, you can draw an obvious conclusion that if you are damaging your muscle fibres everyday without giving them time to rest and recover, your strength gains will be very limited and this can also bring injuries.
 

Additionally, it causes strain on our joints, especially on our wrists and elbows. It also creates muscular imbalances, because if we are regularly training our front, pushing muscles with no back, pulling muscle training, then this will in turn cause our stronger front muscles to pull our body forward into a hunched-over position, therefore ruining our posture, which is counterproductive as we want to improve our posture, not make it worse. 

To balance this out, make sure you also perform plenty of back work.

 

Another problem is how we perform the exercise. 100 pushups a day for a month might not be terrible at first, but it definitely is if we perform the repetitions with bad form. This includes flaring out our elbows, not engaging our core, turning our hands inwards and not keeping our arms tucked in. This in turn produces shoulder impingement and wrist pain which actually limits our strength and muscle gain, which we obviously don’t want.
This also creates a misconception of how many pushups the average person can do. Most people will claim it is at least 10-15 or more, but when done correctly, this number is much, much lower.

 

According to fitness influencer Jeremy Ethier, doing 100 a day for a month causes too many recovery issues and it lacks the progression you need to continue seeing results past those 30 days.
In layman’s terms, injuries and soreness everyday will prevent you from working at your best and your strength will actually go down without adequate rest.
 

As he has said, doing the same variation - the standard pushup everyday will eventually get too easy, which you might think is a good thing, but if you were to continue doing this past a month, you would not see much improvement in strength and muscle mass.
 

This is because our body is constantly adapting, and once we can perform more than 15-20 repetitions of this exercise, it becomes too easy of an exercise in that it provides no challenge to us any more, and continuing to do just this variation alone wouldn’t provide any benefits.
 

That’s not to say that you can’t do pushups forever past a certain point. This just means that you will have to eventually challenge yourself to do harder variations of the exercise, such as placing your hands closer to the centre, or adding weight by wearing a rucksack, or doing it just one-handed.

 

So instead of doing tons of pushups everyday for 30 days, what can you do instead? Well, the internet provides answers, but better approaches just include things like taking an on-and-off approach, performing them every other day if you want to maintain a high volume as a beginner.
This means you are giving yourself at least 48 hours to recover, which just by making small tweaks, makes the pushups much more comfortable, beneficial and sustainable for muscular growth and strength development.