Push-ups are one of the most effective body-weight exercises for a BODYBUILDER. They employ movements that make them very effective for building bigger triceps and chest. They also can be done anywhere and without any equipment. Personally, they’re my favorite body-weight exercise – maybe that’s because they’re what I started out doing.
Like all bodybuilding exercises, progressive overload is important to help you grow muscle. In the case of push-ups, this could be achieved by adding some extra weight to your body-weight, doing more and more reps in less and less time, or by doing both. This would help to get a lot of blood into that chest area.
While some bodybuilder use push-ups as a way to warm up for their main workout, it can also serve as an effective way to build muscle on its own if done right and with the right intensity. When you go on YouTube, you see videos about how doing 200 push-ups every day for a month or two would build your chest muscles. This sure works (from experience). But how about doing 210 push-ups in just ten (10) minutes?
Doing up to 200 push-ups in a day is a rewarding thing on its own, but with the right design of your reps and set levels, you could do as much as 210 push-ups in as few as 10 minutes or less! Must be really difficult right? (chill and let me break it down for you, mate). It’s challenging but not impossible. Besides, what are we without challenges?… You’re right, BORING!!!
I’ll teach you a creative way to get this done.
To do this, all you need is to be able to comfortably do over 30 regular push-ups at a go because little to no rest is required to complete the exercise within the target time. You also need a timer to keep track of time. Okay, let’s get to it already;
HOW TO COMPLETE THIS TASK (grrrrhhh!!!)
Start by doing 20 reps of regular push-ups and 1 rep almost immediately (you could just walk across your room and back). Next, you do 19 reps and then follow it up with 2 reps. Then you do 18 reps and then 3 reps. Noticed that the summation of the successive reps is 21, right? You continue this way until you complete the 11 and 10 reps of the program.
At the end of the program, you would have completed 210 push-ups. Easy as pie, right? I told you so. Now, you’d probably not be able to complete this in 10 minutes straight away, especially if you lack the right condition needed to perform a workout as intense as this. You just try to complete it as quickly as you can by taking as little rest as possible in between sets and don’t beat yourself up by whatever duration of time you may have used to complete it (but make sure you complete it). You’d definitely improve if you keep at it. It is however very important to time yourself so that you can always measure your progress. With time, you would be able to complete this in 10 minutes or even less, and this would mean progressively reducing your rest time between sets.
You can attempt this the next time you’re doing push-ups to spice up your workout. You definitely can do it, but if you don’t try, how can you know?