bodyweight exercises Posts - Born Fitness

The Fastest Way to Do More Pushups

Adam Bornstein — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 16:45:25 +0000

If you want to be fit, you don’t need to start with free weights or fancy machines. The foundation of fitness is movement. And the movements you need to master for any exercise start with your bodyweight.

If you can’t do a pushup (or many of them), you’re likely wasting your time (or setting yourself up for injury) by trying to bench press your way to a better body.

Pushups aren’t sexy or impressive. But, when you spend a lot of time with some incredibly fit people and you discover something very quickly: You don’t have to lift a ton of weight to be considered strong.

Some of the most incredible feats of strength don’t even include any weight at all. (Whereas others certainly do; no matter what you think of powerlifting, watching someone move 700 or 800 pounds is simply amazing.)

If you can perform a lot of pushups and all of their different variations, then you can go a long way towards building upper body strength, muscle, and definition.

Why Pushups Are So Good For You

Years ago, I worked with Martin Rooney on a pushup test. If you don’t know Martin, he’s one of the best coaches in the world and has worked with endless pro athletes and Olympians. Every time I train with Martin, it feels like I would hit a new PR.

In addition to being a great coach, Martin would create challenges designed to make you stronger and fitter. One of those was a 3-minute pushup challenge.

The challenge was built to help you do more pushups, but there was one flaw: It required a level of strength and endurance that limited who could use the challenge as a way to get better.

Most people I know can’t do pushups for more than a minute, let alone 3 minutes.

The challenge was still brilliant because it opened your eyes to the importance of relative body strength.

All too often we base strength on an arbitrary amount of weight you can move, when — in reality — how well you can move your own body is one of the best ways to assess fitness levels and build strength. Not to mention, bodyweight tests can help clean up issues with your form that can cause injuries once you add additional weight.

All too often we base strength on an arbitrary amount of weight you can move, when — in reality — how well you can move your own body is one of the best ways to assess fitness levels and build strength.

When you have relative body strength, you are in control of your body and can move well, whether you’re pushing, pulling, squatting, or picking something up off the ground. It’s why bodyweight movements like pushups and pullups can be a great initial test of strength, and even challenging for those who have been training for many years.

Doing more pushups has lots of upsides. But, figuring out the right program to build strength and endurance is where most people struggle. It’s time to change that.

How To Do More Pushups: The Assessment

As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.”

If you want to do more pushups, you need to figure out if you need to build strength, endurance, or both. Your path to more pushups starts with a simple 1-minute assessment and then includes a program to help guide your improvement.

The test below is one I’ve done for years with clients, and it works incredibly well for helping you become better with bodyweight exercises. (You can do similar variations with other exercises.) I’ve used different variations of this test as an assessment to determine baseline strength.

Step 1: Set a timer for 1-minute and then start performing pushups until the time is up.

Step 2: Record the number of reps you performed.

Pushup Rule #1

For a rep to count, you must go all the way down (chest 2 inches above the floor), pause, and you must lock out your elbows at the top.

Also, you can’t let your hips sag or allow your knees to touch the floor. [In other words, your body should form a straight line from your ankles to your shoulders.]

Pushup Rule #2:

You can rest whenever you want, but the clock must keep running

Before You Begin: Pushup Test Tips

You have 2 options that will help you perform your best on the pushup test:

Option 1: Perform pushups at a rapid pace and do as many as you can until you hit failure and can’t do more.

Option 2: Pace yourself and take mini breaks every 10-15 seconds, doing what you can to avoid failure and complete as many as possible.

In the initial test, Rooney recommended a 15-second break once you started to slow down. This was necessary with a 3-minute running clock. But with only one-minute, this assessment is a little different.

If you’re a beginner and not as strong, resting every 10-15 seconds will be beneficial to you because fatigue will catch up quickly.

If you’ve been training, you might be able to maintain a consistent pace for 30 to 45 seconds. In that case, stop 1 to 2 reps shy of failure, rest 5-10 seconds, and then do as many as possible until the time is up.

Grading Your Pushup Performance

The following scores are based on the averages of my online coaching clients. [Note: women tend to have scores that are 5-10 pushups less than the scores shown below.]

Below average: less than 15 pushups (Remember the rules above, for a legit rep it’s impossible to go any faster than 1 rep per second with the pause at the bottom and lockout at the top.)

Average: 20 pushups

Good: 30 to 35 pushups

Excellent: 40-45 pushups

Extraordinary: 45-50 pushups. If you’ve completed more than 50 pushups, you cheated. You need to pause at the bottom and top of the movement, so every rep should take a minimum of 1-2 seconds.

How to Become Better at Pushups

If your pushup score is lower than you’d like, there’s a quick fix that will help make your upper body more powerful and explosive.

Follow this pushup protocol, trying to perform each rep as fast as possible, and after 8 workouts take the test again and see how you improved.

Week 1 (two workouts): Perform 10 sets of 8 repetitions of pushups. Rest two minutes between sets. If you can’t do 8 pushups, rest as needed following the same strategy used in the test.

Week 2 (two workouts): Complete 8 sets of 10 repetitions with 1 minute of rest between sets.

Week 3 (two workouts): Perform 6 sets of 15 repetitions with 1 minute of rest between sets.

Week 4 (two workouts): Do 4 sets of 20 repetitions with two minutes of rest between sets.

Take 5 days off from pushups, and then take the test again and see how you did.

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Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post The Fastest Way to Do More Pushups appeared first on Born Fitness.

Bodyweight Workouts For Fat Loss: Do They Work?

Adam Bornstein — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 19:06:36 +0000

Every month I write a column for Muscle & Fitness magazine called “Born Fit.” In it, I answer real questions asked by real people on Twitter. These are my unedited answers to those questions. If you want to potentially be featured in the magazine tweet at me and ask a question using the hashtag #BornFit and #AskBorn. -AB

Can I Become Shredded With Bodyweight Exercises?

You know what’s funny? Even in 2014 the fitness world is still highly influenced by infomercials. Back in the day it was Jack LaLanne and Body By Jake, then the BowFlex and 8-Minute Abs, and today it’s P90X and Insanity. Each of these approaches had elements of success—but they all spawned massive trends in the fitness industry. And right now it’s fast-paced, high intensity workouts that usually require bodyweight exercises.

So do the programs work? Yes—but much like learning how to successfully fold a fitted sheet—the devil is in the details.

By now, most of you know that high intensity interval training (the ever popular “HIIT”) is great for fat loss. But there are some rules for really making it work. You’ll read all about effective forms of HIIT lasting as short as 4 minutes (the Tabata method) and topping out around 15 minutes. The reasons being the workouts are effective because of the intensity and not the duration.

That’s where the limitation of bodyweight comes in: if you’re going to do HIIT bodyweight workouts, you might need to train a bit longer or make sure you hit large muscle groups. The book on fat loss is pretty clear:

Exercises using multiple large muscles + little rest between sets = aerobic and metabolic benefits.

The greatest benefit of high intensity training is when you can add resistance and progressively make your workouts harder. While there are definitely bodyweight variations that are more difficult (or you can add weighted vests), bodyweight movements make it harder to progress and maintain a level of max intensity during intervals.

Put in other terms: Imagine doing 70- or 80-percent of your 1-rep max on back squats for 20 seconds compared to doing bodyweight squats for the same time period. I think you know what will crush more fat cells.

What does it all mean? Bodyweight workouts can help you get shredded, but you’ll want to keep 2 things in mind:

If you’re just doing bodyweight, you’ll want to make your workouts a little bit longer to make sure you create enough overload and metabolic stress.
Focus on big muscle movements like squats, pullups, pushups, and inverted rows. Don’t select movements like planks and side planks if you really want to see big results. Sure they’ll work your abs, but they won’t burn that many calories, which is the real reason why high intensity workouts are so effective.

But wait! There’s more…I don’t care what workout you do, if your diet isn’t in order, even the best workout in the world won’t uncover your abs. You might not hear it mentioned on TV, but that’s as good of guarantee as you’ll ever find.

Beyond Bodyweight…

Tired of bad and misleading health information? You’re not alone. Now you can learn:

What workouts will work for your body
How to eat and live the way you want
When you should be worried about the latest health study

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The post Bodyweight Workouts For Fat Loss: Do They Work? appeared first on Born Fitness.

The 4-Step Biceps Builder

Adam Bornstein — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:34:00 +0000

Some of the fittest people I’ve ever met train a lot. That probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but for people who are constantly in fear of overtraining, it’s an eye-opener to understand how much good programming is one of the most important factors that determine how often you can hit the gym.

I remember interviewing Olympic athletes back in 2008 and being astonished by their 6- and 7-day per week plans, consisting of multiple hours pounding their muscles each day.

So much for worrying about more than 60-minutes of exercise turning your muscles into cortisol drained mush, right?

Your biceps respond best to specific, high-tension techniques that usually require nothing more than your body weight.

During my “famous” Dwight Freeney (the tire workout) interview, the All-Pro defensive end crushed his workout for 2 hours.

When interviewing and spending time with True Blood star and Evolution author Joe Manganiello, I learned that the shredded actor consistently pushed his body 6 days per week.

While most people don’t have the time (or desire) to train frequently, it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of training.

You can achieve great results pushing your body with full body routines three days per week. You can also do it with bodyweight exercises. Or you can do it with more frequent, but shorter sessions. The secret lies in the execution, says strength coach Chad Waterbury.

To offer a different approach to building your biceps, let Waterbury be your guide to a better understanding of how to program your training frequency—and discover a unique way to bigger arms. -AB

The 4-Step Biceps Builder

By Chad Waterbury

Helping people add mass to their most stubborn muscle groups has been my passion since I started training professionally in 1996. For the first five years of my career I trained my clients using a mix of low reps with heavy weights and high rep sets to failure.

That’s what most trainers did back then, and still do today.

However, my approach to building muscle changed in 2001 after I went to see the Cirque du Soleil show, Mystere, in Vegas. As I was watching the now-famous Alexis Brothers perform their incredible feats of strength, I couldn’t help but be astonished by two things.

First, they had two of the best physiques I’d ever seen: an ideal combination of muscle, symmetry and cuts. Second – and this is most important – I was shocked when I looked at their weekly schedule.

Those two dudes were performing their mind-blowing strength performance 10 times per week.

I didn’t care if they were using every pharmaceutical that Tijuana had to offer. What they were doing defied all the “laws” of training and recovery I learned in college, textbooks and articles.

That’s when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity (thanks Pulp Fiction): I was going to start training my client’s most underdeveloped muscles more frequently each week.

That strategy changed everything for me; however, it was a long road of many failed attempts to figure out just how often a guy or gal with average genetics could stimulate a specific muscle or their entire body while avoiding burnout.

The High Frequency Training Plan

By 2012 I had accumulated enough experience with frequent training to write my first book on the subject, High Frequency Training (HFT).

My overall approach with HFT was pretty straightforward. You’d choose an exercise such as the pull-up and perform a total number of reps per day (e.g., 50), regardless of how many sets it took. Then you’d add one rep to that total and continue the plan for 6-8 weeks.

It worked well and many guys built up their biceps while the gals finally got the glute size they wanted. But, based on the feedback from a wide range of people around the world, that approach still didn’t work as well for some muscles as I’d hoped.

So I continued to endlessly experiment with higher frequency training plans. Part of my evolved strategy was to look at athletes that built proportionally large muscle groups from their sport. Cyclists have impressively muscular thighs, and gymnasts that do the rings have the best biceps on the planet.

These are their strengths. But for many people, these body parts are weaknesses. So my approach focused on taking what works from the best, modifying, and creating a structured plan to build up any weak body part using a frequency model of training.

The 4-Step Biceps Blast

Since it’s a common area of focus, let’s use the biceps as an example. First, unless you’re genetically gifted (congrats to those who won that lottery), my experience has taught me that most people struggle to build their arms from high rep training. If they did, every collegiate rower would have massive guns.

But maybe more importantly, it’s that people don’t know how to activate the muscles in your biceps. Everyone knows how to flex, but that’s not what happens when we start cranking away at curls.

Body language takes over. Your shoulders and back help move the weight. And the next thing you know, you cranked out an awesome set, only to see arms that look just like they did on rep 1.

Maybe you got a pump, but within an hour your arms are back at their original size.

Second, simply training heavy won’t work, either. There are plenty of guys with average-sized pipes that can curl a lot of weight. Your biceps respond best to specific, high-tension techniques that usually require nothing more than your body weight.

Here’s one biceps-building technique that uses what I call an Iso-Squeeze Countdown. One great exercise for this technique is the inverted row.

Here’s the 4-step plan that will turn the inverted row into powerhouse biceps builder.

Step 1: Assume the starting position with your arms straight and hands 10 inches apart with an overhand grip (palms facing down).

Step 2: Pull your body up to the peak contraction position, hold it, and squeeze your biceps as hard as possible for 3 seconds. Then, immediately do 3 full range of motion reps. Rest for 10 seconds.

Step 3: Pull your torso back up to the peak contraction position and squeeze your biceps intensely for 2 seconds, followed by 2 full range of motion reps. Rest another 10 seconds.

Step 4: Again, pull your torso up to peak contraction, squeeze your biceps with as much tension as you can muster for one full second, then do just 1 full rep.

That short but intense protocol, when performed for the right number of sets and frequency throughout the week is just one of the three ways I stimulate new growth in your most underdeveloped muscle groups. For example, I would combine that movement with an antagonist (opposite muscle) exercise, such as a pushup, and follow the same protocol. Superset just 2 sets of this combination, and then combined with a frequency model of training, you’ll be on your way to faster results.

Targeted Muscle Building and Strength

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