Keeping fit with simple exercises
Since I’ve been not running over the last few months I have had to figure out how to stay fit by other means. This has given me the leeway to experiment with different combinations of exercises and I have learned some things.
The first thing I have been playing with is the 100 Pushups http://hundredpushups.com/ routine. This is a program designed by Steve Speirs and we talked about it in episode xyz of the RunRunLive Podcast http://www.runrunlive.com/episode-108-100-pushups. It is very simple structured program that takes you through an ever-increasing number of pushups over the course of a few weeks.
The first thing I’d like to note about this is that the humble pushup (or press-up if you’re debilitated by a use of Queen’s English) is a darn near perfect exercise. Pushups are simple. They require no equipment, no special clothes, no special place and no special time of day. You can drop and do a set of pushups in any area the length of your body any time the urge strikes you.
Secondly, Pushups are darn effective. They quickly tone up the chest, arms and back muscles and make you look great in your shirts. For a guy they are working the key vanity muscles. Even better, since I’m training for mountain bike racing they are the same muscles that take a beating in that particular endeavor.
You don’t need the 100 pushups program, you could just do them on your own, but I like the structure of Steve’s proscribed program. I have his iPhone App as well. You can get the schedule from his website at {http://hundredpushups.com/}. He has an easy, medium and hard program.
I’ll give you a couple tips on how to do it, and how not to do it.
Don’t be macho and jump into the ‘hard’ program if you’re not ready. It’s better to build up slowly and ease into it to give your muscles a chance. You can always do more if it is too easy but you’ll feel frustrated if you get 3 weeks in and can’t finish a set.
The program is intended to be every other day and works best as a 3-day-per-week schedule. If you try to do it every day your muscles won’t have time to recover and it won’t work as well. I was doing it Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The sessions are made up of 5 sets of pushups. For instance the workout for a day might be 17, 20, 17, 17, 24. Each of these representing a number of pushups. The last set is to do as many as you can – to failure. You are supposed to rest for at least 90 seconds between sets. This is important because you want to strengthen the muscle and not just fatigue it.
Initially the sessions will take less than 10 minutes to knock out. As you start getting into later weeks they take 15 – 20 or more minutes and become substantial workouts.
I have yet to make it past week 4 but even that is over 100 pushups a day and you can really see it, and feel it, in your physique and strength.
As I said in a previous post I have hacked the 100 pushups routine to get an even better work out.
Steve has a 200 situps program that follows the same layout as the 100 pushups program and this is a great way to maximize your workout time and keep things moving. Once you have the structure of the 100 pushups and 200 situps you can insert any exercise. You can do 100 dips, 200 squats, 200 lunges, 100 pullups, etc. the diversity is mind boggling. You could also do time based exercises like planks or leg raises or wall-sits with a little tweaking.
What this allows you to do is to cobble together complimentary sets of different exercises that focus on whatever you want. Steve recommends doing the 100 dip routine on the alternate days of the 100 pushups program because the dips build up the complimentary shoulder and triceps muscles while the pushups work the chest, back and triceps.
I had good success working in a leg exercise, like squats or lunges with the pushups and the situps. I found that doing two complimentary exercises at the same time allowed you to fill in the gaps, the rest times, between sets so you could keep a continuous rotation of exercises and not have to rest at all. For example I’d do the 5 sets of pushups interspersed with 5 sets of crunches.
This combination of continuous rotations of exercises means that you turn the session into a cardio session as well. The faster you go the more fatiguing it is and you’ll work up quite a sweat. When you get into the 3rd or 4th week this routine expands to close to 30 minutes of working out. That’s a pretty good strength and cardio workout.
Finally, as I spoke of before you can overlay any of the perturbations of the 100 situps family of exercises into other workouts. One might be to mix it in with your normal cardio. If you are a runner you can do a “Push-run” where every x minutes of running you stop and do a set of pushups. In the gym you can do the same with any of the cardio machines.
Lastly my favorite is to work the situps, pushups, squats, etc into my normal total-body weights work out. My total body workout that the coach has me do is typically 9 sets of various strength exercises. I’ll salt in a set of pushups, situps, etc., every third exercise. It works great.
I have not made it past week 4 of the routine yet, but that is ok. I just start over with a different combination of exercises whenever it gets too hard or boring. The structure is great but feel frees to hack it to fit your goals.
Hope this helps you folks get an idea of how this whole pushups and situps thing works.