Inspired by the thread on obsolete gym machines, I’m looking for informed thoughts on this question. While doing my 3 mile walk at a good pace (can talk through some it, can’t sing, lots of steps and inclines) I stop and do some pushups. The pushup sessions are about 5 minutes of walking apart; that is, I do 25 pushups, walk for about 5 minutes, do another set, etc. Is that too long a gap between sets to do any good?
It’s all good exercise. What effect are you looking for?
Avoiding losing muscle mass, some cardio. I do a few other things, but nothing major. My partner has just volunteered to throw medicine balls at my head, so thanks for that, Straight Dope!
Look for ways to incorporate pullups of some form. Otherwise, you’re neglecting half your upper body.
Pretty sure I am not able to do a pull-up, but one must start somewhere! I do go past a playground that might have something, although I dread hanging there, feet dangling helplessly, as a pack of rabid kindergarten kids use me as a piñata. I remain distressed over the fact that raising the heart beat by watching “Alien” does not count as exercise.
Nothing wrong with doing pushups. Pushups are never wasted.
@running_coach is on the right track suggesting other exercises to do, if you’re going to stop anyway. I suggest holding a plank every time you get on the ground because it’s an amazing core exercise.
If there are monkey bars, you can start with partial pullups, jumping to the bar to a flex-arm hang than lower(slowly) to the ground. If there are cross bars near the ground, you can do inverted rows.
Athlen-X Home workout playlist.
A large number of videos on bodyweight and improvised equipment workouts.
Thanks for this!
The gap between sets is not much of an issue. The duration and intensity of a set is much more important. (1 pushup, not much benefit; 25 sounds pretty good)
There has been a trend for quite some time for walking and counting steps. Although moving is better than not moving, you have to get your heart rate up significantly to get cardio benefit from an exercise. Do you ever check your heart rate during your walks?
I do count my heart rate, and keep up a pretty steady clip. I alternate between a little shorter but faster one day, a little slower but longer the next day, then my “average” speed/distance with weights in a backpack. Not trying to get much in the way of physique so much as slow the slide of age!
For cardio you want to be 65%-85% of your max heart rate. A simple way to estimate your max heart is 220 minus your age.
You’d do yourself a favor by getting a heartrate monitor. The Apple iWatch have them built in or you can buy plenty of others out there. Like others have said, you want to elevate your heart rate and maintain it for a good 30 minutes. And not just a slight elevation but in that 65-85% max rate CookingWithGas mentions. Doing push ups at various intervals will give you a few spikes in your heart rate but but probably not a significant benefit cardio wise.
If you want to do the pushups for strength and post-walk continued calorie burn you’d benefit most by doing the pushups to exhaustion. That is, the last set you attempt you should not be able to complete.
Inspired by the helpful and good-natured advice from Dopers, I scouted out the local park for monkey bars and the like so I could begin a pull-up regimen. The “monkey bars” are made out of thick nylon rope, but I gamely hopped up to begin my pull-up. Well, it was more of a hang-up: just hanging there was a work-out of more intensity than I expected. Also, the nylon rope was rough and stiff and abrasive and pinching, while prone to sagging and turning.
Nevertheless, I remained undaunted and gamely headed out the next day, this time with a pair of gardening gloves to spare said paws from further abrasion and pinching. As I hung there, slowly twisting in the wind, a little kid came up and yelled, “This play area is for kids!” I smiled and gasped, “Just…10…more sec…” The little bastard whanged me in the schnutz with his lunch kit. When I regained consciousness…
Wish me luck for tomorrow!
Not at all. With things like push-ups doing a few every hour would almost be as good as doing them all at once. A sensible way to do them.
Not a doctor and, from what I understand, sports science is still pretty vague on a number of things (let alone when filtered through my understanding/memory) so take this with a fairly large grain of salt but… Also, apologies for the following introduction text, but just so the advice makes sense.
In general, I would split fitness into three targets:
Conditioning
Hypertrophy
Strength
In the first, you’re mostly working to build up your cardiovascular system to be able to endure a certain physical activity for as long as feasible. If the activity is low impact, you might be able to do it forever. If it’s high impact (e.g. yoke walks) then it might be a matter of trying to go for 10-60 seconds. For more medium-level sports like football or boxing, you’re maybe trying for a few minutes of hard activity with longer phases of lower activity.
For hypertrophy, you’re mostly looking to swell the size of your muscles to the visual max. For strength, you’re trying to get the muscles the strongest that they can be, relative to your calorie consumption.
For general health, my sense is that hypertrophic training is fairly ephemeral. You lift weights in the 10-20 reps range and your body responds by pushing more fluid into the muscle cells, inflating them (they also do get stronger but this style of training is suited to hypertrophy the most because of the optimized swelling feature). Inflated muscle cells probably are stronger because of mechanical advantage but they shrink fairly quickly when you stop exercising and won’t have as long of lasting strength afterwards since some portion of it is strictly tied to the mass.
For strength training, the key components are 1) concentrate on rep ranges below 10 (5-8 is oft-recommended), 2) be well-rested so that you’re able to exert maximum energy every time that you make a go at your next set, and 3) have a little extra fat, so that your body doesn’t try to devour your muscle when it’s looking for extra energy.
In sports, usually your focus with conditioning is to be able to last longer than your opponent at your sport of choice - be it marathon running or boxing. But when you’re just trying to stay healthy, my understanding is that the best goal is to practice your conditioning at a variety of levels, so your cardiovascular system isn’t completely shocked when you go from one level of activity to another. A lot of walking, for example, is good to ensure that you’ll continue to be able to walk a long ways when you need to - e.g. the car ran out of gas in the countryside and you need to walk to the nearest gas station. But it doesn’t necessarily help when you’ve got a heavy couch that needs to be moved and you’d prefer to not have to drop it a dozen times while trying to move it.
The whole purpose, really, of general health is to be ready to respond to a situation that requires physical activity, through old age, and not to have a heart attack while doing it. So really, the ideal way to think about it is thinking about the sorts of situations that you might need to deal with:
- Playing with grandchildren
- Carrying groceries / luggage
- Putting bags of rice / bags of dog food / luggage up on a high shelf
- Pulling oneself off the floor after tripping
- (Maybe eventually) needing to move via wheelchair
- Walking for help
And then to try and think of what training you should do, to make sure that those all stay in the running for as long as possible.
At the moment, your high-pace walks are almost certainly helping you to work on the conditioning side on numbers 1 and 6. The push-ups are a little high-rep for hypertrophy so you’re really still doing some basic conditioning work that might help you if #5 ever became a transition that you needed to make but you’re not really building strength and you’re not doing much on items 2-4.
Still you’re doing good on half of my (personal and somewhat arbitrary) list so I’d certainly say that you have nothing to be ashamed of. But I would add some strength training - if you’re not doing it - focusing on suitcase carry, pull-up, overhead press, squat, dips, and some core work.
Walking - even brisk walking - isn’t sufficient (IMHO). It becomes more and more difficult to build muscle as time goes on and, with that, you become weaker, less mobile, less stable, more likely to get hurt, and enjoy life less. Putting on muscle is sort of like being a bear, storing up fat for the winter. You’ve got to do it while you can because the longer you go, the harder it gets. Just having a good cardiovascular system is certainly good, but it only takes you so far.
Walking is good. But you might want to try something that gets your heart & lungs working a bit more. If running is out, how about biking? Or swimming?
This is a fantastic plan!
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your “breath test” - can talk can’t sing - is a great correlate of being at an appropriate heart rate. No monitor needed nor would it add anything. Varying you pace and incline is also wonderful!
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as noted push ups are a great upper body and core exercise. No need for sets to immediately follow each other.
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you enjoy it so are going to keep it up! The best exercise is the exercise you actually do, regularly.
Yes supported pull ups might be fun to add in. Maybe burpees every so often. There are lots of body weight choices to try. But only if you enjoy those too.
I read a good recommendation for an upper-body strength exercise today:
Hold a 5-pount potato bag in each hand and slowly raise your arms straight out. Hold it as long as you can. After a few weeks, you should be able to hold that for at least a minute. Once you can do that, move up to 10-pound potato bags. Keep working up in size until you can consistently hold 50-pound potato bags for more than a minute.
Once you feel comfortable at this level, put a potato in each bag…