Stop Doing 100 Pushups A Day (I’M BEGGING YOU!)

The classic 100 pushups a day workout has been tried by many, but should you be doing them? That is the question that gets answered in today’s video. The attraction of simple to follow, easy to remember exercise plan that has the ability to deliver a bigger, stronger chest is definitely something that cannot be denied. That being said, is doing 100 pushups a day worth your time?

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We have to look at the reasoning behind why people want to try this 100 pushup a day workout and it’s what appears to be an obvious answer; they want a bigger chest and / or a stronger chest.

Let’s start with strength and where doing 100 pushups a day falls short of building strength.

When you compare a pushup to a pure strength building exercise like a bench press, it simply doesn’t compare. Why? Well, we need to look at both exercises, especially the pushup. When it comes to the pushup, you are only lifting 60-75% of your bodyweight on each rep. That means a 160 lb person is only lifting 120 lbs of bodyweight (on the high end).

Not to disparage anyone, but a 120 lb bench press is by far no means an impressive feat of strength. I understand we all start somewhere, but that would be considered beginning weight. Now, if you worked your way up to perform 20, 30, or 40 reps of that 120 lbs on the bench press, many would argue that that it is still not as impressive as if you increased the weight and performed less reps. On top of that, you’re not really getting stronger in terms of absolute strength, but you are increasing your muscular strength endurance.

We then have to look at the energy systems that are involved in the contribution to the total number of reps performed in a set to failure. There is the ATP-PC system that is responsible for short term, explosive output (such as with strength building in the 1-5 rep range. Then you have the glycolytic system which is more responsible for that hypertrophy range and the oxidative system when you are reaching those high rep thresholds.

That means the high number of reps you complete, the more important it is to train to failure or close to failure. That brings us to the hypertrophy side of doing 100 pushups a day.

There are two ways that your sets can be performed; to all-out failure or a few reps shy of failure. I would argue that performing every set to failure every single day is not a good idea. This really comes down to recovery as there is no ability to recover between training days. This is a diminishing return as you try to progress and build a bigger chest. We know that muscle growth is stimulated in the gym, but occurs outside the gym, when rest and recovery is most important.

In this case, I wouldn’t recommend doing 100 pushups a day to build a bigger chest as you are not prioritizing recovery. But would this be better if the sets were not taken to failure?

Well, again, sets close to or reaching failure is extremely important for muscle growth when the rep counts very high, but you can’t properly recover between every day performance of 100 pushups per day.

If you are stopping short of failure, this where something interesting happens. If you are taking your sets to a very sub-max rep total, how short of failure can you be before it’s still an effort worthwhile for building a bigger chest? There is the understanding that stopping short of failure, especially 1-2 reps shy, is what stimulates the most growth.

This is where the different energy systems also kick in. The ATP-PC system where 1-5 high effort reps to failure is where the most strength is built. The glycolytic system kicks in after that, taking your efforts from strength to hypertrophy up to around 15 reps. This 8-15 reps range is the most the sweet spot for muscle growth. However, once you get to 30-50+ repetitions, the oxidative system kicks in and this is where muscular endurance is built as opposed to strength or hypertrophy. At these high rep ranges, this is where it is most important to train to failure if you want to see hypertrophy benefits on any exercise, not just the pushups.

So how do you maintain within that 7-15 rep range to build the most muscle possible while ensuring you are going to failure or at least close to failure? It comes down to finding pushup variations or create as much tension as possible during the pushup to really stress the chest and bring you to failure.

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