8 Minutes to Awesome The Daily Squat and Push-Up Ritual by Max Shank

I am going to be issuing a "PUSH UP/ BODY WEIGHT SQUAT CHALLENGE" to the School soon... You can get a head start. Read this... Coach Cap

8 Minutes to Awesome

The Daily Squat and Push-Up Ritual

by Max Shank.

Tags: 

Metabolic Conditioning

Bodybuilding

Here's what you need to know...

1. Respect the basics. A steady diet of push-ups and pull-ups will help you hit some pretty awesome gym numbers.
2. Part of what makes Hershel Walker a beast is his relentless daily workout habits, like hundreds of push-ups, sit-ups, and sprints.
3. High-rep bodyweight exercises strengthen joints, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage.
4. Once you reach serious rep ranges, it's about strengthening the pattern and building a platform of endurance so you can tolerate more training.
5. To make bodyweight exercises a daily habit, do them before a shower or some other daily ritual. Engrain the behavior.

A Total Beast

Herschel Walker is a beast. He was a running back in the NFL who got involved in MMA in his late 40's. What helped him get there? Discipline and daily practices.

He did a ton of push-ups (750-1000), sit ups, and sprints every single day.

You could write him off as an outlier and say that, in spite of inefficient training, he was a genetic phenomenon. But instead why not just recognize him as someone who didn't suffer from exercise snobbery.

He was never too good for the basics. And you shouldn't be either.

Reps and Snobbery

Contrast Walker's approach with someone who constantly searches for the perfect exercise that's going to make him gain four inches of muscle in four weeks. That person may consider himself "advanced" and invariably thinks the simple or easy stuff is beneath him.

Let's explore the roots of this snobbery. Consider that coaches and athletes all have a general agreement about how many reps to do of a given exercise:

• 1-5 reps for strength
• 5-12 reps for hypertrophy
• 15+ reps for endurance

This is how most programs are written.

But is it really so cut and dried? Think back to everyone you've ever met who can bang out over 50 push-ups and 20 pull-ups or chin-ups. Weren't they all pretty damn strong? Didn't they all have at least some decent level of musculature?

There are a lot of guys in the military who, on a steady diet of push-ups and pull-ups, hit some awesome numbers in the bench press and weighted pull-up with little or no training.

Related:  More on doing bodyweight exercises every day

Once you start getting into serious rep ranges, it's not simply about endurance. It's strengthening the pattern and also building a platform of endurance so your body can tolerate more training.

It might be helpful to change your mindset. Ask yourself how you get strong:

Well, you lift heavy stuff many times, as often as possible, for a long time.

How could you get to the point where you can tolerate the volume required to get strong?

You do more reps and build your tolerance.

Not only that, but doing higher rep work in the form of bodyweight exercises is especially helpful for strengthening the other stuff that gets ignored, like joints, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage (which have no direct blood supply and only change through movement).

The Shower Trigger

So maybe high reps sounds like a good idea, but for some reason you're not ready to commit to doing high-rep work every day. I get that. You probably can't bust out mega-sets of push-ups any time you want at work.

So how about doing them right before you shower? Not only is this practical, you now have a trigger for the new habit:

"When I take a shower (trigger), I'll first do push-ups."

The Hershel Walker Experiment

A.  Push-ups  3 minutes (rest as needed)
B.  Squats  5 minutes (rest as needed)

Here's how I broke it down:

A.  The 3-minute push-up set:

• 10 Plyo push-ups (for max height)
• 30 Back-of-wrist push-ups
• 30 Push-ups (conventional)
• Hindu push-ups (as many as possible in the remaining time)

For Hindu push-ups the rest position of the downward dog movement let's you "stay in the set" while still getting a slight rest before doing another rep.

B.  The 5-minute squat set:

• Bodyweight squat
• Toe-touch (alternate between the two after each rep)

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