I’m going to piss off a lot of people when I ruin their classic chest exercise with this blog post, but oh well.
I remember as a kid in martial arts, my friends and I would have push-up and sit up competitions. We’d stand in the mirror and try to flex our bird chests to show off for each other.
One of my friends always beat me. By the age of 15, he could do 100 pushups in 50 secs. I still haven’t been able to hit this benchmark!
Of course, this whole thing was before we found the wonders of the gym and started using weights instead of home exercises.
I’m not knocking home exercises, I’m just a fan of efficiency and the shortest route to my goal.
Bodyweight exercises can be great if you’re going for a particular body type of strength and not size. I’m not pursuing that goal, so I use weights.
I say strength and not size because doing bodyweight exercises will give you some size, but only enough to match the strength needed to lift that amount of weight.
Once you can lift that amount of weight successfully, the muscle will continue to get stronger, but size will come a lot slower after that.
All Chest Exercises Are NOT Created Equal!
If you are building for size and strength in your chest, the winner hands down is still the bench press.
It incorporates the most muscles in one exercise with the chest muscles doing a lot of work (depending on your arm placement).
Push-Ups DO NOT significantly help with your overall bench press from my experience and understanding.
Here’s why…
Push-Ups use your Type I, or fast twitch fibers, but it uses them into do a different movement for a different weight. Sure you’ll be able to do more and more push-ups the more you practice, but the weight you’re pushing isn’t significantly increases, so your strength and size won’t significantly increase either.
You have to understand that muscles build themselves to do a particular task better, and that’s about it.
They stick to muscle memory (neural connections already made) and not much cross-over is done between exercises.
I remember reading an article years ago about a man that did a study doing push-ups, flys, and bench presses.
He did only one of the exercises for a period of 6 to 8 weeks. Then he tried to see if the amount of weight he could do on one of the other exercises increased…and it did’nt!
He tried flys to increase his bench and that didn’t work, although he saw growth in his pectoral muscles.
He tried Push Ups to increase his bench and that didn’t work, although he saw growth in his pectoral muscles.
The main reason is that he hadn’t build the necessary neural connections (brain to muscle connections) that would allow him to bench more efficiently.
Neither does it go the other way.
Before I started lifting regularly, I could do only about 60 to 70 push-ups.
Before I wrote this post, I was just able to crank out 80 before I ate carpet. But I’ve increased my bench press max by 50 lbs since I’ve started!
I still can’t do 100 full push ups none stop, but who cares! I’m getting a larger, fuller, stronger chest with weights.
So just keep your goal in mind when you are choosing to do a particular exercise next time. This will keep you from falling prey to any gimmicks.
Muscles are funny things. It’s weird sometimes how little we understand about our own bodies.
Until next time, Happy Lifting!
Mitchell
Filed under Body Building Tips by on Mar 23rd, 2009. Comment. 
