Pushups for Overworked Former-Titans
This... sheer volume of work, is really getting on my nerves. I'm losing weight and gaining inches around my waist. Working 60 hour workweeks is getting sucky. But the nice thing about being overworked is one gets creative. Creative means one gets to do nifty things without ever having time to set foot in a gym. Without having to leave the office even. Like pushups.
But pushups are pussy things, if you're the powerlifting type... or are they? I do recall Louie Simmons' Westside crew doing them for GPP or active recovery... The trick is to find a protocol that gets you to do a LOT throughout the day, with a reasonable amount of intensity.
The trick is to, every 10 or 15 or 20 or whenever minutes, when bored, when tired of reading, to get down on the floor and do some pushups. With no warm-up, these sets out of nowhere have a basic progression of feel:
1) You start out CREAKY. No warm up. It actually feels difficult.
2) You're PRIMED. You're warm enough from a few reps and you're in the groove.
3) You're PUMPED. You can feel yourself working, feels good...
4) You're TIRED. Your reps start to slow down...
5) You're STRUGGLING. Your reps are literally grinding. You have little left in you.
6) FAILURE.
So the basic logic of my pushup routine is to have several variants thrown into one giant set. I arrange them in order of difficulty (for me):
Easy:
1) Medium-Width Pushups (humerus 45 degrees relative to central body line)
2) Wide Pushups (like wide bench presses)
Intermediate:
3) Narrow Pushups (arms clipped to the sides)
4) Diamond Pushups (hands touching. Heavy on the triceps)
5) Hindu Pushups (search the net, you'll find these)
Hard:
6) Side-to-Side Pushups (arms at wide distance. descend toward one hand at a time. Almost as hard as one-arm)
7) One-Hand Pushups
Now here's how the routine goes:
1) Do a few arm swings and circles just so you don't hurt yourself.
2) Go down and do some easy variants, til you progress from creaky to primed.
3) Do a few intermediate variants, still remaining well primed.
4) Do the hardest variant, til you struggle. Don't push too far! When the execution speed drops and you start to grind, move to number 5.
5) Go back to intermediate difficulty, which should feel easy. Rep out til you start to struggle and grind.
6) Drop to easy movements, and rep out til you start to slow down. (Don't wait til you grind. Grinding in an easy movement is a sign that you overdid it.)
7) Get back to work.
The thing is after, you got reasonable loading from stages 4 and 5, and a good pump going from stages 5 and 6, but never enough reps to actually be tired. So I can do about 5 of these giant sets all the time.
The reps for me are something like this:
2) 5r fast medium width
3) 5r fast narrow/diamond, 5r wide
4) 3r per side one hand, 5r per side side-to-side
5) 5r jumping medium, 5r wide
6) 5r medium, fast
So that's about 30-40 pushups in a go, getting up to about 85% intensity (with the 1-arm pushups). Keeps me feeling good.
Now if only I didn't sweat, I could do this *much* more often. But I hate sweating at work. Really.