I don't think it's advocating for doing a single pushup. Seems to be about the idea of simple physical tests (walking speed, number of pushups in a minute, grip strength) being better predictors of health than BMI.
Right, and presumably are useless once people try to game them. 'Useless' might be too strong a term, but you can't e.g. decrease your mortality by training your grip strength.
It's not that it would degrade your health, it's that it wouldn't significantly impact it. Doing dedicated grip training, for example, will radically increase your grip strength (and I found it super fun to do/have), but it is very doubtful that it will increase your longevity. These correlations/proxies are based on aggregates of untrained people. Once you train it, it is no longer a good metric.
For things like walking speed, it's a little harder to game it without actually increasing your cardiovascular health. But without knowing why something is a proxy, it might be useless/less-useful. For example, if fast walking speed is due to a healthy cardiovascular system, and you notice that your walking speed is low, you might train your walking speed. With effort you might get your walking speed up to 'very fast for non-athletes'. But if you had poor CV health for some underlying reason, you wouldn't have addressed that reason, you would just have masked the proxy. Of course, training walking speed is likely to have positive effects on your CV health, so I'm not saying "don't bother walking faster", I'm just saying that it may cause it to be a much more flawed indicator.
So build a battery of tests and aggregate them into a 'score' of health. You can't optimize each aspect to get the best score without actually improving your overall health.
But the point isn't that e.g. walking fast is bad for your health, it's that when it isn't being explicitly trained for, it is a marker of health. Once you explicitly train it, then it stops being that marker, even though it may still have positive effects on your health.
What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health.
For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably very well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.
The question here is whether or not doing the exercise needed to get a stronger grip causes mortality to go down. I don't think that as been empirically determined.
I understood the title slightly differently: the ultimate conclusion was a general pattern of conscientious health behavior is the real predictor. So those that do at least one push-up are likely to be healthy, even though that is purely correlation and not causation. All of these other metrics that have surprisingly high correlation are indirectly measuring whether you generally live healthily.
To expand on this, BMI was created as a population level comparison in the early 1800's, which it does a decent job at. It was not designed as something to look at a single individual with, let alone diagnose a health condition.
But the way it is used to categorise people in a blanket way in many area's is one of concern however.
I say this as somebody who is barrel chested, short legs (28 inside leg in inches) and large upper torso for somebody who is 6 feet 1 inch high and size 13 shoes (UK size, so size 14 in America). I always fall foul of many norm's in society. Always failed a BMI, even when you could count my ribs. Yet come across so many medical professionals who use it as gospel that it's almost religious with them. Same with calori intakes.
But then society often loves to define normal and project that. Be that imposing lark hour mentality upon night owls and leverage disdain upon them, or just calling somebody obese because of some legacy data metric that does not take into account that nobody is perfectly normal. Equally ignores that muscle is heavier than fat, just picks an arbitrary weight based upon gender and height and fills in all the blanks with norm values.
BMI as a metric needs improving - anybody aware of more refined and granular methods that can or are being used?
Sorry if I was unclear, I agree that using BMI to categorize people is a mistake. I think for it's original purpose of comparing two populations it has some value.
In terms of a better model Body Fat Percentage is pretty easy to take now, at my last physical I just had to hold a little electronic device for around 10 seconds and it gave the result.
After reading that those who could do at least 40 pushups without stopping [0] had a 96% lower risk of heart disease, I started doing pushups each day until I could do 40. I'm surprised by how much better I feel.
Not the OP, but the method that worked for me when I was training for the military years ago was to (situation permitting) drop down and do five push ups every half hour for most of the day. Do that for a week, then the next week add five more. In a few weeks you’re doing 20-30 push ups every half hour and the maximum you become capable of doing if you have to take a fitness test goes through the roof.
One method is doing sets of 10 reps (or whatever number of pushups you can do in a row right now) and gradually reduce the time between sets. For instance, you start resting 60 seconds between sets. After a week, you rest 40 seconds between sets. And so on and so forth. After a few of months you should be able to do 40 pushups in a row.
I was able to get to 20 pushups and I kept increasing by one or two a day. Then when I hit around 35 I pushed myself and keep going until I hit 40. It took a little over a week and a half I think.
These measures may be good indicators, until people optimize for them specifically. It reminds me of algorithm questions in tech interviews. They may have been effective at finding the right candidate before it became common knowledge to study algorithms. Measures like walking speed, grip strength, or pushup speed may only be good health indicators, until people begin to optimize for those measures specifically.
Really optimize for them? Doing pushups or increasing grip strengths are not things that you can improve in isolation. To get to even 20 pushups, you can't be obsese, you need enough strength in your shoulders, the core has to be strong. Similarly, grip strength, if you've just let yourself go, there is no chance you have any strength left in your forearms.
What sort of form are these people maintaining? with proper form, and slow and controlled motion I would be very surprised if more than 1 in 1000-10,000 people could do hundred pushups in one set.
I went through the http://www.hundredpushups.com/ program when I was at peak fitness (on multiple sports teams) and it tooks everything out of me over 10 weeks to hit the hundred push up in one set milestone.
Fifty push-ups in one go with excellent form is the base level of fitness in the British Army (probably similar in most other armies). A hundred in one go is a reasonable for many people to reach. Many very fit people count as obese, especially those with the muscles to do push-ups. The Serjeant Major of the British Army said in a TV interview that he was 'obese'.
The percentile graph of max number of pushups is not a linear function. Its entirely possible for a large section of population to reach 50, the same way its possible for a large section of the population to hit the 20 second 100 m, but for almost no one to hit the 10 second 100 m.
This doesn't pass the smell test without more evidence. a) how do you know 'tons of obese people' b) how many of them have you actually seen do one real push ups let alone 100.
Not the parent, but that's really easy. Much easier to know a ton of obese people than a ton of anorexic people.
For instance, I'm on the low end of obese (by American standards). If you take myself and about 5-6 of the people I see at Friday Night Magic, that's one ton right there.
May be you can make a video and post it on youtube. People would definitely watch it. It's extremely difficult to do a hundred pushups in one go - even for athletic non-obese people.
I dont have a scale, but last I checked, by the standard accounting I am obese (BMI 31) and I can do 20 handstand push ups.
100 push ups is just practice. I used to do 1000 free weight squats every morning. I do exercise a fair amount, but if you don't have any physical problems and are healthy, 100 push ups is like walking up a hill.
Your claim is ludicrous. What is "tons"? I will have to see an obese person do 100 push ups before I believe you. Doing 20 push ups is _hard_. Doing 100 push ups non-stop is athlete level performance.
Really 100 pushups in one go, being obese, lol! Since you know a ton of these people, why don't you post a video, btw when I say obese ( its not some muscled dude like the rock, who qualifies as obsese when you consider an outdated measure like BMI), I mean a real fat guy, who has above 39% body fat!
Push-ups was one area of excercise in which I would always struggle - even at a time when I was a top competitive swimmer and also area Kendo, lots of cicling, running. I was fit. But pushups always a struggle.
Solution - do pushups at an angle, so use a chair pushup from that (a comfy sofar arm rests even better and perhaps safer as well). This does mean you are using less effort, but you are still working those muscles and will be able to gradually lower the angle. Bigger the angle, less effort (yay science). So even those with extremely weak muscles involved in a pushup, can do them without struggling and exerting themselves as well as possible injury trying the usual style push ups.
TL;DR Push Ups involve muscles that you may not use in other sports and activities. Push Ups at an angle can aid those with weak muscles who struggle to do a normal pushup and aid them in building the muscles up to the level that will enable them to do a normal pushup.
BMI is highly useful. That it doesn't work for Dwayne Johnson is merely an attempt to reject the whole of it because known edge cases don't work. We know where it doesn't work: extreme heights and serious athletes who are enough standard deviations of muscle mass outside the norm. For that, we can do body fat %. But body fat% is harder to measure, so we've got a quick yardstick: It is BMI.
BMI is rejected because it tells people they're obese and since its unhealthy, they need to change themselves. Noone likes hearing that. The truth hurts.
You'll see these common rejections:
1. Bodyfat loss is hard, so its claimed as not a good measure.
2. BMI has outliers so _mine_ being bad doesn't count.
3. Because not being obese does not provide data about health, they attempt to deny obesity as a poor health marker. This is almost always "you can't tell a skinny person is unhealthy" retort as an excuse to reject obesity as unhealthy.
They will not escape the evidence-based scientific truth that obesity is unhealthy.
I'm 5'11 and 185. I'm in the overweight section of BMI, yet have under 10% bodyfat. I'm definitely not an elite athlete. I used to play hockey at a junior level, but now just bike to and from work. Every thing during my physical is in a good to great range. No issues what so ever. Yet BMI says I'm overweight. To me that's an issue with the index.
Those electrical scales only give a general indication and are not calibrated to be clinically accurate. I have one myself and it fluctuates up and down significantly day to day. So it's basically just a fun toy, not a true medical device. You shouldn't cite such unreliable numbers to try and make a point here.
You have a body fat percentage that should result in a well defined 6-pack and you're barely into the overweight category. You've successfully double-checked by doing a body fat percentage measurement. BMI was still a good and fast check with minimal cost.
To get those #s you would need to have an extreme diet/exercise regime. 185 at 5’11 is either a lot of extra fat or muscle. If you are Sub 10% you definitely have a super defined 8 pack and some of that weird muscle striation body builders get. Would be very surprised if you achieved that by just biking to work.
"The 7% guy is definitely following a very strict regimen,” he explains. He’s probably eliminating certain macronutrients, like being Paleo with no carbs, and is definitely paying very close attention to what he eats.
Meanwhile the 10 to 12% guy is in constant flux—some weeks he’s at 9 percent, others he’s at 12%. “He might have a cheat meal—splurging on wings instead of steamed asparagus when out with the guys—but not necessarily a cheat day,” McCall says.
Someone at 15% is having a cheat day. “He’s paying attention and making certain decisions—no fried foods, burger without the bun, no accidental break room pastries. But he’s not uber health conscious,” he adds."
BMI is useless for the people who care about fitness the most. It's optimal for those who don't care and needn't worry about it. Then it allows those who are at risk and understand the least to fool themselves.
BMI uses height and weight to estimate body fat % because those were the easiest statistics Quetelet had access to. There's speculation that BMI is effectively a proxy for waist size, given assumptions about body shape (how high the person's waist is) and density (fat to muscle and bone ratio).
Waist-circumference-to-height ratio is a proven predictor of cardio health, and is only slightly harder to measure than BMI. Waist-to-hip-ratio is another strong predictor for health outcomes, and can flag people with a normal BMI that have an elevated mortality risk.
A group of friends and I just started a challenge to do 10K pushups in 1 year.
Six months ago, I tried doing a 100 pushups in 1 hour. Couldn't do it. Got spaghetti arms, couldn't move them the next day.
After doing this challenge for 3 weeks, I can do 60/minute and can easily top 150 in one hour, without breaking a sweat. The 10K goal seems too easy now, so setting we've set our sights on 50K for the year. It's been purely about consistency and a smidgen of testing our limits every once in a while. There's no schedule or set limit each day -- just as many as possible given your day.
Oh and for fun I added a Twilio/Flask app so we can text in our push-ups to a Google spreadsheet, which sends out a daily email (through Apps Script) with a few fun analytics (average, estimated end date etc.).
This entire article (and most like it) can be summed up by one of its very own sentences:
Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that
correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a
person’s overall health—which can otherwise be totally
impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly.
“Yes, how hard you can squeeze a grip meter. This was a better predictor of mortality than blood pressure or overall physical activity. A prior study found that grip strength among people in their 80s predicted the likelihood of making it past 100. Even more impressive, grip strength had good predictive ability in a study among 18-year-olds in the Swedish military on cardiovascular death 25 years later.”
In the cited study, a significant difference between highest pushup group and lowest pushup group is a mean age of 35 and 48 years, respectively. It is well known that age is the strongest predictor of cardiovascular events.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadFor things like walking speed, it's a little harder to game it without actually increasing your cardiovascular health. But without knowing why something is a proxy, it might be useless/less-useful. For example, if fast walking speed is due to a healthy cardiovascular system, and you notice that your walking speed is low, you might train your walking speed. With effort you might get your walking speed up to 'very fast for non-athletes'. But if you had poor CV health for some underlying reason, you wouldn't have addressed that reason, you would just have masked the proxy. Of course, training walking speed is likely to have positive effects on your CV health, so I'm not saying "don't bother walking faster", I'm just saying that it may cause it to be a much more flawed indicator.
What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health.
For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably very well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.
It's called an outlier.
I say this as somebody who is barrel chested, short legs (28 inside leg in inches) and large upper torso for somebody who is 6 feet 1 inch high and size 13 shoes (UK size, so size 14 in America). I always fall foul of many norm's in society. Always failed a BMI, even when you could count my ribs. Yet come across so many medical professionals who use it as gospel that it's almost religious with them. Same with calori intakes.
But then society often loves to define normal and project that. Be that imposing lark hour mentality upon night owls and leverage disdain upon them, or just calling somebody obese because of some legacy data metric that does not take into account that nobody is perfectly normal. Equally ignores that muscle is heavier than fat, just picks an arbitrary weight based upon gender and height and fills in all the blanks with norm values.
BMI as a metric needs improving - anybody aware of more refined and granular methods that can or are being used?
[0] https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.h...
Edit: also focus on your form!
The technique is discussed here for pushups.
http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/
That's ridiculous - I know tons of 'obese' people who can do a hundred pushups in one go.
I went through the http://www.hundredpushups.com/ program when I was at peak fitness (on multiple sports teams) and it tooks everything out of me over 10 weeks to hit the hundred push up in one set milestone.
Not the parent, but that's really easy. Much easier to know a ton of obese people than a ton of anorexic people.
For instance, I'm on the low end of obese (by American standards). If you take myself and about 5-6 of the people I see at Friday Night Magic, that's one ton right there.
100 push ups is just practice. I used to do 1000 free weight squats every morning. I do exercise a fair amount, but if you don't have any physical problems and are healthy, 100 push ups is like walking up a hill.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Solution - do pushups at an angle, so use a chair pushup from that (a comfy sofar arm rests even better and perhaps safer as well). This does mean you are using less effort, but you are still working those muscles and will be able to gradually lower the angle. Bigger the angle, less effort (yay science). So even those with extremely weak muscles involved in a pushup, can do them without struggling and exerting themselves as well as possible injury trying the usual style push ups.
TL;DR Push Ups involve muscles that you may not use in other sports and activities. Push Ups at an angle can aid those with weak muscles who struggle to do a normal pushup and aid them in building the muscles up to the level that will enable them to do a normal pushup.
BMI is rejected because it tells people they're obese and since its unhealthy, they need to change themselves. Noone likes hearing that. The truth hurts.
You'll see these common rejections: 1. Bodyfat loss is hard, so its claimed as not a good measure. 2. BMI has outliers so _mine_ being bad doesn't count. 3. Because not being obese does not provide data about health, they attempt to deny obesity as a poor health marker. This is almost always "you can't tell a skinny person is unhealthy" retort as an excuse to reject obesity as unhealthy.
They will not escape the evidence-based scientific truth that obesity is unhealthy.
Isn’t this entire conversation about unreliable indices?
"The 7% guy is definitely following a very strict regimen,” he explains. He’s probably eliminating certain macronutrients, like being Paleo with no carbs, and is definitely paying very close attention to what he eats.
Meanwhile the 10 to 12% guy is in constant flux—some weeks he’s at 9 percent, others he’s at 12%. “He might have a cheat meal—splurging on wings instead of steamed asparagus when out with the guys—but not necessarily a cheat day,” McCall says.
Someone at 15% is having a cheat day. “He’s paying attention and making certain decisions—no fried foods, burger without the bun, no accidental break room pastries. But he’s not uber health conscious,” he adds."
BMI requires simple passive equipment to measure, the subject doesn't really have to participate and the subject is not at risk.
But it really can be misleading and counter-productive when you start exercising when fat is replaced by muscle.
We really need more accurate static measurement devices that don't need to weigh you underwater. Fatbit maybe? :)
Waist-circumference-to-height ratio is a proven predictor of cardio health, and is only slightly harder to measure than BMI. Waist-to-hip-ratio is another strong predictor for health outcomes, and can flag people with a normal BMI that have an elevated mortality risk.
A group of friends and I just started a challenge to do 10K pushups in 1 year.
Six months ago, I tried doing a 100 pushups in 1 hour. Couldn't do it. Got spaghetti arms, couldn't move them the next day.
After doing this challenge for 3 weeks, I can do 60/minute and can easily top 150 in one hour, without breaking a sweat. The 10K goal seems too easy now, so setting we've set our sights on 50K for the year. It's been purely about consistency and a smidgen of testing our limits every once in a while. There's no schedule or set limit each day -- just as many as possible given your day.
Oh and for fun I added a Twilio/Flask app so we can text in our push-ups to a Google spreadsheet, which sends out a daily email (through Apps Script) with a few fun analytics (average, estimated end date etc.).
Wow, I wonder how that percentage has changed over the lifetime of the nation, as well as the figure globally over time.
First chart under 'figures / tables' https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4