Thought my fellow programmers/nerds might find this blog post useful and interesting, and hopefully motivational. There isn't much else I'd rather do than screw around with my computers, write code, etc, which has naturally made getting into shape kind of difficult. This year I resolved to do something about it and so embarked on a series of ridiculous exercise quests and am now in the best shape of my adult life.
Do you have any concerns that you're only doing push movements? My physiotherapist told me that it's quite easy to build imbalanced muscles by excessively doing only push ups, without incorporating "pull" movements in my exercises too. It seems like you would've come across this in your research but don't think it's an issue seeing as you seem very healthy and happy with your current shape?
Sorry for slow response. At this point I'm doing much more than push movements. The pushups remain (I did 527 on Saturday for instance) however I'm also doing bootcamp-style track workouts, occasionally lifting weights, running hard, and eating very clean. And yes I am beyond happy with current fitness level and shape however new goals will be set for 2026. :-)
This is inspirational, I am also looking into getting back in shape, getting my weight up since I am going to be approaching 40. And randomly some part of my body just hurts during the day.
Awesome. I like how fitness snowballs. Once you develop a decent body, it feels like a shame to eat bad food. And so on. It's like a guy who has a beat up car, doesn't like the way it looks, so doesn't take care of it - then buys a nice car, likes how it looks, so starts taking care of it. Staying fit becomes easier and easier.
My push-up story: I used to think I can easily do many pushups until I met my personal trainer and did push-ups in front of him. In his opinion, none of my pushups were correct. It was discouraging to hear someone dissect my mistakes: elbows flaring out instead of being held close to the body, hand position too wide or too forward, hips dropping. Of these, fixing the last mistake of hips dropping seemed the most elusive. Some days I could control the hips perfectly well, but other times I seemed to be unable to control the movement of the hips.
I still do 50 pushups per week with a mix of good and bad form (which is of course way less than 10k per year), but I found that I've mentally associated pushups with an exercise that I couldn't do well. It doesn't give me any dopamine boost. I'm much happier doing something else like barbell squats which I could do with good form and increasing weights.
If you do hundreds of half assed pushups every day, consistently, you'll still be able to do 100 perfect pushups in one set when some pedantic "those aren't pushups" type tries to make you feel bad for finding a path to fitness without being a form nazi.
All that matters is area under the curve - do them daily and in quantity. Hungover? do them. Sleep deprived? do them. Headache? do them.
Form is so far in diminishing returns land it's hilarious that people bring it up, and in my experience often what's considered "perfect form" actually puts more strain on joints and increases likelihood of injury.
Sometimes I feel better after a fast food meal. It's like a fat and sugar high, almost like you're feeling the fat coursing through your veins. Most of the time I definitely don't feel better.
Congrats on the results, that's awesome! I like the simplicity of push ups; you can do them wherever and it's very hard to come up with an excuse to not do them. Have you considered throwing pull-ups into the mix?
Personally I found it very very easy to come up with excuses to not go to the gym. Too tired, too far, it'll be too busy at this time, I don't have enough time, etc. The closest gym to me is 15 minutes. That's 30 minutes round trip + ~$260/yr + having to wait for most machines. Going 5 days a week would be 130 hours/yr in just driving for me!
I finally cancelled my membership and built a home gym. Best decision I've ever made. It costed me around ~$1200 in total for 300lb of weights, a power rack, an olympic barbell, a diy bench, and a full calisthenics "park" [1]. I've been a lot more consistent as I have zero excuses to not workout! The only thing I miss is the gym environment though; it's harder to be motivated when nobody is watching. I've found having a goal/routine to help with that though.
> When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food?
These foods are designed to push the yum button with a carefully chosen mix of fat, salt, carbs, umami components, sugar, protein.
It's not spaced out the way it would be eating the same ingredients slowly as a Greek salad with lamb, pita and feta, but the ingredient lists are not dissimilar, lamb for beef. The point is that ultra processed food inputs mainline all of the positive experience into a remarkably brief period of time.
Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth wrote about this in "the space merchants" in 1952. I don't think they expected it to come true inside their decade, but the seeds were laid by Ray Kroc and others across that time.
I don't deny your reasoning but I kind of say you're arriving at a rejection of the yum impact a long way after you've been hooked in.
If it's any inspiration to other folks out there, or if my anecdotes are of any value, I went from 220lbs down to 165lbs over the course of about 2 years and have kept it off now for another 3 years so far.
The main things that worked for me:
- Eating things that kept me full enough: I would wake up and have a light breakfast (one of: bagel, eggs, toast, yogurt), exercise mostly fasted (30min low-intensity run, 1hr bike ride), get home and have a protein shake (some say casein protein leaves you feeling fuller longer than whey, I experienced this), snack on healthy things throughout the day (eg: nuts, protein bar), drink lots of water, eat whatever I wanted for dinner but not to the point of feeling stuffed (I really like pasta), and going to bed around 10-11pm.
The shift for me was not working in the office anymore, which meant no shortcuts like burgers for lunch or expensive food trucks to fight the office depression.
Consistent cardio was also the other piece for me, not only did it help a ton with my mental health and stress, but the low intensity cardio day over day I saw producing weight loss results.
No gyms, no fad diets, just consistent daily-ish cardio, not eating too much, sleeping well, drinking water. Though I know everyone is different :-)
My problem is I can’t do 1. If I could do just 1 I feel like I could slowly work my way up to 2, 5, 10, 100, whatever. Starting at 0 trying to get to 1 feels insurmountable.
I have tried all kinds of advice from the Internet. I tried doing pushups against the wall or on my knees. I kept that up for quite awhile, but still never got close to doing 1 real normal push-up correctly. I don’t have the discipline to keep going when it takes that long to get any results.
If you can do 3+ knee pushups then you should be able to just about do 1 normal pushup. Surely if you progress to 10+ knee pushups you can do at least 1-2 normal ones.
Maybe you are not eating enough protein to grow your muscles when doing the knee pushups.
If you're a keyboard jockey like me you probably have or are prone to have shoulder issues. You really should be doing 2:1 pulling:pushing, or even omit most pushing entirely.
Nothing helped me as much as learning this. Spend more time doing facepulls, rows, pulldowns, and any weird variation you can come up with which works your back muscles. I went from a hunchback to mostly not a hunchback and my shoulders are better for it.
There are few things that will blow up your shoulders as quickly as doing pressing movements wrong. If you want to embark on a pushup journey at least learn good form.
I must take a moment to second the bit about proper push-up form.
Fantastic exercise you can do just about anywhere.
I went an hour out of town to watch the Perseids a couple months back. I'm a bit of a gym rat, so I did sets of push-ups to keep my body temperature up, though I'm already shivering by the time I'm starting each set. So, I completely neglected to even think about the proper form (I made the classic mistake of squaring outward my elbows), and further aggravating the circumstances was dealing with the awkward road angles/grades.
With just a handful of sets, I'm pretty sure I permanently damaged my right shoulder. Ugh. The Perseids were fantastic, though :)
I tried for quite a while to do the "100 pushups" program but I could never get past 7 pushups. They can be a deceptively very difficult thing to get right.
For one, you find it takes great concentration and continuous form checks not to do things that route 100% of the exercise through your shoulders instead of chest. Your elbows will want to flare out all the way, because our body just prefers shoulders for some reason and really really doesn't want the chest to be exercised, and pretty soon you'll have a shoulder impingement. At this point you have to give up on the exercise for a while to not inflame it further and make the injury permanent. Even trying my hardest to do the form perfectly I start feeling something in my shoulder eventually.
Besides the form, I just found them very hard to progress on compared to other exercises. For half a year or so a few years ago, I did them all the time wherever I was to pass the time, usually to failure. But I just never found that point where I could keep going and going like most people reach easily. When I started my form was wrong and I think I could get to 8 but once I corrected the form I never got that far. The number just rose to 6 or 7 and wouldn't budge. I tracked all my calories and macros - I was only very slightly below maintenance while making sure I had at least 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, every day. Here's the log from when I tried the 100 pushups program at the end:
Failed week 1 and had to redo it 1 time, failed week 2 4 times and had to go back to week 1, passed week 1, failed week 2 and gave up.
I got an optional free testosterone test recently out of curiosity. It was only 326 which is in "reference" but the consensus online seems to be that this is too low for 30 and men tend to feel much better at a level of 500+. So I'm strongly considering starting TRT and trying again, maybe with a generous calorie surplus this time to make sure there are no possible obstacles? Not sure what else I could do to move past such a plateau. I hit a similar one in the bench press too.
Dude you're being way too hard on yourself and fixating on the wrong thing (form) as a self-imposed barrier to progress.
I'm guessing you're overweight if you're under 10 pushups. Just do what you can, do them daily, forget the form, the key at this point is to develop the habit of routine and the self-discipline to stick to doing the physical and annoying thing on a daily basis.
Beyond that focus on nutrition so your weight is reeled in, the pushups become easy when your weight is normal.
I love this DIY method! Sometimes you just know what's best for yourself.
I've done something very similar for about 8 years now. Push-ups and crunches (and sometimes burpees). I spent most of my life thin, just because of my lucky metabolism. In high school, people thought I was anorexic even though I ate junk food all the time. I'm someone who hates to break a sweat unless absolutely necessary, who would never go to a gym, and who also works a very sedentary programming job... and everything was just fine until alcohol and age caught up with me in my late 30s.
So, I remembered the stupid stuff they had us do in high school gym class. There were actual educational lessons there, right? Push-ups and crunches.
I use a Moka Pot to make my coffee in the morning, it takes exactly 9 minutes to boil on my stove. I started off with 30 push-ups and 30 crunches a day, before the pot boiled, before I got out of my underwear. I kept adding a few a day until I was at 100 + 100 (Initially I would take breaks in the push-ups at 25, 50, and 75 - but eventually I could just do 100 without stopping). The results of it were surprisingly good, for something that takes less than 9 minutes of your day.
Just a side note about McDonald's -- I've only ever gotten one rancid McDonald's meal in my life, and it was REALLY bad. I almost never eat fast food anymore either, except in a very particular case.
The author says:
>>When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food?
Me. I have some level of IBS - not debilitating, but enough that I don't want to leave the house sometimes. I also have lived in a lot of countries with questionable food sanitation, although now I'm just in America and eat a lot of Indian and Thai food. Anyway, for whatever reason, if I need to catch a flight in the morning, the sure shot 100% bulletproof way to know that I will not need a bathroom is to eat a Big Mac, nuggets and fries the night before. That meal can somehow completely stop a multi-day IBS episode in its tracks. I don't do it unless I need to, but somehow it completely calms my gut and binds up whatever's in there. I literally do it almost every time before I fly. My home cooking is much more likely to leave me stuck in a bathroom somewhere.
Make of it what you will.
One other thing - walking. This is what really caused me to lose a lot of weight and get back to within my optimal zone. I am (as reads the bio) an alcoholic. When I get done working at home, I go to a bar. I track my calories, and about 50% of them are alcohol. To motivate myself to walk, I started picking bars that were further away. And then much further away. So if I'm going out for 3 beers, I'll often walk 1.5 miles to the first bar, then have another beer each half-mile on the way back. This makes an astounding difference. You're actually hungry when you get home, still have a light buzz, listened to some interesting podcasts, and you sleep a lot better.
All of this is advice from a 45-year-old whose habits are very, very bad - I am not some paragon of health. I smoke like a chimney. I'll probably die young. A little bit of extra struggle goes a long way, though.
Love this. I am also 45 and been a beer loving “alcoholic” since me mid 20s. I was rail thin until maybe 22-23 and then gained around 40 pounds over the next several years. I’ve lost maybe 20 of those pounds once and looked and felt great but couldn’t keep it off. I’ve currently lost 15ish pounds in the last 2 months and am determined to get to my high school weight. I now only drink on weekends. I eat ok but not great (but certainly not horribly).
My biggest new thing is running 5 days a week. I start my morning every day with a 4-6 mile run and don’t let myself make excuses for why I can’t run. If I have an early meeting, then I run in the evening. This has helped me so much.
Wow. Good for you. A 4 mile run would almost certainly kill me. I think I'd drop dead after about a mile. Cardio is the one thing I'm really not good on, and I have a minor arrhythmia. About 20 burpees and I feel close to blacking out. I want to improve on it, but very carefully. But it's still been possible to lose a good amount of weight without putting a lot of strain on my heart. Still not at my high school weight, though! I was 130. I've come down from a high of 175 to 155, and have a hard time getting below that.
Everybody says "drink a lot of water", but nobody says how much. Often people say that you need at least 2.5L/day. My constant headaches stopped and I'm finally able to lose weight (from 120kg) after I started to drink 4.5L/day. It's hard to keep up with such amount of water, but it looks like it was necessary.
I lost all of my back strength during my startup days, which ended in chronic back pain. Worst, trying to run or even a soft jog would make things worse. The thing that reversed the trend was SUP, which now I do all year round even in frigid waters. Back pain is gone and I can run again. Still trying to lose weight though.
Agree this is very inspiring - I suspect many folks out there might respond to a simple approach like this. I have fallen off several wagons in this regard, Convict Conditioning and the Busy Dad Routine most recently - generally because, although fun and encouraging initially, they are just too much faff from an administrative perspective!
I am up for this! One question: do you accrue push-ups during the day in a 'greasing the groove' type approach and then stick in the total at end of day? Or more of a session? Just curious what was successful for you...
35 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadDo you have any concerns that you're only doing push movements? My physiotherapist told me that it's quite easy to build imbalanced muscles by excessively doing only push ups, without incorporating "pull" movements in my exercises too. It seems like you would've come across this in your research but don't think it's an issue seeing as you seem very healthy and happy with your current shape?
I still do 50 pushups per week with a mix of good and bad form (which is of course way less than 10k per year), but I found that I've mentally associated pushups with an exercise that I couldn't do well. It doesn't give me any dopamine boost. I'm much happier doing something else like barbell squats which I could do with good form and increasing weights.
All that matters is area under the curve - do them daily and in quantity. Hungover? do them. Sleep deprived? do them. Headache? do them.
Form is so far in diminishing returns land it's hilarious that people bring it up, and in my experience often what's considered "perfect form" actually puts more strain on joints and increases likelihood of injury.
Personally I found it very very easy to come up with excuses to not go to the gym. Too tired, too far, it'll be too busy at this time, I don't have enough time, etc. The closest gym to me is 15 minutes. That's 30 minutes round trip + ~$260/yr + having to wait for most machines. Going 5 days a week would be 130 hours/yr in just driving for me!
I finally cancelled my membership and built a home gym. Best decision I've ever made. It costed me around ~$1200 in total for 300lb of weights, a power rack, an olympic barbell, a diy bench, and a full calisthenics "park" [1]. I've been a lot more consistent as I have zero excuses to not workout! The only thing I miss is the gym environment though; it's harder to be motivated when nobody is watching. I've found having a goal/routine to help with that though.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ESce1kqRc
These foods are designed to push the yum button with a carefully chosen mix of fat, salt, carbs, umami components, sugar, protein.
It's not spaced out the way it would be eating the same ingredients slowly as a Greek salad with lamb, pita and feta, but the ingredient lists are not dissimilar, lamb for beef. The point is that ultra processed food inputs mainline all of the positive experience into a remarkably brief period of time.
Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth wrote about this in "the space merchants" in 1952. I don't think they expected it to come true inside their decade, but the seeds were laid by Ray Kroc and others across that time.
I don't deny your reasoning but I kind of say you're arriving at a rejection of the yum impact a long way after you've been hooked in.
If it's any inspiration to other folks out there, or if my anecdotes are of any value, I went from 220lbs down to 165lbs over the course of about 2 years and have kept it off now for another 3 years so far.
The main things that worked for me: - Eating things that kept me full enough: I would wake up and have a light breakfast (one of: bagel, eggs, toast, yogurt), exercise mostly fasted (30min low-intensity run, 1hr bike ride), get home and have a protein shake (some say casein protein leaves you feeling fuller longer than whey, I experienced this), snack on healthy things throughout the day (eg: nuts, protein bar), drink lots of water, eat whatever I wanted for dinner but not to the point of feeling stuffed (I really like pasta), and going to bed around 10-11pm.
The shift for me was not working in the office anymore, which meant no shortcuts like burgers for lunch or expensive food trucks to fight the office depression.
Consistent cardio was also the other piece for me, not only did it help a ton with my mental health and stress, but the low intensity cardio day over day I saw producing weight loss results.
No gyms, no fad diets, just consistent daily-ish cardio, not eating too much, sleeping well, drinking water. Though I know everyone is different :-)
I have tried all kinds of advice from the Internet. I tried doing pushups against the wall or on my knees. I kept that up for quite awhile, but still never got close to doing 1 real normal push-up correctly. I don’t have the discipline to keep going when it takes that long to get any results.
Maybe you are not eating enough protein to grow your muscles when doing the knee pushups.
so yeah, that's kinda the whole game
Nothing helped me as much as learning this. Spend more time doing facepulls, rows, pulldowns, and any weird variation you can come up with which works your back muscles. I went from a hunchback to mostly not a hunchback and my shoulders are better for it.
There are few things that will blow up your shoulders as quickly as doing pressing movements wrong. If you want to embark on a pushup journey at least learn good form.
Fantastic exercise you can do just about anywhere.
I went an hour out of town to watch the Perseids a couple months back. I'm a bit of a gym rat, so I did sets of push-ups to keep my body temperature up, though I'm already shivering by the time I'm starting each set. So, I completely neglected to even think about the proper form (I made the classic mistake of squaring outward my elbows), and further aggravating the circumstances was dealing with the awkward road angles/grades.
With just a handful of sets, I'm pretty sure I permanently damaged my right shoulder. Ugh. The Perseids were fantastic, though :)
Congrats on the journey WJ!
For one, you find it takes great concentration and continuous form checks not to do things that route 100% of the exercise through your shoulders instead of chest. Your elbows will want to flare out all the way, because our body just prefers shoulders for some reason and really really doesn't want the chest to be exercised, and pretty soon you'll have a shoulder impingement. At this point you have to give up on the exercise for a while to not inflame it further and make the injury permanent. Even trying my hardest to do the form perfectly I start feeling something in my shoulder eventually.
Besides the form, I just found them very hard to progress on compared to other exercises. For half a year or so a few years ago, I did them all the time wherever I was to pass the time, usually to failure. But I just never found that point where I could keep going and going like most people reach easily. When I started my form was wrong and I think I could get to 8 but once I corrected the form I never got that far. The number just rose to 6 or 7 and wouldn't budge. I tracked all my calories and macros - I was only very slightly below maintenance while making sure I had at least 1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, every day. Here's the log from when I tried the 100 pushups program at the end:
Failed week 1 and had to redo it 1 time, failed week 2 4 times and had to go back to week 1, passed week 1, failed week 2 and gave up.
I got an optional free testosterone test recently out of curiosity. It was only 326 which is in "reference" but the consensus online seems to be that this is too low for 30 and men tend to feel much better at a level of 500+. So I'm strongly considering starting TRT and trying again, maybe with a generous calorie surplus this time to make sure there are no possible obstacles? Not sure what else I could do to move past such a plateau. I hit a similar one in the bench press too.
I'm guessing you're overweight if you're under 10 pushups. Just do what you can, do them daily, forget the form, the key at this point is to develop the habit of routine and the self-discipline to stick to doing the physical and annoying thing on a daily basis.
Beyond that focus on nutrition so your weight is reeled in, the pushups become easy when your weight is normal.
I've done something very similar for about 8 years now. Push-ups and crunches (and sometimes burpees). I spent most of my life thin, just because of my lucky metabolism. In high school, people thought I was anorexic even though I ate junk food all the time. I'm someone who hates to break a sweat unless absolutely necessary, who would never go to a gym, and who also works a very sedentary programming job... and everything was just fine until alcohol and age caught up with me in my late 30s.
So, I remembered the stupid stuff they had us do in high school gym class. There were actual educational lessons there, right? Push-ups and crunches.
I use a Moka Pot to make my coffee in the morning, it takes exactly 9 minutes to boil on my stove. I started off with 30 push-ups and 30 crunches a day, before the pot boiled, before I got out of my underwear. I kept adding a few a day until I was at 100 + 100 (Initially I would take breaks in the push-ups at 25, 50, and 75 - but eventually I could just do 100 without stopping). The results of it were surprisingly good, for something that takes less than 9 minutes of your day.
Just a side note about McDonald's -- I've only ever gotten one rancid McDonald's meal in my life, and it was REALLY bad. I almost never eat fast food anymore either, except in a very particular case.
The author says:
>>When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food?
Me. I have some level of IBS - not debilitating, but enough that I don't want to leave the house sometimes. I also have lived in a lot of countries with questionable food sanitation, although now I'm just in America and eat a lot of Indian and Thai food. Anyway, for whatever reason, if I need to catch a flight in the morning, the sure shot 100% bulletproof way to know that I will not need a bathroom is to eat a Big Mac, nuggets and fries the night before. That meal can somehow completely stop a multi-day IBS episode in its tracks. I don't do it unless I need to, but somehow it completely calms my gut and binds up whatever's in there. I literally do it almost every time before I fly. My home cooking is much more likely to leave me stuck in a bathroom somewhere.
Make of it what you will.
One other thing - walking. This is what really caused me to lose a lot of weight and get back to within my optimal zone. I am (as reads the bio) an alcoholic. When I get done working at home, I go to a bar. I track my calories, and about 50% of them are alcohol. To motivate myself to walk, I started picking bars that were further away. And then much further away. So if I'm going out for 3 beers, I'll often walk 1.5 miles to the first bar, then have another beer each half-mile on the way back. This makes an astounding difference. You're actually hungry when you get home, still have a light buzz, listened to some interesting podcasts, and you sleep a lot better.
All of this is advice from a 45-year-old whose habits are very, very bad - I am not some paragon of health. I smoke like a chimney. I'll probably die young. A little bit of extra struggle goes a long way, though.
Can you share the final version of the sheet you made? I'm curious what your columns ended up being, in addition to the original push-ups column.
I am up for this! One question: do you accrue push-ups during the day in a 'greasing the groove' type approach and then stick in the total at end of day? Or more of a session? Just curious what was successful for you...