7 ms·

The Power of One Push-Up

65 points by rafaelc 7y ago

mikece 7y ago
I'm a big fan of "minimum effective dose" when it comes to working out but doing only one pushup is skimping...
- ahuth 7y ago
  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.
  - Afton 7y ago
    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.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      How can you game exercise training in way that would degrade your health? Steroids and a diet high in sodium?
      - Afton 7y ago
        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.
    - epmaybe 7y ago
      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.
      - Afton 7y ago
        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.
    - woodandsteel 7y ago
      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.
  - joefkelley 7y ago
    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.
ng12 7y ago
> Its inadequacy is famously evident in examples such as the human muscle-mound Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson qualifying as obese. It's called an outlier.
- rosser 7y ago
  An outlier on a meaningless metric is a meaningless data point.
  - neaden 7y ago
    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.
    - Zenst 7y ago
      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?
      - nradov 7y ago
        Body fat content is a better metric for individuals. You can get an accurate DXA scan for about $50 in most cities now.
jaden 7y ago
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. [0] https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.html https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.h...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Xcelerate 7y ago
  Is it correlation or causation though? I.e., does “targeting the push-up metric” actually entail lower heart disease?
- r0fl 7y ago
  How long did it take you to get to 40 consecutive pushups and what method did you use to get there?
  - navbaker 7y ago
    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.
    - sp332 7y ago
      This technique is called "grease the groove" and it's useful anytime you've plateaued on reps for an exercise. Edit: also focus on your form!
      - melling 7y ago
        Has anyone tried it? I believe you want to try for 50% of maximum. The technique is discussed here for pushups. http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/ http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/
ASTP001 7y ago
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.
- dansingerman 7y ago
  Goodhart's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- sharadov 7y ago
  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.
  - Vrondi 7y ago
    That's pretty hilarious, because I've known plenty of guys who were obese, yet could do 20 pushups. Being fat and strong are not mutually exclusive.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > To get to even 20 pushups, you can't be obsese That's ridiculous - I know tons of 'obese' people who can do a hundred pushups in one go.
    - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
      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/ 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.
Zenst 7y ago
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.
kevin_b_er 7y ago
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.
- soperj 7y ago
  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.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Which technique did you use to measure body fat percentage?
    - soperj 7y ago
      A scale that sends electrical impulses through the body (at least that's what i was told it does)
      - nradov 7y ago
        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.
dhruvkar 7y ago
anecdote on pushups: 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.).
whalesalad 7y ago
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.
spodek 7y ago
> the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 or 30 percent Wow, I wonder how that percentage has changed over the lifetime of the nation, as well as the figure globally over time.
melling 7y ago
“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.”
fedups 7y ago
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. First chart under 'figures / tables' https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2724778 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
RickJWagner 7y ago
There'll never be another push up as famous as Jack Palance's one-arm routine during the Oscars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4

65 points by rafaelc 7y ago

mikece 7y ago

I'm a big fan of "minimum effective dose" when it comes to working out but doing only one pushup is skimping...

ahuth 7y ago
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.
- Afton 7y ago
  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.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    How can you game exercise training in way that would degrade your health? Steroids and a diet high in sodium?
    - Afton 7y ago
      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.
  - epmaybe 7y ago
    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.
    - Afton 7y ago
      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.
  - woodandsteel 7y ago
    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.
- joefkelley 7y ago
  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.

ng12 7y ago

> Its inadequacy is famously evident in examples such as the human muscle-mound Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson qualifying as obese. It's called an outlier.

rosser 7y ago
An outlier on a meaningless metric is a meaningless data point.
- neaden 7y ago
  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.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    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?
    - nradov 7y ago
      Body fat content is a better metric for individuals. You can get an accurate DXA scan for about $50 in most cities now.

jaden 7y ago

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. [0] https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.html https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.h...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Xcelerate 7y ago
Is it correlation or causation though? I.e., does “targeting the push-up metric” actually entail lower heart disease?
r0fl 7y ago
How long did it take you to get to 40 consecutive pushups and what method did you use to get there?
- navbaker 7y ago
  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.
  - sp332 7y ago
    This technique is called "grease the groove" and it's useful anytime you've plateaued on reps for an exercise. Edit: also focus on your form!
    - melling 7y ago
      Has anyone tried it? I believe you want to try for 50% of maximum. The technique is discussed here for pushups. http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/ http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/

ASTP001 7y ago

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.

dansingerman 7y ago
Goodhart's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
sharadov 7y ago
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.
- Vrondi 7y ago
  That's pretty hilarious, because I've known plenty of guys who were obese, yet could do 20 pushups. Being fat and strong are not mutually exclusive.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > To get to even 20 pushups, you can't be obsese That's ridiculous - I know tons of 'obese' people who can do a hundred pushups in one go.
  - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
    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/ 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.

Zenst 7y ago

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.

kevin_b_er 7y ago

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.

soperj 7y ago
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.
- nradov 7y ago
  Which technique did you use to measure body fat percentage?
  - soperj 7y ago
    A scale that sends electrical impulses through the body (at least that's what i was told it does)
    - nradov 7y ago
      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.

dhruvkar 7y ago

anecdote on pushups: 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.).

whalesalad 7y ago

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.

spodek 7y ago

> the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 or 30 percent Wow, I wonder how that percentage has changed over the lifetime of the nation, as well as the figure globally over time.

melling 7y ago

“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.”

fedups 7y ago

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. First chart under 'figures / tables' https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2724778 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

RickJWagner 7y ago

There'll never be another push up as famous as Jack Palance's one-arm routine during the Oscars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4