
Why We Do Pushups - markpeterdavis
http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2011/07/why-we-do-pushups.html
======
brosephius

        we’re a tech co - meatheads are nowhere to be found
    

so programmers can't be athletic? I'm sure that's not what he meant, but
that's how it comes across. also, the idea of group pushups as a "team
building" activity - seriously? that just sounds awkward and weird. not to
mention that pushups are not remotely sufficient as exercise if that's all
you're doing.

you want to help your employees stay in shape? commit to making sure they have
time to get some exercise, however way they enjoy doing so.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, this approach seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Push-ups are, at-best, a difficult exercise to get right (see
<http://thetoptwoinches.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/100/>). Do them in bad form
and you can injure yourself. Is the team leader going to be both an expert at
management AND an expert at physical education? _Does the company want the
lawsuits if an employee is injured exercising at the direction of their team
leaders?_ Are investors aware that their money is being used for this stuff?

Oh, and considering this stuff is not related to the job at hand, you could
also argue for a discrimination lawsuit considering it's creating a "hostile
work environment" for anyone without a lot of shoulder strength (women, old
people, the disabled).

~~~
cuchoperl
Are you kidding or is it true? You can get a lawsuit for this? (I don't live
in the US)

~~~
cema
In the US you can get a lawsuit for anything, but the chances of losing or
winning are not always, although frequently, related to how good a lawyer you
managed to get on your team.

------
stiff
"team building" is like an arranged marriage - either you have a team or you
don't, trying to force it doesn't yield any results and usually it's just an
euphemism for being forced to do stupid things, most often to get drunk with
everyone or "you are not being a team player". I would feel rather silly doing
push-ups at work, especially at the command of my "team leader". Maybe people
with more submissive personalities can swallow something like this more
easily.

Aside from the above, where opinions may and probably will vary, doing just a
single exercise very often is actually detrimental to health in many ways.
Additionally, push-ups are exactly the wrong the exercise for most computer
people, who tend to have rounded shoulders and contracted chest muscles - they
are primarily a chest exercise, further exaggerating the rounded shoulders,
where actually chest streching is needed and rowing exercises for the back.
You might make fun of meatheads, but you actually should think a bit about
what you are doing to your body, or it won't really do any good.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Arranged marriages are remarkably successful. People are really good at
falling in love given the right context clues.

Similarly, team-building exercises can be stunningly effective. The military
takes a couple months to make you willing to sacrifice your life for a group
of what were recently strangers.

~~~
sbochins
I'm not sure by what is your criteria for arranged marriages being successful.
Is it because there are less divorces? The reason for that is probably because
divorces are extremely taboo or illegal in the places that have have arranged
marriages. As for the sacrificing in the military. Some of that has to do with
the kind of people that want to join the military (a very small portion of the
US population). Also from chats with family and friends that have done
service, they did not feel like their "buddies" would be willing to sacrifice
themselves for them.

~~~
rdtsc
It seems that an easy team building process is to just identify an out-group.
Make an "us" vs "them" scenario. That kind of stuff appeals to the primitive
part of the brain and is quite effective.

Improperly defining that can be dangerous. It can create too much adversity in
the workplace where teams spend more energy thinking how to beat the other
team vs how to improve the product (sometimes the two goals are not
equivalent).

I guess it is a bit safer to identify the competitors as "them" but in a niche
market people always jump ship and all the negative attitudes and comments end
up finally being exposed.

------
JonLim
Everyone in the comments seems to be poo-pooing either the pushups themselves
or the team building abilities as noted by the author.

I'm not here to defend the team building side (nyeh, it's alright for team
building) but pushups are a great exercise to do.

By themselves? No, of course not, but they're good by themselves anyway (full
body weight exercise.)

However, in the middle of a long day at your desk, it doesn't hurt to take a 2
minute break to go down and do a bunch of pushups with a couple co-workers. It
gets the blood flowing and it gives you an excuse to socialize.

Doesn't seem like a bad idea at all to me.

~~~
jseliger
Agreed. I posted something similar in a comment yesterday:

"BTW, a lot of these people are pretty committed athletes. If you're not, and
you're looking for something that's easy and obvious, try doing some pushups
throughout the day. When I'm feeling antsy, sometimes I get up, do 20 pushups,
and then go back to what I'm doing. Start small: two pushups count if you're
not used to them.

I like to run, and if you're starting out, it's relatively easy to buy a pair
of running shoes (try going to a running shop with a pair of shoes you already
own; the staff should be able to look at your wear pattern and adjust the shoe
they recommend accordingly) or a pair of Vibram Five-Fingers. Start easily: go
out running for five minutes. Or ten minutes. Build up little by little.

Otherwise, I think the meta-advice of this article is that we make time for
things that're important to us, which most of us probably already know, or
know on some level."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2783031>

~~~
stanmancan
If you don't run much I highly suggest spending two months running _before_
running in Vibram Five-Fingers. And when you do get them, run on grass or
dirt. They're the only shoes I wear running and I can do a fast paced 45
minute trail run in them and feel amazing, but even 15-20 minutes on concrete
can cause pain.

~~~
jrockway
I'm going to agree here. It's a good idea to go to a running shoe store and
run on a treadmill with a variety of shoes. I only discovered this after
injuring myself with shoes that weren't supportive enough (a neutral
cushioning shoe). Now I have to stop running for two months and go to physical
therapy twice a week. If I had gotten the right shoes in the first place, I
could be running now.

Don't get "barefoot" shoes unless you are an experienced runner.

~~~
joelrunyon
I ran a marathon in my VFFs and I've bene running for a year. I was hurting
afterwards but definitely survived. In fact, the VFFs allowed me to start
running again. Before them, I would run 1-2 miles and have massive knee pain
and shin splints.

VFFs are awesome, but take your time, get used to them and stretch a lot.
They're worth it.

------
scott_s
To me, a work-life balance means maintaining a separation between work and
activities. I do various kinds of training on my own. I don't want to do them
at work. That's where I think about work-things. And I do my various kinds of
training as a way to clear my mind of work-things.

------
davidwparker
Back when I was in the USAF as a computer programmer, we would do "push-ups
for darts" at work. We had a dart board and each person on the team would
throw three darts. Each person had to do the combined total of the others in
the room (throughout the day). The totals normally ended up between 200-400
(triple 20s was a pain). Granted, I was in the military, so push-ups were part
of our PT test anyway, but it was a lot of fun.

------
mcantelon
>We do something called buddy pushups (something I picked up when I was a
wrestler). Here’s how buddy pushups work. Everyone gets in a plank position
and stays in it even when they’re not doing pushups. The leader (could be
anyone on the team) does 1 pushup by themselves, then holds a plank while
everyone else does 1 pushup. ... We support each other and high five at the
end. While it’s exercise for the individual, it’s a team effort.

You high five at the end, eh? Let me guess... you're North Americans. Pretty
ridiculous. If you want to do push ups, do push ups... it doesn't have to be
some ridiculous cult-like group thing.

------
joelrunyon
How many people usually end up participating? Is there a big disparity between
the number of pushups the strongest person can do vs. the weakest person? Do
you guys try to beat old records or just do it to get moving again.

~~~
michaelkeenan
I'm not the OP, but my office has a similar ritual. Out of about eight people
in the office, usually three to six of us go out to the patio to do pushups
and sometimes martial arts at about 2pm each day.

Our strongest person does about 120 pushups in a row (he is _really_ strong);
the least strong does about 10; the least strong male does about 40. We try to
beat our old personal records but there's not really any competition between
people.

We haven't experienced the problems predicted by others in this thread. It's
not explicitly a team-building activity - it's just something some of us do.
It's not led by a manager, and managers participate somewhat less than non-
managers. It's not mandatory and if people are engrossed in a task, they
choose not to join in that day.

~~~
joelrunyon
Interesting.

In that light (a self directed, non-mandatory common group activity), I don't
understand how it could come across as a bad thing.

------
kennu
I wonder if the team also showers together afterwards or just smells bad for
the rest of the day.

~~~
jrockway
Most people don't smell bad after 5 minutes of mild exercise in an air
conditioned building. Just saying.

~~~
Evgeny
I'm a person who starts sweating easily, so there's a high chance I'd feel at
least _some_ discomfort after. On the other hand, if the exercise is mild
enough not to make me sweat, it's probably next to useless for me.

~~~
akronim
I don't think you're supposed to get fit, the benefit is more that it stops
you sitting in your chair for 8 hours straight.

~~~
roundsquare
Nah. I think the real benefit is that they have a "victory" every few hours to
keep them going.

------
buff-a
From [http://www.livestrong.com/article/167826-how-to-do-a-
wrist-p...](http://www.livestrong.com/article/167826-how-to-do-a-wrist-push-
up/)

 _Only perform this exercise if you are at an advanced fitness level._

 _The hand position required for wrist push-ups places increased stress on the
wrists, increasing risk of injury_

Yoga or tai chi might achieve the same goals with less injury. Programmers
risking wrist injury seems unusually ill thought out.

Huh, oh look: he _isnt_ a programmer. Now it all makes sense.

"I am currently the CEO & Co-Founder of Kohort.

"Prior, I was a VC at DFJ Gotham Ventures, where I invested in information
companies. "

Fancy that.

------
contextfree
I like the idea of exercising during the workday - ideally at midday, at a gym
within walking distance - but this sort of quasi-mandatory communal exercise
seems a bit cultlike in a way I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with.

------
Hominem
I worked at a place with team building yoga. Interupted my work every time the
yoga instructor dropped in to make us do downward dog. I tried telling them I
was busy a few times but a whole office harassing you to do yoga was worse
than missing deadlines. I had to bring it up with a director, then I got
blamed for getting the yoga woman fired. So much for team building.

------
e03179
Anyone have some links to studies that show sitting in a chair at your desk is
bad for your health?

Someone the other day said that he "heard" that sitting in a chair all day
long for years is just as bad for your health as smoking. Not sure I get the
correlation, but surely we have enough data points to have several credible
studies.

~~~
bmccormack
Check out <http://juststand.org/>. That (and talking with colleagues who stand
at their desk every day) motivated me to try standing.

Thanks to Fog Creek providing adjustable-height desks for every employee, this
was really easy to do. I started with 2 hours each day one week, then 3 hours
the next week, etc., until I'm now standing the whole day. I love it.

~~~
jseliger
Question that I haven't seen addressed online: about how much do those Series
7 desks cost if one buys them individually?

------
redthrowaway
While it's a cool idea, I can only see it working first thing in the morning
when everyone gets to the office but before you start work. Otherwise, chances
are you'll be interrupting _somebody's_ work, which if you're a programmer can
be a huge hit to productivity.

~~~
fragsworth
Maybe increased blood flow on the whole averages against the interruptions,
causing a net increase in productivity?

~~~
jrockway
After my muscles have used up all my glucose / glycogen, there's none left for
my brain :)

------
tomjen3
That has got to be one of the dumbest ideas ever. Provide locked bike storage
with a roof and showers.

What happened to come to work to, well, work?

------
joelrunyon
Seriously people?

OP isn't saying everyone has to do 50 or else they're fired. It's a voluntary
exercise (any exercise is better than no exercise) and they like to do it as a
team. They're not embarrassing anyone or making fun of other people.

Pushups are a great workout. If you can't do 100. Do 1. Then do 1 more the
next day. Then one more. No weights. No gym. No excuses. Just you and your
body. Commit to it and then do it. When pushups get easy, there's a ton of
variations you can try. One of the greatest and simplest exercises ever.

------
tapvt
It seems to me that this is neither a dumb idea, nor hostile, nor mandatory. I
know for a fact that working long hours to meet tight deadlines is a challenge
for anyone.

A quick round of push-ups, or other exercise, can open the mind to new
possibilities, opportunities, and solutions. The diversion could very well
help to break the road-blocking thought patterns that often crop up when one
is faced with tough problems.

Beyond that, it seems to me that such a practice builds solidarity in the team
and inspires the participants to push for their best result, and to improve
over the course of future sessions (iterations, perhaps?). I cannot see how
fostering such a spirit could be a bad thing, especially in the context of a
tech startup.

No responsible person would force a co-worker or employee to damage their
health through participation, nor to participate if they did not feel
comfortable doing so. The implication that the author would advocate or
enforce the exercise to the contrary seems nit-picky and contentious.

Isn't the benefit of the push-ups at least a bit greater than that of the
often-present case of beers in the office fridge, especially when the practice
becomes a regular part of the culture?

------
juliano_q
I like do to pushup intervals while I am at the computer at home. Be allowed
to do it in the work and not be considered a crazy freak would be awesome to
me. I really feel better and "more alive" after some pushups, and it boosts my
productivity.

But I dont like the idea to do it as a group. I like to take my time and do
the max repetitions that I could possible handle. Do it as a team would be
limiting.

------
WalterBright
Doing pushups should be balanced with pullups.

~~~
icegreentea
Especially if you're sitting at a computer all day. Gotta strengthen that back
to keep your shoulders from curling in too much. Then everything starts to go
wrong =/

~~~
btam
Would you please elaborate on this? Why are curled-in shoulders especially
bad?

~~~
oostevo
You might find this Google talk useful:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfg_e6YG37U>

------
sbochins
Kind of reminds me of the scene in Portal 2 where you look at a painting for 5
seconds for your art appreciation time. I hope this isn't a mandatory activity
like eating lunch with all your peers at StackOverflow. I understand the logic
behind it, but its probably something I wouldn't want to do. I would like it
if offices encouraged employees moving around more often. At my work the
office is kind of small and I usually sit in the same spot for too many hours
without getting up.

------
ssharp
This technique doesn't strike me as all that effective for exercise (doing a
handful of pushups a day is better than doing nothing, but not by that much)
or for team building.

------
fatalisk
What they really need are some hardcore dead lifts and squats thrown in there
with some post-workout protein shakes.

------
bennesvig
I don't know what I'd think about doing the group push-ups, but whenever I get
a little bit sleepy or tired at work, doing 15-20 push-ups is a pretty good
wake up.

------
noonespecial
I like pushups. I do them often. But this is exactly the kind of thing I'd say
no to as a test to find out if this was really a place I wanted to keep
working at.

------
DanielStarling
Note: if you do this long enough you'll end up with a shoulder slump worse
than the classic one desk jockeys have. Try to balance it out with back
excercise.

~~~
joelrunyon
Your shoulders slump because you don't end up stretching the muscles. You
simply build them up and make them tighter, which results in the slump. You
need to stretch your pectorals, not do back exercises, to balance it out
(although back exercises wouldn't hurt)!

------
Ronkdar
Absolutely agreed with everything here. Additionally, push-ups help keep you
awake. Nodding off? Drop and do 5. Gets the heart pumping again.

~~~
WalterBright
I like doing a brief mid-afternoon nap. It'll keep me productive well into the
evening. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the American work style.

~~~
eru
Have you tried just doing it? Don't let your assumptions about expectations
hold you back. Set your own expectations.

I brought a rocking chair for naps to work.

------
georgieporgie
I'm horrified. This has very high potential to be harmful.

The defacto nerd position is seated and hunched. Developing the pectorals will
only exacerbate this. If you want to engage in group exercise, find a routine
which is more balanced, or at least balanced against what you do the rest of
the day. Just do some calisthenics and stretch out those tight chests.

~~~
joelrunyon
You're kidding, right?

~~~
dredmorbius
Not at all.

Look up kyphosis and upper cross syndrome.

 _Any_ time you're doing strength training, you want to balance your
movements. If you're doing push (presses, push-ups), do pulls (rows, pull-ups,
inverted pull-ups). Work your legs _and_ your upper body. Do bilateral and
unilateral movements (single arm or leg). Do strength _and_ cardio. Mind your
exercise _and_ your diet. Oh: and rest and recovery are also key.

For many people in tech, sitting at desks, hunched in front of a screen,
you're chronically tight on the anterior (front) of your body, and loose on
the posterior (backside). If you look up exercise/fitness literature, you'll
find a lot of reference to "posterior chain activation" or related terms, and
exercises like deadlifts, power cleans, pull-ups, rows variations, kettlebell
swings, etc. All work part or all of your backside, and can really help
balance our your body (it's done amazing things for me, reducing back pain and
other issues).

I don't know that doing 10 push-ups every day or two is going to cripple
anyone, but if that's the only resistance work that's being done, it's
certainly not going to help. Which is where a not of strength-training /
fitness newbies get things horribly, horribly wrong: they come up with some
half-assed, imbalanced, inappropriate training program / routine without
understanding what they're doing or why.

Fitness activities, like technical problems, should be goal oriented. Identify
your objectives, determine your resources, construct a program, execute on it,
assess, modify, and iterate. It's really not all that difficult, but it does
require a modicum of thought.

~~~
tjogin
That might have been a risk if the team were doing bench presses, but pushups
is not going to build any significant amount of muscle.

~~~
georgieporgie
Pushups most certainly will build significant muscle.

The point, however, isn't the muscle size. It's the imbalance in muscular
strength and tightness. Yes, stretching will help, but given that the majority
of people do _nothing_ to strengthen their upper back, they _will_ develop a
significant muscular imbalance from doing mere pushups.

~~~
tjogin
To facilitate continuous muscle growth you need to continuously increase the
resistance over time, and you need to do so within about 8-12 repetitions per
set to stimulate hypertrophy. In simple terms, you need to push your max all
the time; as you get stronger and develop more muscle, you need to keep
increasing the resistance to reach the next level. This is very well
established in scientific studies.

Simple logic dictates that this is is impossible with pushups. You cannot
change the resistance without changing what muscles you activate, and an
averagely built male can do more than 8-12 pushups per set from the very get
go. The only way forward is to increase the amount of pushups you do in one
go, and that throws hypertrophy out the window.

This is why pushups is a rather useless exercise, beside the fact that it's
difficult to do correctly and causes injuries (doing them on your palms can
fuck up your rotator cuff, and doing them on your knuckles can fuck up your
hands and wrists).

But even without scientific proof, I think most people have this experience
with pushups (whether they've thought about it consciously or not): the people
who do them are rarely very big, they're the thin traditional martial-arts
type, at best.

~~~
dredmorbius
Training modalities differ from just the 8-12 reps range. Check out the
Wikipedia Strength Training article for a good overview. You can get varying
responses with reps ranging from 1 to 30 or more (with appropriate scaling of
resistance).

The disadvantage of push-ups from a training perspective is that it's hard to
progress with them (increase resistance), though this can be done by changing
body angle, changing hand position, adding weight, or changing to a more
challenging variant (say planche push-ups).

The point that I and others have been making is that a naive and uninformed
approach toward exercise and fitness may provide few if any benefits, could
exacerbate an existing imbalance, and really shouldn't be touted as a genius
inspiration. Much as, say, a naive and uninformed approach toward technology
often has corresponding / similar / analogous negative outcomes.

Push-ups are fine, in the right balance with other movements. They're not a
complete exercise routine of themselves.

As for getting big on push-ups, there are always exceptions. Hershel Walker
comes to mind as a calisthenics devotee.

~~~
tjogin
Pushups is a terrible exercise, for sure, since it doesn't build muscle and is
prone to injury. The only reason it doesn't screw up your rotator cuff very
quickly is because the resistance is so low; had it been better at building
muscle (i.e. more resistance, on level with bench presses) your rotator cuff
would tear much sooner. Injury wise, pushups' saving grace is that it is such
a bad exercise.

Doing 30 repetitions in a set is a surefire way to stagnate in your muscular
development. This has been proven time and time again in scientific studies.

But whatever, let's just agree to disagree here. I'll continue to side with
the scientific studies done in hypertrophy, and you continue believing in
pushups.

~~~
dredmorbius
The key question wasn't whether or not push-ups will develop significant
muscle mass. It's whether or not they're going to compound a very likely
existing syndrome (upper cross syndrome / kyphosis) in a team of programmers /
tech geeks.

Push-ups _are_ sufficiently effective that they'll at best make the problem
worse. Any untrained individual doing any resistance movement consistently
will make gains in strength and muscle size (Google Mark Rippetoe's "The
Novice Effect" or discussions of training complexity vs. training age). Sure,
you'll plateau after a few months, but you're still going to be ahead of a
very large share of the sedentary population. And you're doing nothing to
address the intrinsic imbalance between anterior and dorsal and muscular
development and overall tension.

