Surprised by progress on bodyweight exercises
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 4:02 am
So I've been a TB user for at least 5 years, and it is by far my favorite program that I have used. I remember reading TB the first time and when I got to the section that talked about bodyweight exercises, I kind of scoffed a little bit at it. You see I've always believed that the best way to progress bodyweight exercises was to do them daily ala Pavel's push-up program or some other type of GTG program. I didn't really think that doing a percentage of max reps 2-3x per week would do that much for bodyweight exercises.
Well, I've been battling shoulder pain with the bench press for awhile now, and I've finally just decided that I don't have to bench press. So in place of it in my Zulu-ish template, I subbed in push-ups. That had me doing push-ups 2x per week, and I decided to do 5 sets in the first week, 4 sets in the second week, and 3 sets in the third week - decreasing the number of sets as the intensity went up. Well let me tell you that in 6 weeks, my push-up total has gone from 60 to 90. In all fairness you should know 3 things. 1) I probably could have done more than 60 in my first max test, but I didn't want set myself up for failure, 2) when doing 90 push-ups yesterday after getting to 70, I did take a break where I went up into a downward dog position for a 5-count and then cranked out 8 more until I needed a break and continued with the 5-second breaks and continuing on until 90, and 3) if I would have continued taking 5-count breaks in the downward dog position, I probably could have gone on for awhile past 90 but I decided to stop at 90 so that I had a good max rep at which to base my next cycle.
So while I was skeptical about that way of progressing bodyweight exercises, it worked quite well.
Well, I've been battling shoulder pain with the bench press for awhile now, and I've finally just decided that I don't have to bench press. So in place of it in my Zulu-ish template, I subbed in push-ups. That had me doing push-ups 2x per week, and I decided to do 5 sets in the first week, 4 sets in the second week, and 3 sets in the third week - decreasing the number of sets as the intensity went up. Well let me tell you that in 6 weeks, my push-up total has gone from 60 to 90. In all fairness you should know 3 things. 1) I probably could have done more than 60 in my first max test, but I didn't want set myself up for failure, 2) when doing 90 push-ups yesterday after getting to 70, I did take a break where I went up into a downward dog position for a 5-count and then cranked out 8 more until I needed a break and continued with the 5-second breaks and continuing on until 90, and 3) if I would have continued taking 5-count breaks in the downward dog position, I probably could have gone on for awhile past 90 but I decided to stop at 90 so that I had a good max rep at which to base my next cycle.
So while I was skeptical about that way of progressing bodyweight exercises, it worked quite well.
