I'd fallen off the wagon a bit with my hundred pushups workout so I dropped back to Week 3 tonight. (We were without air conditioning for a week, and doing much of anything physical was a chore.) At the suggestion of Fit36 I tried tightening up the rest periods between the levels, and ended up failing to do the minimum number of pushups on the max level all in one stint; I ended up five short (15, 12, 12, 10, 10) but went back to do the other five about 30 seconds later.
I'm still thinking that going for more pushups each workout, rather than trying to cut the breaks down to the prescribed amounts, is what I need. I'm more than happy taking a good long time to get through 100 pushups in a row, but I need to keep myself from getting injured, and I also need to lose some more of the weight. More pushups means more calories burned.
If you really want to drop weight, doing more pushups isnt the way to do it. The average pushup burns less than a calorie. That means to drop a pound, you need to do over 3500 pushups. If you want to drop the weight, go for a 30 minute walk/jog after your pushups.
Thanks for your comment, Matt. You’re right. I’m doing cardio workouts as well.
What I meant (and didn’t say clearly) was that doing more pushups will burn more calories than doing fewer pushups. I can do more pushups if I’m not trying to take short breaks.
Right, pushups alone aren’t the best way to lose weight.
So I don’t want to be a downer, but you aren’t going to lose any weight with pushups. You will however build muscle which ups metabolism (resulting in more calories burned more quickly). But to build muscle quickly you have to focus on fatiguing. Which is best achieved by doing as many pushups as you can in a shorter period of time.
You can have the best of all worlds, though, by following Matt’s suggestion of going for a walk after (actually before would be even better).
Good luck!