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.
Yeah, I found that statement funny, since the first tech company I worked for was MSFT. Out in that area (the pacific northwest), physical activity is a huge deal -- hiking, skiing, and snowboarding especially. On every team I was on, the vast majority of the people were in stunningly good shape. Even the 35+, multiple-kids crowd.
I still remember one time that I almost killed an interview candidate by mistake. Ran down to pick him up in the lobby, and then started talking to him on the way up to our offices... realizing at the second of five floors that we needed to move this discussion to the elevator before he had a heart attack. We used the elevators so rarely that it hadn't even occurred to me!
Of course, there were strange things about it. Many people got season-long Mt. Baker lift passes, and you could basically write off schedule estimates for the first week of the season that there was enough powder on the ground.
I think a lot of people unconsciously see the stairs as a fallback method to the elevator. Stairs in a commercial building are usually minimally decorated. They're "the fire escape."
In a lot of local buildings where I live the doors are locked from the stairwell side on every floor and locked from the outside at ground level. So you can use them to go down during a fire, but you can't use them to go up.
If you are squatting heavy, as you should be doing if you are training with the goal to increase your overall strength, walking up a couple floors shouldn't be too hard of a task and I am pretty sure there are more benefits to it than it would hurt your other goals.
I put up a leader board in the office yesterday for stair climbing times. I've got one other person interested and the competition has started already. :) Current best time is 44s for 8 floors.
Yeah I definitely have nothing against anyone who goes through actual pain, or anyone who has no reason for that matter. I was just stating that in my experience, very few of my officemates that I know are capable end up taking the stairs willingly. It's their choice to make.
Sometimes it is because of stupid building rules. The fire doors in my building are alarmed and you can't get in and out of them. You can only exit at the bottom and enter through upper floors in case of a fire.
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).
My knee jerk reaction to this story was "do any women work at this company"? (I'm female and do pushups every day as a component of marathon & triathlon training, so I'm not whining about the hypothetical possibility of feeling excluded.) I understand the intent, but the implementation seems misguided for many of the reasons that others have mentioned. If you want to encourage your employees to stay in shape without marginalizing anyone, offer to subsidize gym memberships or the athletic activity of their choice (e.g., karate classes, participation in a soccer league, yoga etc.) And there are plenty of teambuilding activities that have virtually no threat of joint damage.
That's not what "hostile work environment" means. Mandatory pushups are one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of, but I assume you are not going to be fired if you don't do them. When everyone starts doing pushups, go out for a quick run, or something.
Depending on the situation, you could have a hostile work environment[0]. Take a guy who is over weight and weak, make him feel uncomfortable about not being "good enough" to do the push ups, add "good natured" ribbing from co-workers that goes on day after day and subtle "anti-team" vibe because the rest of the team is pushing up together.
Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Something to watch for but not something to stress unduly about.
Conduct which creates a hostile work environment is illegal only if it is based upon the employee’s protected status as a member of a protected class. In other words, not all harassing behavior breaks the law. It is not discrimination if one employee is rude to another employee just because they have had an argument.
Fair enough, but a lot of women have trouble doing more than 1 or 2 pushups. I'm guessing the author's company doesn't employ any (at least on the tech team).
Push-ups are, at-best, a difficult exercise to get right
This is surprisingly true. On Monday, I tested my one-rep max on shoulder presses, which involved a couple of balls-out failures with a weight I couldn't lift. Two days later, I feel fine. The last time I tried to find out how many pushups I could do in a row, I hurt my shoulder and didn't feel right again for two weeks. I'm pretty sure on any given day I could simply get on the floor and do pushups (with decent form) until I hurt myself. It's much safer to stick with exercises where you can safely work until failure, since you never know when you're going to accidentally exceed your limits. It's doubly true for people who don't exercise a lot.
Funnily enough, this seems to be common knowledge amongst gym instructors. Yet many of the people who routinely do pushups as part of the conditioning or warmup for indoor sports don't seem to know, even if people have been doing it for decades.
Even worse, in the cases that I'm experienced with (for various martial arts) these pushups are done on mats that make it even worse because the wrist is even more over-stretched (because the ball of the hand sinks into the soft mat, while the fingers do so less); and doing push-ups on the knuckles is considered something 'for the hard core'.
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.
If think you're parsing that wrong. Being a meathead isn't at all the same as being athletic, I would hope that nobody would think that programmers couldn't be athletic. But when people think of programmers excercizing, they tend to think of running or biking or skiing or hiking rather than a "meathead" form of exercise like group pushups. And the fact that you find group pushups "awkward and weird" shows that the author had some justification in being defensive about it.
Of course, I totally agree that they aren't a good enough form of exercise.
"Pushup aren't "remotely" sufficient if that's all you're doing."
I don't think he wanted this to recreate the gym experience at work. It's just a little work break for exercise that they wouldn't get throughout the day. I think we can all agree, some pushups > no pushups at all. I don't see why it has to be an all or nothing philosophy.
Also, you should respect the pushup more than you are. They're surprisingly difficult and much more varied than they first appear. :)
that was my first reaction too.
I run two miles per day and mountain bike on the weekends.
That is when my mind clears up and allows ideas to take (new) form. One way to allow employees to get fit is offering discounts to gym and group after-work sports.
"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.
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.
It would be interesting to compare the two. I imagine the foundations of affection in an arranged marriage that turns out well are based on different things than most marriages today.
If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say an "Us against the world, for better or worse, whether we like it or not". That's a classic foundation for strong relationships.
The military takes a couple months to make you
willing to sacrifice your life for a group of
what were recently strangers.
My experience is completely opposite. Perhaps I was in a wrong military (I was: USSR, mid-1980s), mandatory conscription, culture clash. Mandatory conscription is similar to arranged marriages, but not to how jobs are staffed, so the analogy may not hold here.
In case my management decides to do this kind of team-building exercise, I think I would be willing to give them benefit of doubt, but the very cheesiness of it all will likely wear me out before I give up and call it bullshit. Conflict with the management will then be almost inevitable. The opposite of team building! Maybe it is just me; I see comments that sound positive.
Conscripts are not at all like 'proper' soldiers. Conscripts are just there to sit out their time. You can't compare that to training professional, actual combat-ready soldiers (i.e., not truck drivers and radio operators - although of course they all go through the same basic training.
The amount of time that is put into taking away individual identify and replacing it with a group mentality in combat troops like e.g. US Marines or Foreign Legion legionnaires is huge (from what I know of reading books and watching TV - it's not like really know anything about this).
Conscripts are not at all like 'proper' soldiers.
Conscripts are just there to sit out their time.
The soldier is sleeping, the service is going on. Of course. And yet, that's how most of the armies of the world are. That how the US army was, to a large extent, during the Vietnam war. (But also during WWII.)
I spent two years of service performing mostly bullshit tasks (or doing nothing). When I was in training I received some kind of basic education of driving, uh, amphibious transporter medium - modified (ПТС-М, плавающий транспортёр средний - модифицированный). Was kind of fun.
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.
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.
they did not feel like their "buddies" would be willing to sacrifice themselves for them.
Out of curiosity, were they in the front lines? There's plenty of jobs in the armed forces I could see that camaraderie never forming, particularly more bureaucratic sections.
I don't think it's so cut and dried as "you have a team or you don't." Marriages aren't like that, friendships aren't like that---team cohesion falls on a spectrum as well.
I think there's value to team-building exercises when the participants want to be on the team, because just wanting isn't enough. But I agree that those sorts of exercises are certainly not sufficient alone.
"you have a team or you don't" should be read in the context of the sentence it appeared in - I do agree there is a spectrum, the point was that you cannot somehow make a team from a bunch of people if they don't go along with each other well by themselves. Those "team building" activities have a very artificial feeling to them and while many management people gladly will jump on any currently popular management bandwagon, I think most participants just think it's ridiculous, even through no-one will say it out loud. The actual team building happens when people do their real work together and there are sensible ways to encourage this, there was recently this post roughly about how Pixar or Apple offices are arranged in a way that you have to go across the whole office to grab a tea, so that people run into each other many times a day and have a chance to discuss stuff.
Team building just makes me shudder. A bad experience with a job I had in Korea made me almost swear off drinking entirely because I came to associate it with hwaeshik where I'd drink with obnoxious seniors while having to ward off their passive-aggressive male dominance bullshit. It was partly my own fault for setting expectations the wrong way. My friend who hired me and was the team's other foreigner just refused to go from the start. That worked out better for him in the long run, even if it gave him the reputation of being the difficult anti-social foreigner.
Push-ups are well within my wheelhouse (and if you do a few hundred a day it's not a bad one-exercise regimen to keep some minimum level of upper body and core strength), but I'd still feel really stupid doing them with my team mates, especially in our business.
"Feeling stupid" isn't necessarily a good metric for determining whether or not something is worthwhile doing. Lots of people doing something "stupid" end up being incredibly successful.
I thought my anecdote suggested quite clearly why I consider it stupid. Reading over it again I still think it does, but I'll spell it out for you:
These kinds of team-building rituals make certain people very uncomfortable and anxious. This is no doubt lost on a lot of the empathy-challenged type-A personalities that tend to infect middle management.
When it comes to push-ups I wouldn't personally have a problem performing them, but I'd really hate to see the weaker guys suffer. In the eyes of team building gurus, that kind of suffering and struggle is supposed to lead to a death-and-rebirth bonding experience. But for many people, it's the kind of thing that will make them dread going to work every morning.
I think it completely depends on the situation. In my opinion, the OP didn't come across as "empathy-challenged type-A personality" and his company seems small enough that everyone involved seems okay doing them. While it might not be great for everyone (maybe especially in corporate environments), it didn't come across mean-spirited or ill-willed at all in this case.
Edit: That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience with what seems like a terrible job.
> That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience with what seems like a terrible job.
The job itself wasn't that bad. Korea has some cultural quirks from a Western point of view. The drinking and prostitution culture around the workplace are chief among them. But most of the blame falls on me for not setting the right expectations from the beginning since I was the guest in a foreign country. Lessons learned and all that. But if something analogous were to happen to me in a Western workplace, I wouldn't let culture shock take the blame.
"Team building excercise" is a good euphemism for "drill". Cults and command-and-control institutions have employed things like "buddy pushups" for centuries. It's pretty funny this startup thinks it's somehow innovative.
I agree with you; my personality would not allow me to do this. In addition to the dominant / submissive issue, who wants to crawl around on the floor at work, anyway? I'm disgusted just thinking about it.
If you want your employees to work out, give them an hour off in the middle of the day, a well-stocked gym, and showers.
There are a lot of things managers and coworkers can do that either strengthen or weaken team spirit.
In my experience one of the most positive is eating meals together. One of the most negative is playing favorites or improperly assigning credit for accomplishments.
I think it would be weird if we had "mandatory pushup time" but if me and 2 other co-workers decide to have a pushup contest during work, I think it'd be fun, not cheesy.
Almost everyone would naturally eat at least something during the work day, team building or not.
A small minority would naturally incorporate physical activity into the work day. I personally prefer to do it before or after - changing clothes twice, shower + workout itself does not fit naturally into the lunch break.
Everybody eats, usually at least once during the work day, and in our society sharing a meal has positive connotations. Besides, it is possible (and in many cases customary) to have a conversation over a meal.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another benefit is that in the morning your body has the highest level of testosterone, which helps in muscle growth and you could have a protein drink for breakfast. Yeah, I can see the being snapped out of flow issue to be a big one.
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.
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?
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.
Or rows or any other kind of pulling. It's not unusual to prescribe a 2:1 work ratio of pulling to pushing. But push-pull imbalance tends to be more of a problem with weighted exercises like bench pressing than with plain old push-ups. There are lots of people who do push-ups without corresponding amounts of pull-ups with no ill effects.
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 =/
If the pushup is done properly the shoulders should be in the correct alignment. I do agree that I would add pull ups and then some band exercises to make sure the shoulders are kept in proper form.
The other thing I would add is core work, and not just strengthening, but also correcting posture (pelvic tilt).
All of the above just scratches the surface on how to correct the bad things that happen to your posture when sitting at a desk for hours each day.
Well, it's beyond just shoulder alignment during the exercise. Your shoulder and upper back posture is pretty much dependent on the interplay between your pects (chest), upper and lower trap, and lat muscles. If you start getting a severe strength imbalance between these muscle groups, you can start getting posture problems. That's in the long term. There's also short term stuff with your sore muscles avoiding stretching, resulting in some curling in.
All of this only gets worse if your typing at a keyboard because of the 'natural' position you assume.
It leads to terrible neck problems, like the pinched nerve I have. It causes significant discomfort, then intense pain and, eventually, numbness in one or both arms. Recovery is on the order of several years (and counting).
It should really be balanced with a lot of things... I think if these guys really want to benefit their employees, they should get them together with a real trainer or fitness expert.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you're saying balanced workouts are better than just pushups alone. I agree. But, in lieu of being able to do a full body workout at your desk, I think pushups are a good alternative to keep the blood flowing. Just be conscious to stretch occasionally.
I'd suggest something like burpees as a better alternative. Whole-body movement, may incorporate push-ups, but you're also getting a full triple extension (ankle, knee, hip), and at least some posterior-chain activation.
If you're doing other movements at other times (including rows), the push-ups are fine. You don't have to balance your movements at the same time -- alternating days or workouts would be sufficient.
Absolutely not. I cannot express to you how much pain can come from this. I'm talking about career-ruining, debilitating problems.
You're not in the Army. You aren't going to balance out your strength training with a long day of running, climbing, etc. You're going to get your chest good and pumped, then plop right back down and hunch.
1. 10 pushups a day will not debilitate anyone.
2. You don't have to hunch. You can practice good posture at your desk.
3. If you're really worried about this, take 5 minutes to stretch out your pectoral muscles before/after doing this.
I would love to see some medical studies of people who've been seriously debilitated by doing pushups throughout the day. There's a difference between being in pain (sore) and being hurt. If you're doing enough pushups at the office to get hurt, you might be taking the team-building exercise a little too seriously.
If you were so inclined, you could find all the information you desire about injuries caused by unbalanced musculature. But you seem like the invincible type who's going to ignore caution, so good luck to you.
Wrong about what? You don't HAVE to hunch, you can stretch, and I said I would like to see studies of people hurt from ten pushups a day. If you have them, please share. If not, I'll keep listening to my body, doing pushups, and properly stretching safely. Have a good day!
You are wrong about your ridiculous universal assertions. Ten pushups a day never hurt anybody? What basis do you have for this, other than ignorance?
Even in the case of minimal physical exertion, neglecting muscular balance will lead to injury. Stretching, while good, will not overcome muscular imbalance. How many people do you know who do any back-specific exercise?
As for posture, look at any of the photos that make it up on HN, such as photos of new startup locations. I haven't seen a single person in any of the photos sitting with proper posture. In over a decade of professional work experience, I have only ever seen one person sitting with correct posture, and he was an ex-Olympic athlete.
Are you aware, by the way, that shirts are cut differently now than in the past? The shoulders are rotated forward, because that's how people carry themselves now. People, on average, simply do not maintain proper posture. It requires concerted effort, stretching, and, usually, focused weight training.
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.