Your experience on this site will be improved by allowing cookies.

Were Pushups Always this Difficult?

 S. Sean Suvanadesa , Thailand  Jul 22, 2024

John's blog post about bench pressing and why we utilize pushups for the Global Fast Fit routine has made me consider a few things about how our participants have done so far.

The Global Fast Fit routine has had a few adjustments made to it. The original routine of 30x pushups, 30x leg lifts, 30x squats, and 500m run was understandably difficult for women due to the pushup requirement, thus allowing for the GFF Modified routine where pushups can be done with knees to the floor. The difficulties women have with pushups was to be expected, and the modification was a fair compromise towards those difficulties.

The suprise (perhaps it shouldn't be) was the difficulty that some men were having doing the pushups. The issues with the young men I've had try the GFF routine was rather telling of how lackadaisical they had been with improving their upper body strength. This is compounded by the fact that most of these young men that I had do the routine were from a Muay Thai gym.

You could say that I've only come across a small sample size of people doing the routine, Thailand doesn't have nearly as many candidates who have tried GFF compared to other countries. That's fair. However, we've had over a thousand submitted videos, and I've watched a good amount of them. To achieve a certified score, we aren't asking for perfect form. If we were then we might be lucky to have a hundred certified videos at this point; but once you learn a bit about more about the human body and the way it's meant to work, then there are certain things you just can't unsee.

Just to throw one thing out there and keep this from being an angry rant (hence the blog picture) is this. Sometimes it's impossible for someone to achieve good form for an exercise because of how weak and unused certain muscles are due to complete lack of use. This is expected based on how much of our work requires for us to sit over long periods of time. It's also expected because recreation also tends to have us sitting over long periods of time as well. Something telling about someone's pushups is where they keep their pelvis when they're performing them. It's extremely telling when hardly anyone can get into neutral position with their torso when doing pushups (I can't either). This isn't due to lack of effort, it's due to an inability to get into position because of how lifestyle has now warped the human body away from the way it was meant to be utilized.

This was one of the bigger draws that really made me more interested with Global Fast Fit. While the routine itself won't correct a lot of issues that people may have, at least it gets people moving and that already is a move in the right direction.

Login to Comment

S. Sean Suvanadesa   3 months ago
@Gregor Yes, this is the way. It's the most pragmatic way to go about training, and reduces any likelihood of injury. Unfortunately ego tends to come into play quite often with this sort of thing. Either someone ends up pushing to the point where their body can't handle the workload they're giving it and they get injured, or they find shortcuts such as taking gear. The best way is to identify what's weak, and work on it one day at a time.

Gregor Rasp   3 months ago
If you are weak, you don't start with 20 or 30 pushups. You start with one or two and keep practicing until you can do three, and so on. That's called training, preparing for a challenge. For this to work, you need patience and consistency, and that's mental training. If you are not prepared to work towards a goal outside your comfort zone, don't engage in GFF. I don't have much sympathy for people who say I want this, but are unwilling to do the required work.
Every healthy, adult, and non-disabled person, men and women alike, can build up to a certain number of push-ups (at least 5, possibly more) and ultimately perform them with near-perfect form.

S. Sean Suvanadesa   3 months ago
@Bryan It's extremely concerning seeing these issues already developing in males that are late teens/young adults and that these issues persist regardless of the location.

I do wonder if technology is the only issue here. It seems as if there's been some form of paradigm shift culturally and mentally in the modern era. I haven't been back in the US for quite some time. From everything I see on the news and on social media it appears to be a completely different world from when I left it. While I imagine I'm looking and reading through an aggrandized and exaggerated scope of the current American culture and mentality, there seems to have been an acceptance of being in an unfit state.

Now that's just the US, I wonder how the mentalities are in different countries around the world and why is it we're seeing signs of physical weakness globally.

S. Sean Suvanadesa   3 months ago
I was actually hoping that the post in itself would be more of a way of viewing the physiological changes in upper body strength in general. I believe the title and post itself should be taken in the way that Global Fast Fit utilizes pushups for its own function and benchmark. Pushups here aren't the sole problem, it's the overall weakness in upper body strength that people appear to have.

If we were to use pushup repetitions and form as a way of surmising how strong people are in this day and age then we can postulate that people (at least the majority of participants that we've come across) are generally lacking in strength in some capacity.

While we don't have any great sources for empirical evidence of pushups done by past generations going very far back, we do know that the overall use of their upper body was far more likely to be demanding before things became automated. Using your example of people who worked on farms, as our societies become less agrarian, there's less of a need to have the strength that's needed to work on a farm. Especially at the advent of information technology, modern society is changing rapidly enough that the strength that was once needed for survival is becoming less and less necessary.

Bryan Matott   3 months ago
Sean, this is a great assessment. At this point I have reviewed 1500+ videos of people from all ages, sizes, nationalities, backgrounds, etc. I agree with you on the theory that the weakness we see broadly across all participants comes majorly from lack of muscle use, lack of activity, or worse, lack of natural activity.

I agree that societies general lifestyle patterns are not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. I believe technology has been a main catalyst in this increase in lack of activity, with the past 2 decades bringing individuals to a grudgingly slow pace. Does this apply to all countries, or are there other contributing factors to consider? No matter the variable, what we are seeing regarding weakness is worldwide, at a high percentage.

The thing is, it's understandable to not be able to do the entire routine, at least given the current state of society, but I am seeing that many people are troubled to hold a single rep in a proper position, even those that seem otherwise able-bodied. This factor is quite surprising to me.

In addition to your comments on push ups, I have seen great weakness in plank position for leg lifts, where often times participants will keep there body in an arched position, or during squats some will lost balance getting into a sitting position. It's very hard or impossible for them to get into a good position.

Global Fast Fit was designed to address the core components of ones physical ability. And by core, it's really the basic fundamentals of motion and stability. Pushing and pulling (push ups), Sitting and standing (squats), Core strengths which help control the rest of your body (plank leg lifts), and cardio which literally keeps you alive (500m)... It's a little concerning to see weakness in core physical attributes so prominent, worldwide.

John F. Groom   3 months ago
Sure, many people around the world are in poor shape from sedentary lifestyles, but to answer the question "Were pushups always this hard" we would have to have some evidence of how many pushups could be done by previous generations, and what form they used.
That's not easy to say, as no such documentation exists, or, if it does, I don't know where.
Sure, when people worked on farms they were in better shape. But I don't think women in my mother's generation had any better upper body strength than women today.