Can Doing 50 Pushups and Situps Every Day Make You Strong?
Pushups Benefits
When performing pushups, you use muscles of your upper body to lift your body weight up and down repeatedly. Performing pushups everyday will help promote strength in your chest muscles, or pectorals, your triceps and your deltoids, which are located in your shoulders. Strengthening these muscles can help you throw a football farther, swing a golf club with more force or push a stroller up a hill more easily. From an aesthetic standpoint, pushups may help tone your arms and shoulders.
Situp Benefits
As with pushups, situps don't require any special equipment, but they can still help you improve your fitness level. Rather than targeting your upper body, situps help strengthen your abdominal muscles. Having strong abdominal muscles can help you improve your posture and may also aid your balance and stability, particularly when you change directions while playing sports.
Effect of 50 Repetitions
Obviously, the type of exercise you perform will have a significant effect on which muscles get stronger. But the number of repetitions make a difference as well. Higher numbers of repetitions -- such as 50 -- tend to promote muscular endurance, or the ability of your muscles to produce a moderate amount of force over and over again. In other words, performing 50 pushups daily is more effective for training your muscles to withstand taking a high number of shots in hockey simultaneously rather than training your muscles to put significantly more force on each individual shot.
Strength Improvement Strategies
Performing 50 pushups and situps each day can help you enhance your muscular endurance dramatically. But if you want to promote power and strength more effectively, consider performing these exercises with weights for fewer repetitions. Adding resistance and performing fewer repetitions can help enhance strength and power, even if you're performing the same exercises. You can also perform machine exercises such as the chest press and cable crunch with a low-rep, high-resistance setup.