Press ups shocker! how many

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  • Fastlad
    Fastlad Posts: 908
    Press ups are for squaddies doing their training. Who the hell wants to be doing a 100 press ups, let alone 1!!! Riding your bike regularly, in and out of the saddle, pulling on the bars etc keeps arms and shoulders strong (enough) and toned. That's my excuse, and i'm sticking to it! :)
  • shm_uk
    shm_uk Posts: 683
    solsurf wrote:
    Father Jack wrote:
    The question is why would you want to?

    Over the last few years I've been getting more bike and running fit and I like to think of my self as fit so it was a bit of a shock that I had lost my upper body strength. My arms are quite toned (from pulling hard on the handle bars to get up the hills around here) so I was surprised that I couldn't do more than probably the average man in the street.



    Press-ups primarily focus your shoulder, chest & tricep muscle groups.
    Cycling doesn't seem to particularly rely on strong chest/tricep muscles as much as strong back and shoulders, and to a lesser extent biceps (at least, these are the upper-body muscles I feel working the most when I'm riding).



    Cycling will certainly tone certain muscle groups, but will only make them stronger to a limited extent because they're not moving a lot of weight.

    Also, on a bike you're only moving muscles through a limited range of their movement.

    Both of these reasons are why cycling won't particularly help your press-up ability, but doing press-ups will help strengthen your shoulders which is beneficial for chucking a bike around :-)



    As an aside, I find chin-ups or pull-ups more beneficial for my mountain-biking fitness than press-ups.


    The most important thing to remember with any gym type exercise is to maintain proper form throughout - more reps is not necessarily better. It's often easy to increase reps by using poor technique, but this will give less benefit and is more likely to result in injury.

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