#volume training

I’m done with the 400-pushups-a-day affair. What an ordeal. Over the course of 31 days I squeezed out exactly 12,431 reps of pushups. I tried using different variants to cheer myself up, hoping this might distract me from how excruciating an experience I was putting my body through. Overall, was it worth it? Um, no.

I never expected much real benefit from this anyway so I can’t say I’m disappointed. From the very beginning I considered this to be an experiment whose aim was to prove (or disprove) the hypothesis whereby high-rep pushups over an extended period of time are senseless. I’m still in two minds about whether the experiment has fully born out the hypothesis. What I can say for certain, though, is that the ‘investment' dwarfed the returns. Look at this picture:

The difference that immediately jumps out at you is that I've got tanned. Yes, it’s summertime. What you can’t see though is the toll those 12K pushups have taken on me - I’ve seriously aggravated my elbow tendonitis and developed wrist pain as a bonus.

On the positive note, I’ve got slightly leaner and a wee bit more vascular. But was that the pushups? I’m not sure. It may as well be the lighting in the ‘after’ picture or a slightly different pose that’s making those veins pop out a little more. You can’t re-create the exact same pose after a month.

Still, I do look a tad smaller now, which is interesting because I haven’t lost any weight. I did get a little stronger though, and that is what's got me intrigued. After all, hundreds of pushups on top of my normal routine (and I do a lot of volume training) should have absolutely fried my chest! And yet, I’ve actually been able to add a bit of weight to some exercises I do for chest and crank up the volume.

Counterintuitive as it appeared, I carried out an investigation. I am about to share my conclusions so those of you who cannot be bothered with pseudo-scientific gibberish, it’s fine to drop off now, I won’t be offended. Others, read on…

This will be about muscle mitochondria, their role in providing energy to the muscle and stimulating hypertrophy (ie, growth).

What’s a mitochondrion? Wikipedia says it’s a "double membrane-bound organelle found in all eukaryotic organisms”. Yea, whatever. It’s enough to know that mitochondria are tiny power-generators which use the oxidative energy system (ie, respiration) to produce energy that’s then delivered into the contractile muscle threads (called myofibrils) to enable contraction. You will find them floating in the sarcoplasm surrounding those myofibrils.

In order to adapt to a training regimen, the body needs to produce more power, ie, more mitochondria. Whilst the body is perfectly capable of creating new mitochondria, early studies seemed to argue that resistance training had no stimulating impact on that process. Unlike cardio which - so the argument went - naturally 'forces’ the muscle to create more mitochondria in order to get more power from oxidation, on which it solely relies, to allow us to withstand hours on the treadmill. In other words, cardio is able to utilise the mitochondria’s power-generating abilities much more efficiently than weight training, and thus stimulate the creation of new ones.

At least that’s what they used to say until more recent studies showed up. This is where it gets interesting. Apparently, regular high-rep light-weight resistance training (approx. 30% or your 1 rep max for as many reps as possible) triggers various kinds of adaptation processes that alter the composition of sarcoplasmic mitochondria, effectively leading to oxidation-generated ATP being recruited by fast-twitch muscle activation (as when lifting weights) and not just by slow-twitch activation (as when doing cardio). It also - just like cardio - promotes the production of more mitochondria.

Effectively, high-volume training with light to moderate resistance will lead to an increased engagement of the oxidative energy system in delivering energy to the myofibrils when you lift weights, not just when you run an ultra marathon… You will be tapping into more energy sources during weight training, including those which are normally reserved for cardio.

This would explain why my strength gains. But why have I not put on additional muscle size from doing all those pushups?

Well, as you may know there are two types of hypertrophy. In order to build size over a relatively short period of time you're shooting for sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is basically size gains caused by increased protein synthesis in the sarcoplasm. You can easily pump up the sarcoplasm by doing high-rep exercises with moderate or light weights (often referred to as metabolic stress) which, when performed repeatedly will cause your cells to stock up on glycogen and create more organelles (like the mitochondria) in the sarcoplasm, all of which will lead to the muscle cells growing in size.

Sounds good but, unfortunately, most of it is hogwash. The extent to which sarcoplasmic hypertrophy contributes to the overall muscle size is biblically overestimated. The idea that you can build huge muscle by going light for high reps is attractive enough to gain traction - I get that. But science has no mercy. Research proves that not only is the size of the sarcoplasm barely affected by resistance training but also it amounts to no more than 20% of muscle size. You'd have to double or triple its volume to see any difference on the outside. Good luck with that.

The real size is in the myofibrils and those need mechanical damage for protein synthesis to kick in and actually build new muscle cells. That means you need to lift heavy to grow and there's simply no way around it.

Sarcoplasmic protein synthesis, however, does have its merits. It functions as an excellent power generator for myofibrillic hypertrophy and, as such, it does ultimately lead to muscle growth, although not directly. If you do pushups in addition to heavy resistance training, as opposed to just pushups, you should see extra gains eventually. That’s because you will be getting stronger. You will be recruiting more ATP to fuel the myofibrillic hypertrophy, of which size gains are a side effect. Don’t expect anything noticeable in a month though, it’s just not enough time. Strength gains are a different matter. You will notice these quite quickly. When you do, add weight to the bar. Otherwise there’ll be no gains, only your workouts will feel less taxing.

OK, so how do we explain those ‘body transformations’ from hundreds of pushups a day over a few weeks, as seen online? Well, most of them are fake. Those that aren’t are actually quite easily accounted for. The gains are optical. If you add an extra 3 or 4 hundred pushups to your daily routine you are going to be burning off a lot more calories than usual. After a month you are inevitably going to look more shredded, having gotten rid of the flabby layer that covered your muscles and veins. Notice that in their ‘after’ photos those guys don’t look bigger - they look more athletic.

So, are high-rep pushups worth doing in addition to your normal workouts? As I said at the beginning, I don’t think so. They are really taxing on your tendons and wrists and that does impact your weight training in a bad way. And the benefits? Well, an extra vein coming into view or an extra few pounds on your bench press are achievable via other, less torturous methods, I’m sure.