TWO Workouts

Ever wondered how much following a meal plan or calorie tracking would affect your physique and overall strength performance? Just to put it in one picture: Quite a bit. In the right picture I was following a regular diet without calculating anything and I was “eating big to get big” you know. Bulking was fairly easy since I was just eating a lot without paying attention to what I actually ate. But the fat gain was fast and muscle gain was minimal. And when I was dieting for fat loss I usually ended up only in a slight deficit which made progress too slow or I was losing weight too fast which led to strength and muscle loss in the process. So after dieting down I had pretty much lost some muscle and not enough fat. But in the left picture I had a structured approach using meal planning and flexible dieting as combined. This is what gets you the results but it's not much talked about. Most gurus and companies out there just want to sell you their shortcuts and supplements but our bo...

Push-ups are a great tool to gain strength and size to the chest if you do the right exercises in the proper rep range. But when talking about push-up workouts you mostly see high rep work done with submaximal load leading to disappointing results. It almost seems that no one actually understands the basic loading parameters of the push-ups. What you should do instead is to work in a moderate rep range 6-12 progressing to more challenging exercises when you reach the top of that rep range. And keep the number of working sets somewhere between 8-12 sets per week. This ensures progressive overload, proper training stimulus and strength gains over time. Here I’m going to introduce a push-up progression model based on the actual load of the push-ups and calculated 1 rep max. For those who have not read the push-ups compared to bench press post check it out here: https://twoworkouts.blogspot.com/2020/09/push-ups-compared-to-bench-press-with.html There is a calculator included that lets you ...

  Push-ups compared to bench press Have you ever wondered how you would compare the different types of push-ups to a barbell press? Well I did but couldn’t find a good push-up to bench press calculator. So I did some research online, made my own calculator based on the actual load and verified the results. Of course direct comparison is not possible because the two exercises are completely different but we can compare the loading parameters between barbell press and push-ups. So a fair warning if you can bench press 1.5x bodyweight you are not able to do one arm push-ups or the other way around. It just doesn’t work that way. But if you currently can do one arm push-ups with good form you could probably reach the 1.5x bodyweight bench 1RM relatively fast by practising the actual lift. In the following we will look at: Strength standards - how much you should actually press to be intermediate or advanced 1RM vs 6-10RM for bodyweight exercises Push-up variations and actual load Top a...