How important is it to eat right and also..

funfan55

How important is it to change your diet if you are working to build muscle and also can you gain muscle just from doing push ups and diamond pushups

ninerbuff

Building muscle takes progressive overload along with a certain amount of volume. So with pushups you can only reach a certain amount of overload unless you just keep gaining weight. Putting on mass takes a calorie surplus. And you need a certain amount of protein to consume to encourage hypertrophy.



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sijomial

"How important is it to change your diet if you are working to build muscle."
Depends on what your current diet is like. Might need change, might not.
Plenty of people add muscle with very ordinary diets as it's your training that drives the process.
If you have regular fitness, strength, physique goals a regular diet will work.

"and also can you gain muscle just from doing push ups and diamond pushups"
If doing them places enough stress on your current muscles to cause adaptation.
The problem with push ups is that you can't use increasing weight to progressively increase the difficulty and have to use volume which isn't as efficient and will most likely stop working for hypertrophy fairly quickly , depending where you are starting from.
For an extreme example after not being able to put any weight on one leg for 3 months just learning to walk again was enough to build a little muscle but that was very short-lived and I had to increase the stimulus (stairs, cycling, weights....) to continue rebuilding my leg muscle - just walking more wasn't going to do much.

Is that all you are planning on doing? What about the rest of your body?

funfan55

I plan to also build legs too and abs

ninerbuff

funfan55 wrote: »

I plan to also build legs too and abs

Consider joining a gym to get the resistance you need to help you along.

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SnifterPug

You can get quite creative with push ups if they are your exercise of choice. Different hand positions, doing them with your feet on a step, using a slingshot for crazy volume overload, putting a weighted rucksack on. Push ups done with proper form will strengthen upper body and abs. They are a full body exercise, but I'm sure they would not actually build legs.

Any change in diet depends on your current diet as has been pointed out, and what your aims are. For pure bulking you need sufficient protein and to eat calories at maintenance or a little above depending on how much fat you can tolerate putting on. Obviously you won't build any muscle without progressive overload as has also been stated. And you need enough sleep.

rheddmobile

Re: push-ups - a lot depends where you are right now in your training. As a completely unfit 50 year old woman, I went from no hint of muscle in my chest or arms to nicely defined chest and arm muscles in about a year of mainly pushups. I’m not huge, but as an older woman I get occasional “wow your arms and back are amazing” comments, so something is working. But I was starting from not even being able to do countertop pushups - I was so out of shape I was doing wall pushups - and working up to finishing the “bring Sally up” pushup challenge by the end of it. If you are a unfit noodle person you will get more gains from pushups than a big buff guy can.

A push-up is basically a bench press, inverted, so you can keep building muscle about as long as your bench press is less than your bodyweight - or I guess you could do what @SnifterPug suggested and add weight to your push-up. It may not be the optimal way to do it though, and eventually you are going to want to add weights to keep going.

davew0000

I think you can go a long way with push-up variations. There are a few nice ones in this book by Bret Contreras, such as side to side, diamond or one armed push-ups