body weight vs lifting heavy-how often?

Hi - my angle on it is if you can do push-ups every day, you are not working with enough intensity; you need to step up the exercise. If you are able to do 3 sets of 10 regular pushups, try increasing the intensity:

- by performing them slower - down to a count of two, hold the low plank for a one-count then push up to a count of one and repeat. you may find you can't do so many, which is ok - you have increased the intensity of the exercise.

- or by increasing the difficulty of the exercise; pushups from your feet raised on a block, on a football, one hand on a football etc

- by mentally contracting every muscle fibre as you perform the exercise. This becomes easier to focus on when you slow down the movements.

By increasing intensity in this way, you should find you really can't do pushups the next day as your body needs to repair.

Your body doesn't know whether it is pushing something external like a barbell or doing a bodyweight exercise. The trick in bodyweight exercises is to keep increasing intensity by making things increasingly difficult. It is a fascinating process. I'm quite addicted!

I can't comment on weight lifting - hope someone else can help you out there.

I think C4RLO5 hit the nail on the head. Stress is stress, whether it's body weight or iron weight. Give your muscles time to repair and recover between sessions of training. Stressing a muscle every day will eventually lead to an injury if you do it for too long. Listen to your body and rest if you need it.

I've read articles that have said to increase your ability to do exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, or dips, to do them every chance you can. It seems to go against the philosophy of rest periods. I'm not sure of the correct answer, but I do believe that it has to do with body weight exercises don't usually stress the system like heavy lifting does.

If I have a sore muscle, I try not to work it for a day, or two, but part of my job requires shoveling, hammering, and sometimes, heavy lifting. I think the body will adapt, as muscle soreness doesn't last as long, or get so severe when you are used to doing certain jobs, or exercises. For proper muscular development, rest days are important, along with switching your routine so your body constantly needs to adapt to the changes being applied to it.

For proper muscular development, rest days are important, along with switching your routine so your body constantly needs to adapt to the changes being applied to it.

program jumping isn't really going to help you continue to make progress.

yes it's good to cycle out some of your assistance excercises, but your programming should stay relatively the same. jumping from trend to trend is why people don't make progress.

I didn't recommend changing your whole program. Just enough that your body doesn't adapt to it. I agree, it is too hard to track progress when you are completely changing your program, too often. I always keep the main "bench mark" exercises in my program, but will change some of the other lifts around, occasionally. But even the main lifts, do change, by trying to either add weight, or reps. Therefore, the body still has to adapt to the new stress being applied to it.