If you're just starting you should only do pushups every second day with 2 days off after 5 days. For example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday with the weekends off. Keep in mind these three words: Routine, Recovery, Repeat. If you are recovered from the routine you did yesterday then you can repeat today. But you need to be able to repeat week after week. If you cannot, then increase recovery time or decrease total reps but maintain three training sessions per week.

If you are a beginner or even experience and want to improve, the first thing you need to do is to find your starting point. The best way to do this is to use our FREE pushups plan calculator. Please CLICK HERE now and you will be guided through setting up a personalised pushups programme that matches your skill level.

Pushups require you to use the following muscles: shoulders (front, side and rear deltoids), chest (pectoral muscles) and triceps (lateral, medial and long heads). But they also put demands on the glutes, lowerback, lats, traps, rhombus, abdominals, obliques, thighs and calves in different degrees. Pushups are a great all body workout, especially when you mix up your routines with different types of pushups.

If only? While your abdominal muscles are used when you do pushups (just as with a plank) doing large numbers of pushups will NOT give you a six pack, or abs. If you want a six pack you need to do two main things: focused core exercises and good diet to reveal your hard work. Once you reach your goal here, you only need a consistent weekly exercise routine AND diet to keep what you have worked for. You should not need to continuously bulk and then cut.