Challenging yourself with 300 pushups a day can help start your fitness journey and offer benefits. Find out what can happen.
Pushups are mainly a bodyweight resistance training exercise to grow and strengthen chest, tricep, and front shoulder muscles so this will be the main focus.
If you can barely do the 300 pushups in about 6 sets of 50 pushups to 7 sets of 43, a workout session with these can be challenging enough to grow and strengthen the target muscles.
You do really have to push yourself to failure in high-repetition sets like this to see muscle growth.
If the repetition ranges above are too easy, the 300 pushups will focus more on muscle endurance and may not cause that much growth.
Next, most people will not want to do workouts like this every day. Giving your muscles a rest day to repair and grow can help you avoid overtraining and actually increase your progress.
Muscle-related results aside, the 300 pushups a day (or every other day) would also help you burn some extra calories, potentially improve sleep, mood, and general health, and help you get in the habit of exercising.
One last thing to note is that you also want to implement exercises for your back muscles to avoid slouched shoulders.
What will happen if you do 300 pushups a day?
Let’s say you are able to do 300 pushups a day, possibly in different sets. In that case, implementing these could offer you some of the benefits and potential downsides below.
It could grow and strengthen your muscles
The main reason to do pushups is generally to grow and strengthen your chest, triceps, and front shoulder muscles since this is a bodyweight resistance training exercise.
To achieve these fitness goals you have to put the muscles under enough pressure, do the right number of repetitions, eat the right nutrients, and rest enough.
What exactly enough and the right number of pushups on what days is depends on your personal body and strength level.
That being said, there are some general guidelines you can use to find out if 300 repetitions are the right choice.
Pressure and repetitions
The pressure and repetitions needed per set/workout to train your muscles are closely related. In this article, the number of repetitions a day is 300 but there are still ways to split these up.
First of all, if you can do 300 pushups in a row, the bodyweight version of this exercise is likely not enough to grow and strengthen your chest, triceps, and shoulders.
On the flip side, people who are interested in resistance training tend to overestimate how much weight you need to grow and strengthen muscles.
Some studies imply that doing resistance training with only 30% of 1 RM can be enough to grow muscles (1). The main thing to keep in mind is that you really have to push to failure in these higher-repetition sets.
In simpler words, if you can barely complete the 300 repetitions in about 6 sets of 50 pushups to 7 sets of 43, a workout like this could be enough to see growth and strength results.
The same applies if you can hit these amounts of sets but not quite the repetitions.
Two ways to make pushups hard enough to see results are doing the decline version and/or doing them with weights.
Should you do them every day?
Another reasonable concern with doing 300 pushups a day is the amount (or lack of) rest involved.
Resistance training exercises damage the muscles you work during the workouts. This may sound bad but it actually starts a variety of internal processes that can make you stronger and healthier over time.
That being said, your body still needs enough time to recover from a workout.
There will likely be a few individuals that recover within 24 hours. Especially if the 300 repetitions are more of a muscle endurance exercise for them.
That being said, most people will want to implement an extra rest day for two reasons.
First of all, even if you would do low-repetition sets with weighted pushups, you would likely benefit from this extra rest day.
Secondly, you generally recover more slowly from resistance training workouts where you really push yourself to failure.
Since this will be needed to grow and strengthen muscles with 300-pushup workouts, you should likely not do these every day. Taking an extra rest day can actually improve the results you get and allow you to work other muscles.
How many calories do 300 pushups burn?
It is typically not the main goal of the exercise but pushups also burn extra calories while you do them.
Exactly how many this will be depends on things like your exact body weight, body composition, hormone levels, intensity, etc. That being said, there are ways to make predictions about this number.
Let’s say the average person does 20 pushups per minute and takes about 15 minutes of actual exercise to do 300 pushups.
In that case, people with the following body weights can expect to burn these amounts of calories with 300 pushups:
- 125 pounds (56 kg) body weight: 89 calories
- 155 pounds (70 kg) body weight: 110 calories
- 185 pounds (83 kg) body weight: 131 calories
- 215 pounds (97 kg) body weight: 152 calories
These are decent amounts for 15 minutes of exercise (+ rest periods between sets) especially if you do this every day for a month, 3 months, a year, or more.
At the same time, there are definitely workouts that help you burn more calories during the 15 minutes.
That being said, something important to note is that pushups also positively influence calorie burning in more long term ways.
First of all, doing resistance training exercises at high intensity can cause afterburn which comes down to burning a few more calories for a small amount of time after working out.
Secondly, any extra muscle mass you get from the 300 pushups a day will benefit calorie-burning throughout the day.
Whether all these things also make it so pushups help you lose weight is a different story.
You may start slouching your shoulders
Something important to note is that while exercise offers many benefits, you can also do it in ways that cause suboptimal results.
If you only do 300 pushups a day and not other resistance training exercises, your chest, triceps, and front shoulders will be unusually strong compared to your back (shoulder) muscles.
In turn, this can cause you to slouch your shoulders which can be uncomfortable and not visually appealing.
To compensate for all these pushups, something like a bent-over row or one of its variations can be helpful.
Your muscle endurance will likely improve
To focus on muscle endurance you do train differently. However, even if the 300-pushup workouts help you grow your muscles, they will likely also improve muscle endurance to some extent.
Unless you have to push things a lot throughout the day, better muscle endurance in your chest, triceps, and front shoulders will not be the most useful.
At least not compared to something like core muscle endurance which is helpful when standing up.
That being said, it is still one of the effects worth mentioning.
300 pushups a day challenge result examples
You can definitely expect the results above to happen when you implement 300 pushups a day.
That being said, seeing what results people get when they actually implement this routine can be interesting too.
300 pushups a day for a month
Jose from the Youtube channel Teachingmensfashion did 300 pushups a day for 30 days.
More specifically, he did 100 decline pushups in the morning, 100 regular pushups in the afternoon, and 100 incline pushups in the evening. You can see the results below.
How to get to 300 pushups a day
While it is not always the optimal routine, getting to 300 pushups a day and sticking to it can be a good goal to aim for. This is generally more motivating than just telling yourself you should do more pushups.
However, your current strength capacities may not allow you to hit this number of repetitions in a reasonable amount of time.
Luckily, this is often not a permanent situation. By taking the right steps, you can likely get to 300 pushups a day.
First of all, you want to be able to do more than 3 sets of pushups with at least 6 repetitions. If this is not yet possible for you, you likely want to start with easier pushup progressions first.
After that, you slowly want to increase either the repetitions and sets you do (and really push yourself to failure) (up to about 6 sets) or use something like a weighted vest to make the pushups harder.
If you are not seeing muscle growth results with workouts of 3 to 6 sets of fewer pushups while increasing repetitions/weight, you likely either need to eat more or rest more.
Once you tick off all these boxes, you should slowly but surely go in the direction of being able to do 300 pushups a day. Of course, this will take consistent effort. You will generally not go from 10 to 300 pushups in a week or two.
Is 300 pushups a day good for you?
If you recover quickly enough and train your back muscles enough to avoid slouched shoulders, 300 pushups a day with the right technique is generally good for you.
That being said, it is hard to call this routine optimal for health and results.
First of all, most people will prefer doing fewer pushups but with extra weights. This will save you time and likely offer more results.
Secondly, most people will want to implement at least one rest day in between each 300-pushup workout. This will give your muscles more time to recover and can actually improve results.
Thirdly, for optimal health and fitness goals like weight loss, you want to implement other exercises, implement other types of workouts, and make changes in other lifestyle areas.
So getting to 300 pushups a day and sticking to it can be a good challenge to get yourself moving more and can definitely offer benefits.
At the same time, you could make some changes to your routine and other lifestyle habits to see even more positive results.
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