The sticky lump sails across his living room and flattens against the wall above the piano and next to the painting of the flower with a satisfying thwap. Ted Skup, the man who would be king of the artificial spit ball, winds and fires. One man's stick-to-itiveness sells magic wad YouTube: Chris Comfort's push-up tips and variations: 'Stuck on Pushups? Try the Pushup Push Workout!' by Stew Smith of : Here 'is the program that has helped people go from 50 pushups to 80 pushups in two weeks.' Push-ups are simple, effective, economical way to build strength (Seattle Post Intelligencer/Bob Condor, 2007) If you do pushups every day, when is your body going to heal the muscle tears in your chest and triceps? The answer is it is not.' Now that you know this, let me ask you a question. Once they heal, they are a little bigger and a little stronger. It then takes time and the nutrition that you eat to heal those tears. That is the initial stimulus of hypertrophy. When you are working out, you are tearing the muscles fibers. Your muscles are not growing and increasing strength when you are working out. But theyвЂ™re fairly specific, not the kind of total-body aerobic endeavor that creates overall fitness.ДЄn enduring measure of fitness -the simple push-up (New York Times, March 2008)ДЄuthor pushes push-ups (Gary Post-Tribune, March 2008)ДЇrom That's Fit: Are push-ups the new yoga? Simple but effective - The push up Innovative abdominal training Your best upper body exercise.ДЇrom : ' It is not a good idea to do pushups daily and here is why. Published March 1, 2008ДЇrom Tommy Boone, co-founder of the American Society of Exercise Physiologists: вЂњPush-ups are excellent for developing the shoulders and arms. 'Death, Taxes & Push-Ups: Confessions from `The Pusher'ДЄBox Publishing, 216 pages, $18.95. 'Never do so many that it hurts.'Д«ut when, in his zeal, he starts talking about the value of doing 1,000 or even 2,000 pushups a day, I, for one, recoil at the thought - the tedium of counting, for one thing.

'If you thnik you can do sets of 10, do 5 instead,' he said. Move down to inclined surfaces, maybe all the way down but on your knees at first. He tries to make it an easy sell - start small, with just a few repetitions standing up against a door-frame, if that's where you're at. I'm guessing this is a better idea - promoting a simple, inexpensive route to fitness that obviates the need for expensive equipment and gym memberships. I wrote about Skup ( right) nearly 18 years ago when he was promoting Spit Wads, a novelty product that mimicked the spitballs many of us fired at one another as children ( see below), He hoped to sell 100 million packages but said this week that he ended up selling about half a million during a three-year marketing run. 'Get going on them and they're aerobic as well.' He calls his push-up routine 'horizontal jogging.' 'They work your upper body, your stomach, your waist, your butt, even your thighs,' he said. Skup, 56, says he's done 1,000 of them a day, every day, for that last 25 years (putting him close to 10 million) and considers them a 'nearly perfect workout.'

My life as a king wad