Beatriz

Training without a bench for years, the honest summary is: the push-up is not a compromise until you are quite strong, and then it becomes one.

For the first year or two, weighted push-ups and their harder variations will take you as far as you want to go, and the trunk work is a genuine bonus rather than a consolation.

The point where it starts to matter is when you need real load in small controllable increments to keep progressing, because that is what a barbell is uniquely good at. Adding two and a half kilos to a bar is trivial; adding two and a half kilos to a vest that is already heavy and shifting around is not.

Until then, the equipment is not what is limiting you.

There is also a real and well-established training approach that resembles this and is worth knowing about, because it is the legitimate version of what you are describing.

High-frequency, submaximal training — practising a movement most days, always stopping well short of failure, at a load you can repeat tomorrow — works, particularly for skill-heavy movements. Some strength traditions are built entirely on it.

The rule that makes it work is the one basic training does not follow: never train to failure. Failure creates fatigue that requires days to clear. Stopping several repetitions short lets you come back the next day, and the accumulated volume over a week can exceed what three hard sessions would give you.

So daily training is not inherently wrong. Daily training to exhaustion is.

If the real motivation is that you want to be in the gym more often — which is a perfectly good motivation — there are ways to use the extra days without wrecking the programme.

• Add conditioning on the off days. Walking, cycling, rowing at an easy pace. Helpful for recovery and for body composition, and it does not compete with the lifting.
• Practise technique at light loads. Twenty minutes of squatting an empty bar is not a workout and is enormously useful in the first months.
• Work on mobility where you are restricted, which for most beginners is ankles, hips and shoulders.

That gives you six days of activity, three days of training, and a programme that still works. The mistake is turning the extra enthusiasm into extra hard sets.