Why We Do Pushups

Absolutely agreed with everything here. Additionally, push-ups help keep you awake. Nodding off? Drop and do 5. Gets the heart pumping again.

"team building" is like an arranged marriage - either you have a team or you don't, trying to force it doesn't yield any results and usually it's just an euphemism for being forced to do stupid things, most often to get drunk with everyone or "you are not being a team player". I would feel rather silly doing push-ups at work, especially at the command of my "team leader". Maybe people with more submissive personalities can swallow something like this more easily.

Aside from the above, where opinions may and probably will vary, doing just a single exercise very often is actually detrimental to health in many ways. Additionally, push-ups are exactly the wrong the exercise for most computer people, who tend to have rounded shoulders and contracted chest muscles - they are primarily a chest exercise, further exaggerating the rounded shoulders, where actually chest streching is needed and rowing exercises for the back. You might make fun of meatheads, but you actually should think a bit about what you are doing to your body, or it won't really do any good.

I don't think it's so cut and dried as "you have a team or you don't." Marriages aren't like that, friendships aren't like that---team cohesion falls on a spectrum as well.

I think there's value to team-building exercises when the participants want to be on the team, because just wanting isn't enough. But I agree that those sorts of exercises are certainly not sufficient alone.

Doing pushups should be balanced with pullups.

To me, a work-life balance means maintaining a separation between work and activities. I do various kinds of training on my own. I don't want to do them at work. That's where I think about work-things. And I do my various kinds of training as a way to clear my mind of work-things.