I’m going to be taking a physical fitness test in about a month or so and one of the citeria is pushups.
The problem is, I seem to be limited in that area(less then half the recommended) and I’m not sure how exactly one is supposed to be able to increase the amount, other then to work at it, and I’ve been doing that.
Any suggestions?
Really unscientifically, there are about a gajillion muscles used in push-ups - back, stomach, thighs, calf, hands, feet, and then - the biceps, triceps and pectorals - these are the bigboys when it comes to doing pushups. So anyway that you can stengthen these three will help, but the surest way of getting better is, as you state - practice push-ups…
Bummer.
What Achilles said (how could you forget to include the deltoid muscles!). Just keep working on them. Do ten or twelve sets a day.
Set yourself a target, like a minimum of 60 a day. Do the 60 pushups in sets of 10, 20 or 30. Start off with 10, rest, do another 10 and so on. Maybe you could do 3 sets of 10 in the morning, then another 3 sets at night.
Slowly increase the number per set, until you meet your requirements.
I agree, that in a short time-frame, practicing push-ups in sets is best. Give daily limit, increase the amount you do in each set. Start with 10, move to 12, 15 so on. If you had more time, though, I would advise practicing on something with more resistance three days a week - i.e. BENCH PRESS. If you can rip off some bench press three days a week doing 3 sets of 8 (the final few should be close to impossible to lift) you will notice an amazingly noticable difference in the ease of push-up ability over time.
Oh, and if you WOULD start doing bench-press, don’t ever do them back-to-back days (actually two days in between is probably better) because it’s not the actual lifting of the weights that makes your muscles stronger, but rather the rest period in between workouts that allows your muscles to rebuild (from breaking down) to a point that they were stronger than they were before.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no power-lifter, nor could I probably bench much more than my weight, but know that there is much potential to damage/injure or regress if done improperly. Okay I’m done now.
Slight Hijack: As mentioned, a rest period is required to actually grow stronger, but what if you don’t rest immediately and instead continue to lift weights, etc. Will the body make up for it later when you do rest or what?
I’m in the same boat (i.e. I’d like to double the number of push-ups I can do, and I’ve got about a month).
So how often should I take rest periods and how long should they be? Should I base it on muscle soreness?
When I entered the Army I could pump out about 15 good ones before I would start to cry. Drill Sergeant taught me that doing many small sets a day improves your performance at a rapid pace. By the end of the second month I could knock out 40 before thinking a rest would be nice. Days of rest didn’t seem to be important in my growing ability as I did many sets of pushups every day for 2 months.
But seriously. If you’re doing pushups for a TEST, do as many as you can before resting (presumably you need to maintain the basic pushup position during the rest) because as soon as you stop pumping, your arms fill up with blood and further repetitions are MUCH more difficult.
The dal with resting after Bench Press workouts has to do with the extent to which you are breaking down your muscles. When you’re starting your bench brogram, you typically keep doing sets with progressively smaller weights until you can’t even lift the bar. Seldom do you get a pushup workout that is that extreme. Your body needs the days to cleanse the tissue of lactic acid, bits of damaged muscle, etc. and rebuild. I have heard of extreme cases where a muscle group is targeted (usually in an insane act of testosterone poisoning) to such an extent that the blood is blooded with bits of tissue that actually clog the kidneys. Yuckers.
The amount of rest you need depends on the intensity of your workout. If you are doing high-impact lifting, to where you are isolating certain muscle groups by doing bench, flys, etc than you would want to at LEAST skip one day before isolating those muscles again. This is because you are litterally tearing your muscles down and they “heal” during rest and this is where “getting stronger” actually happens.
If you are doing lower impact workouts, less rest is needed. For example, if you’re only doing 25-50 pushups, you can do those everyday. If you’re exceeding 100 pushups to the point where you can feel your muscles burning and you are really straining to get through the final set, than more rest would probably be a good idea. Other than waiting for muscles to heal, there is always just plain risk of breakdown or injury.
When I was in college, I decided that I would do 100 push-ups every day. I started by doing 15 in the morning, 15 middle of day, then 15 before bed (45 daily). After a couple weeks, was doing 20 at a time (60 a day), then after that up to 25, 4 times a day. I got really good at them, but one day I went down and wouldn’t you know it, some sort of searing pain came right out of nowhere into the upper part of my right shoulder. I attribute it to over-doing it (repetition-wise on a daily basis). Plus if you do every other day push ups, you could probably do more per day. Either way, I had to stop and now I probably couldn’t do 100 push-ups if I was on the moon.