Everyone who trains at some point has done or still does pushups to some degree. The problem is that most people don’t really work very hard to get better at push-ups. Pushups are usually done to warm up or cool down at the end of a workout.
A lot of people don’t give much respect to the pushup and for what it can and will do for the body. I know that I have done over a million push-ups in my thirty plus years of training. In those thirty years of training and doing push-ups, I was always trying to find the best way to improve the number of push-ups I could do.
I tried every possible way to try to increase my numbers and there was never any kind of information on how to improve the number of push ups. I thought and tried to figure it out. One way I thought of increasing the number was to do a lot of bench pressing at the time. I thought it was almost the same move, and of course found that nothing could be further from the truth.
So the bench press didn’t help me. I thought I needed to improve my stamina because doing pushups made me breathe hard and fast, which slowed me down. Distance running didn’t help me.
The first time I ever did a lot of pushups in one workout was when I was a senior in high school when I did 1200 pushups in 1 hour. But I still couldn’t figure out how I should train to improve my push-ups, other than doing push-ups.
Then I got stuck in the experts talking about resting and letting the body rest and not overtraining, no wonder I wasn’t improving, it was because I wasn’t doing enough.
The two secrets that changed the number of pushups I could do was to have a stronger functional body and train with short, intense exercises like sprints, jump rope, burpees, etc.
Training this way allowed my body to get used to training without oxygen (anaerobic) or with oxygen (aerobic). Weight training and distance running require training the anaerobic system. Sprints, jump rope, burpees, pushups all require training the anaerobic system to really excel.
Men in the military, state police, mixed martial arts, and martial arts have all benefited from this type of training to improve their pushups.
Training fast and explosive will strengthen your body and give you the strength and conditioning to improve your pushup numbers more than you ever thought possible.