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Everyone who trains at some point has done or still does push-ups 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 pushups 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 pushups. I thought and tried to figure it out. One way I thought of increasing the number was doing a lot of bench pressing at the time. I thought it was pretty much 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 push-ups made me breathe hard and fast, which slowed me down. The distance races did not help me.
The first time I 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 caught up in the experts talking about resting and letting the body rest and not overtraining, no wonder I wasn’t getting better, it was because I wasn’t doing enough.
The two secrets that changed the number of push-ups I could do was having a functionally stronger body and training with short, intense exercises like sprints, jump rope, burpees, etc.
Training this way allowed my body to get used to training without oxygen (anaerobic) not with oxygen (aerobic). Weight training and distance running require training the anaerobic system. Sprints, jumping rope, burpees, push-ups all require training the anaerobic system to really excel.
Men in the military, state police, mixed martial arts, and martial arts have benefited from this type of training to improve their push-ups.
Training fast and explosive will strengthen your body and give you the strength and conditioning to improve your push-up numbers more than you ever thought possible.