May 20 2009
How to Pump Out More Push-Ups
By: L Jones
Words to live by in the Army are “train as you would fight”. This saying is a powerful lesson in life when in pursuit of achieving your goals. You wouldn’t train for a marathon by swimming three times a week. It might help with your endurance, but it’s not preparing you for a marathon.
Practice test question: To do more push ups, I should ________?
a. talk about doing more push ups b. start swimming c. start to lift weights d. do push ups
Strangely enough, all of these answers will help you, but your best option in this case would be d. do push ups. Ok, I just said that all of these anwers could help and here is how answer a. helps. We are going to discuss push ups a bit. Not the actual exercise, but different types of routines with different results.
The Pyramid
The pyramid is a great routine to help with muscle development, strength and mental toughness. It will not help you do more push ups though. Why? The pyramid is geared towards doing a set number of push ups, no more maybe less. You start at one rep, work your way up to fifteen of twenty reps and then back to one. The problem is you get breaks in the middle. You get to relax your muscles when you’ve completed the designated amount of reps.
Ladder
The same effect as the pyramid. With the ladder you either work your way down from a set numebr, say twenty push ups down to one or you work your way up. This is a great routine for muscle development and honestly, you will probably be able to do more push ups, but not much more than the max amount that you’ve done in the routine. Why? You are not training as you would fight. If you need to do 73 push ups on the pt test, doing a ladder routine which only requires you to do a max of twenty or twenty five push ups just doesn’t cut it.
Bench Press Routine
I tried this one year and got really strong at bench pressing, but when it came time for me to take the pt test, I did poorly. I passed, but I barely passed. At the time, I weighed around 168 and could lift 225lbs around 6 to 8 reps. My chest was pumped, I felt powerful; so why did I do so poorly?
When I worked out with the bench press, I normally would do three sets of ten to twelve reps. How many push ups did I need to max the pt test? I needed more than ten to twelve. Are you starting to see what I am saying?
Push ups require endurance, rhythm, strength, technique, mental toughness, stamina. To do more push ups, you need to do more push ups, but here is where you make your money.
The key to doing more push ups is to replicate the conditions in training to match those in t he fight. In the Army, that fight is the Army Physical Fitness Test or APFT. The APFT gives you two minutes to do as many correct push ups as you can. The key term in that sentence was “two minutes”. Time is money maker. When you train to do more push ups, you train to time, not to reps. It’s that simple.
On my next blog, I will post my rountine, my journal, and results by date. On the previous post, you saw the results. This one will show you how I got there. Make sure you check it out.
