How To Do More Pushups
One of the most beneficial but most hated exercises is the pushup. For anyone looking to put on more muscle and/or increase their upper body strength… pushups are excellent. Most of my figure competitors can do between 25 – 40 pushups. Most started out just being able to do a few.
What often happens is that women will get stuck on a particular number of pushups and have a problem increasing the number of reps they can do. What most trainers would do is to try and make the exercise easier (ex. by having you do them on an incline). If you are struggling to increase the number of reps you can do, the secret is to make the pushups harder… not easier!
In the video above you see me placing a 18lb medicine ball on Melanie’s (by the way, Melanie is my new figure pro as of 2 days ago! Congratulations…) back for added resistance. She is more advanced than most women so I wouldn’t start out using this much weight… a 5lb weight will do just fine. You won’t be able to do as many reps (you may actually surprise yourself and squeeze out your normal maximum reps)… but you are forcing your muscles to work harder during the pushup – this will translate into you pushing harder when there is no extra weight on your back, which will lead to you doing more reps. I would suggest doing this for 3 consecutive workouts before you try to do pushups without any resistance…. you will be surprised at the results when you try regular pushups again.
“What if I’m alone and don’t have anyone to place a weight on my back?”
In that case you could do negatives. Without going into detail as to why they work, just trust me… they work better than anything else for building strength.
- from the top of the pushup position, lower yourself SLOWLY to the ground (or as far down as you can go without doing a face-plant… splatt!)
- use your knees to get back into the top position (don’t use your arms to get up), you are trying to save all of your energy for the lowering portion of the pushup
- lower yourself again toward the floor… all the way, if you are strong enough
- continue these ‘negative’ pushups until you can no longer control yourself as lower yourself toward the floor (remember, no face-plants)
- the most important points to remember are Not to use your arms to push upward back into position and that you MUST lower yourself slowly… this is essential to getting stronger… lowering yourself down too quickly will be ineffective.
- do 3 or 4 good sets each workout, for three consecutive workouts without doing regular pushups and you will see results when you try the pushups the regular way during your 4th workout.
Posted on October 20, 2009, in Figure Competition Training and tagged figure training, figure workout. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
Excellent idea. Pushups have not been a strength of mine. I’m going to give these suggestions a try. Thanks!
I’d agree that the logic of making an exercise easier to increase the reps is a bit backwards – you’re just increasing the period of time you can keep going, which won’t do anything if you want to build strength rather than work capacity.
Something I’ve done to provide resistance for press ups is to use resistance bands. (I don’t always have someone to put weight on my back and resistance bands have so many uses that they were a worthwhile investment).
If you put a couple of twists in one (to stop it splitting open and one part sliding up to pass across the back of your neck etc), you can lie it across your upper back and hold an end in each hand.
It provides more resistance as you move up through the press up so you get a harder workout than usual at what should be the easiest part of the press up. I’ve increased my reps a huge amount this way.
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