Without doubt, as far as bodyweight exercises go, no exercise will provide such a complete upper body workout as the push up. Just as the bench press is the king upper body lift for bodybuilders and weight lifters, the push up is for bodyweight exercises – because the mechanics of push ups and bench pressing are almost identical.
Anyway, you are here because you want to know what you can do to increase your push ups.
What I’m going to give you here is 3 simple tips which are guaranteed to help you get pumping out more push ups than you likely think possible.
Here we go:
Use Reps and Sets
Being from a bodybuilding background this makes perfect sense to me. I wouldn’t approach my lifts with the mindset of doing as many reps in one set as I can until I collapse from failure and then stop altogether. No. What I’d do is, split them up into sets.
Instead of aiming to do 50 push ups, I’d maybe begin by splitting it up into 3 sets of 17, 17, 16 with a break in between each set.
Once I’m comfortable doing this, I’ll then shorten the breaks between each set, until I really don’t need a break at all and can push out 50 without stopping.
Push beyond failure
Pushing yourself really is the only way to make improvements in any exercise. If you feel your arms about to collapse, keep pushing until you collapse. Training until failure – particularly in an exercise which has the capacity for high reps such as push ups, you are building more capillaries and veins which serve to feed the muscle energy and oxygen and remove waste products from the muscle, so your muscles are much better conditioned for it each time.
Lose body fat
The average adult carries around with them a few stone of fat, and they may not even look fat at all. But, 2 stone of fat is 28lb – which is quite an amount of weight. Just think how many more push ups you’d be able to do if you were 28lb lighter… it’d be quite a few.