I need a PROVEN pushup improvement routine

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I got to do a physical fitness test... sooner than I thought, In about a month for my navy officer application. For my age the minimum is 44, the more the better obviously. I did 41 yesterday which was surprising as I havent been doing pushups at all and I was expecting lower, it had to be high from my dumbell presses where I had been focusing on endurance doing like 15 to even 20 reps.


To get an excellent rating I would have to do 67:shock: Im not sure yet what I want to do for a program to try to get there. The people saying not to go to failure all the time are probably right so that way I could do them more regularly and maybe only go to failure once a week to test my progress.

 

The thing that gets people stuck with higher reps is lactic acid. So the logical thing to do is to increase your bodies ability to cope with and clear the lactic acid. A good way is pyramids (starting at 1 and going up to a certain number and working back down with short 15-30s rests in between) or ladders (same as pyramids but you start at the top rep and just work down), both will help your body deal with the lactic acid. The last and best thing you could do for your test is to just set the timer like the others have set and bang out as many as possible in 2 minutes, or 3 minutes, if you have to do them on your knees when you cant do anymore just to push it that much more.

Something that you may not have considered is that you are possibly doing them too fast, start taking a full second on the up portion and a full second on the down portion, this makes them much harder than just banging them out super fast and builds up more lactic acid. Trying different tempos illicits different responses. Speed=greater power, slow=greater endurance, letting the muscle fully relax between reps=greater strength.

 

Do push ups more than 3 times a week. What works for me is doing them through out the day if I can. Say I'm sitting around watching TV, knock out 35 or 40. Then 10 minutes later do it again. If you do that over the course of an hour or even several times a day it'll build it up fast.