Fitness Friday - Drop and give me twenty!

Come on, Mayo-naze... stick your face in it!

It's Friday! That means it's time for another edition of Fitness Friday. Today we're going to discuss pushups. There's a reason the Army and Marines make you do lots of them. They build functional upper body strength. I lift weights for the majority of my upper body workouts, but I still incorporate body weight workouts as well. And the push up is at the top of the list. Remember when you were were in gym class and the Teacher made you drop and give him twenty pushups? He was probably a sadistic, power-hungry tyrant, and you swore that you'd never do pushups as an adult. Or maybe you are still remembering the spine tingling screams of a Drill Instructor. Regardless of your past history or current abilities, I have a method for improving your push up prowess that I want to share with all of you. No, it doesn't involve screaming, swearing, or berating you with a flurry of four-letter put downs. It is a progressive technique that builds strength without pushing yourself to exhaustion.

Are you quitting on me, Private Pyle?

Are you having trouble breaking past your push up limit? Most people get stuck because they crank out a max amount of pushups and push to failure. By pushing to failure, you are stressing the muscles to the point of breaking them down. And when muscles get broken down, they need time to repair. So If you want to stack up the push up numbers, you might want to take a softer approach.

Synaptic Facilitation

The principle of synaptic facilitation is doing frequent, non-exhaustive sets of a specific exercise to strengthen the nerve pathway. Basically, this is a fancy way of saying muscle memory. Think of a baseball players for instance… they practice their swing each and every day. The reason they do this is to develop a “groove” where the body gets more efficient at performing that movement. They are strengthening the neural pathways to perform that movement, the more they practice it.

Building Push Up Strength

You want to think of building strong neural impulses to strengthen the neural pathways, so fatigue is to be avoided. So doing push ups, multiple times per week, but training short of failure, helps to produce the same strength-building results. Put into simple terms…you are doing many sets of one exercise short of failure to improve in that one exercise. The key to progressive strength training is to stop 2 reps short of failure. Lifting to failure is fine when you are trying to break down the muscle and gain mass, but it isn’t the best way to gain strength. The problem with lifting to failure is that it develops fatigue. Once a muscle is fatigued, it reduces its ability to contract hard.

This is where you can build in the concept of Periodization, or Ladders. Think of ladders as taking “two steps back, in order to take 3-4 steps forward”. Let’s say you are stuck at only being able to crank out 20 push ups. No matter what you do it is impossible to do more. And the more you try to push past 20, the more you seem to be stuck. Sound Familiar? Personaly, I can identify with my bench press. I hit a personal best plateau, and actually bent backwards the more I tried to aggressively go past my plateau . It was a frustrating experience. But once I learned about doing ladders, I was able to build mind to muscle strength, strengthen the muscle fibers by lifting less weight more frequently. By doing ladders, and lifting less, I increased my bench press strength and beat my personal best. It works for push ups, too.

The plan for adding more push ups is to back down a bit from your personal best and then spend the next two weeks building back up to increase it.


To start the work out, do one set of of 3 pushups, rest 10 seconds and repeat. Do this push up repetition sequence for a total of 10 minutes.

Standard Pushup – 3 reps

Rest – 10 seconds
Standard Pushup – 3 reps
Rest – 10 seconds
Repeat this progression for five minutes. 

When it starts to get tough to do the 3 reps you should rest for 20 seconds. The key here is o give your muscles the proper rest in between sets so you can do 3 pushups without going to failure. At first you will think this will not happen, but it will! Doing only 3 push ups may seem a little “too easy” at first and you’ll probably be tempted to start out doing higher amounts of reps. Don't. Just do 3. If you have to rest 30 or 40 seconds between sets that's fine. Again, what makes this strength building workout effective is the fact that you are not pushing to failure. You are successfullly doing 3 good pushups A LOT of times.

Do this push up workout two times a week. Don't go kamikaze and push yourself to overtraining. You don't want to fatigue the muscles. Remember, the key to periodization is to take your time to re-build your strength foundation. If you rush the time to reach your previous best, you may wind up getting stuck. The key is to be able to do 3 pushups, several times, without feeling the burn or going to failure.

After a few of these workouts, go back to attempting as many push ups as possible. Go for a personal best. Chances are, if you did the periodization workouts correctly, you can now do 5 to 10 more than before. 

Give this strategy a try and see if it works. Good luck!


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The views expressed on this site are my opinions and should not be taken as a substitute for qualified medical expertise. I am not a Doctor. I do not give medical advice or make claims to cure any sickness, disease or affliction. I simply share my understanding of health and fitness. Please consult your Doctor or Health Care Practitioner before starting any diet or fitness routine.

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