Increasing Your Pushups

I had a client of mine ask me last week what she can do to increase the amount of pushups she can do. She's at a plateau right now that she can't get past.

First, in order to get better at pushups you have to do....pushups...

Second, progression is the key. The closer that your body gets to the ground, the more difficult the pushup becomes.

So start out conservatively. Do wall pushups to begin. If you can do 50 of them, then you know you're past that level.

Then move on to an incline pushup. Find something like the back of a chair and see if you can do 50 pushups in that position. If you can, then find another incline that makes you go a little closer to the ground, like the seat of a chair and try to pump out 50 (I'm not suggesting that you try to do 50 wall, 50 incline on the back of a chair, and 50 incline on the seat of the chair all within the same session, you might want to space all of those out with some time to give your muscles time to recover).

Continue decreasing the incline until you're on the floor. When you reach the floor, start by doing pushups on your knees. When you're able to do 50 of those, then move on to regular pushups.

To mix it up, try doing pushups where you do holds at intermittent points of the lowering portion of the movement. You can do these at the incline levels, on your knees and in the normal pushup position.

To do this, start at the top of the pushup position and come down one third of the way down and hold it there for a count of 3. Then lower yourself another third of the way down and count to 3 again, then lower yourself to the lowest position (meaning, if you're doing this as a regular pushup, you're at a full range of motion with your nose is only a couple of inches from the ground), and count to three again.

Continue doing this until you have done 10-15 intermittent hold pushups.

As time goes on using both of these styles, you should see an increase in the number of pushups that you are able to do.

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