How To Do More Push Ups
If you’ve ever tried doing push ups every day, you may find you improve to a certain point, and then your progress stops to an absolute crawl, and no matter how hard you try you simply can’t increase the numbers.
Here are some pointers which will help you to increase the numbers of press ups:
- Eat plenty of carbs: what you are doing is exercise, and that requires fuel – and that fuel is carbs. Eating a good meal of complex carbohydrates, such as brown rice, pasta or potato a few hours before a workout is a great way to ensure your muscles are full of glycogen (energy).
- Don’t do push ups every day: by doing them daily you will improve up to a point, but that point won’t be anywhere near your maximum potential. You are working your muscles: breaking them down and repairing them. Only, if you aren’t resting, your muscles never fully repair and recover. The only way you’ll ever do more push ups is if you give yourself time to repair. I would recommend doing them no more than twice a week, with rest days rest in between.
- Vary your hand position: go wider, go narrower. By changing your hand position you put more or less emphasis on different muscles. For instance, a wider hand position puts more emphasis on the chest, and a narrow hand position puts more emphasis on the triceps.
- Slow them down or speed them up: sometimes, varying the speed at which you do an exercise can work wonders for helping to break through a plateau. If your muscles become too accustomed to the humdrum of an exercise, you can completely shock them by changing the pace, and they’ll respond by growing bigger and stronger so they aren’t caught short next time.
- Work on the negatives: the negative portion is the lowering part of the movement. It’s a little-known fact that our muscles are much stronger in this phase of any exercise than in the actual upward phase. It’s perfectly possible for our muscles to fail on the upward phase, but still have plenty of gas left in them to do many more forced negatives. To force negatives simply start at the top as if you’ve pushed up, and then lower – very slowly. Doing this will force more work out of your muscles, which can only mean one thing – growth and increased strength for next time (providing you get enough rest and nutrition in between.)
- Consume more calories: no, you won’t get fat – because you’ll be keeping a check on your body fat levels, so you’ll know within a week or so precisely how many calories you need to grow stronger. But, to grow stronger, you must eat more calories. The same rules apply as to weight lifting. You need to fuel your workouts and your muscle building. If you are strictly doing press ups, try eating 200-300 more calories per day than normal, and your muscles and strength should grow, keeping body fat levels to a minimal.
- Up your protein intake: ok, so you already know about protein – but don’t think just because you aren’t doing weights that the same doesn’t apply. What push ups are, essentially, are inverted bench presses, and they break down the muscles in precisely the same way. It’s proven that by increasing your protein intake, you help to build muscle.
So there you have it. Now you know how to do more push ups, what are you waiting for? Lets get to it!
