Increasing pushup and pullup counts

[championjc]

let me rephrase that has anyone trained there endurance in sets to the point where they couldn't go past the number of reps they could do 5 sets of?

[tictac1]

Oh, I think I get it. So you did 59 sets of 5, and on that 60th set, you couldn't even get the five. I did something like that on the Armstrong pullup course, which jacked up my teres minor. That's kinda like training to COMPLETE failure, eh?

In cycling that might be similar to bonking, where your body runs out of glycogen. "Sugar gone, now switching to fat!" You feel like death eating a cracker, even walking is too hard. No fun at all, and zero benefit.

[Scrumhalf]

Originally Posted by tictac1

I went from doing 30 pushups to 157 in about 18 weeks, doing between 100 to 500 pushups throughout the day, three times a week. The 500 days were rare, mostly 100-200/day.

Tictac, what was your pushup routine like? How many did you do in a set? Is doing it 3 times a day ok - I work in an office area, so dropping to knock out a couple dozen at random times during the day could raise a few eyebrows...

[tictac1]

The routine was kinda random. During breaks (10 minutes every hour) the tack officers would beat on us, so it might be one set of 50 every hour, maybe only 25, or they would get a wild hair and decide we were gonna do pushups til someone dropped, so maybe 100 or so.

In general, it was a "grease the groove" style approach, since they onyl had 10 minutes an hour to grind us. They almost always left us alone on tuesday and thursday, but not always. They tried to keep you guessing. But in general, yeah, only three days per week. The other days were running, agility, stuff like that.

The STYLE of pushups was a little different, the tack would call out "down" or "up", you didn't just them at your own pace. Sometimes they would make us "rest" in the down position, not real fun. The only time you could bang them out at your own pace was during testing, which was every 2 weeks, if I remember correctly.

Hey I live in cubicle land too, I wouldn't worry about the eyebrows... I work out on a handrail out back, stretch out in my cubicle, maybe do pushups there, etc. At first they thought it was weird, maybe, but no one actually said "hey, you can't do that". By now, everyone oughta know that sitting on your ass all day ain't healthy.