About a year ago, during one of my rambles around the web, I came across a site about how to build up to doing one hundred consecutive push-ups (www.100pushups.info). Sue and I got started, and after a few months I had set an informal goal of trying to manage 60 consecutive pushups by my 60th birthday. I fell a bit short of that goal and was growing vexed by my lack of real progress as I followed the program religiously.
Then I discovered the true secret of growing stronger (at least for aging men): LESS IS MORE! . . . Yippee! There is almost nothing I hate more than doing pushups, and the discovery that I could actually improve by doing less has been a delightful and liberating revelation.
The initial program calls for an every-other-day routine of five sets of pushups with about 60 seconds of rest between sets. I got bogged down at about "Week 7" and couldn't make any more progress until I made two changes: (1) Instead of doing pushups every-other day, I now do them every third or (more often) fourth day. A blissful reprieve. And (2) instead of taking 60 seconds rest between sets, I take as much time as I want--something like three to five minutes, but I don't time it.
To illustrate how successfully less can be more, here is a record of my routine for the past month:
3/10 64/50/48/50/50 -- 262 total
3/14 64/58/50/52/45 -- 269 total
3/18 66/68/54/50/46 -- 289 total
3/23 68/64/54/50/48 -- 289 total
3/29 75/62/54/58/54 -- 303 total
4/3 30/30/30 -- 90 total
4/5 75/60/56/55/44 -- 290 total
4/9 72/70/60/56/50 -- 308 total
Mind you, I don't by any means try to do "perfect form" pushups. I hate 'em. I do 'em fast and dirty. I want to get them finished and go have a beer. I'm no body-builder and never will be, but pushups do provide a quick total-body work-out that can help one avoid the injuries that are otherwise endemic among aging baby boomers.
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