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I'm in the Air Force and I want to increase how many push ups i can do in a minute to help my PT score go up. I need 57 in a minute to get a perfect score for upper body strength.
I know doing more push ups would definitely help. However as I have found, i can only do them for so long before I grow tired of doing them.
I was kind of wondering if bench pressing could be an alternate way to build more endurance and strength to pump out a few more?
Right now I can do 50 in a minute before I really tire out. I want to get to 60 if possible.
I figure maybe do push ups one day, bench the next, do push ups the day after that.....
I dont know the answer but I can do 100 in one sitting now. When I first started the acid build up in my muscles would burn so bad that I had to stop. I started doing more vigorous reps of push ups as if I was lifting weights. Throw my body down hard and push off like the ground like a caged ape. I would do this until I could do no more and then only take a 60 second rest before doing it 3 more times(with only 60 seconds rest in between each set). More often than not I would still be breathing heavy and be tired. The next set would be like I was actually lifting weights because my body was still recovering. I do the same technique with pull ups and sit ups/crunches.
Eventually I moved on to weighted pull ups, push ups, and sit ups as my body weight became not enough to really give me much of a workout.
Look at the musculature of the abs, arm, shoulder and back.
You want to strengthen your abs, your lats, your traps, your pects, delts, biceps, and triceps...
- For abs the crunches should suffice, I would also add doing a pike. I normally will do pikes while watching television-- just get in the push up position during advertisements. This will strengthen all muscles required for doing push ups
- Strength-wise I would do bench (biceps), tricep press, lat pull down, and most AF gyms have a pull up machine do a few sets of those.
Along with push ups. There is also the 100 push up challenge on line, where you do as many push ups as possible in X- amount of time, and it tells you how to split those up to accomplish doing 100 push ups.
57 pushups in 60 seconds is pretty darn impressive. I know I couldnt do it even if I had a month to prepare for it. Probably because as a fighter/martial artists/striker too big chest muscles take away from striking/punching power so I am not that strong in pushups but I can do pullups like no ones business.
Since you are going for speed, as an addition to your training try this: stand upright with your legs straight and just fall forward, WITHOUT BENDING YOUR KNEES and land in a pushup position with your arms bent. Your "landing" position should be like the middle of a pushup - not all the way down and not all the way up. As your fast twitch muscles get stronger, the speed of your pushups should increase. Try it. I know it sounds crazy, but try it. It'll work.
I'm in the Air Force and I want to increase how many push ups i can do in a minute to help my PT score go up. I need 57 in a minute to get a perfect score for upper body strength.
I know doing more push ups would definitely help. However as I have found, i can only do them for so long before I grow tired of doing them.
I was kind of wondering if bench pressing could be an alternate way to build more endurance and strength to pump out a few more?
Right now I can do 50 in a minute before I really tire out. I want to get to 60 if possible.
I figure maybe do push ups one day, bench the next, do push ups the day after that.....
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance.
Yep, strengthening your core will help. Yes, increasing your bench will help you do more push-ups on your PT test.
However, alternating push-ups/bench/push-ups every day is likely overtraining your chest/tris/shoulders.
I would also look into trying different types of push ups. This really helped me because certain areas were weaker than others because of how I used my muscles for just day to day things. I never timed myself but before I started to mix up the types I could only get about 20-25 in and wanted to die. LOL Now I am up to 100 easily. I still can't believe it compared to just back a couple months ago. I think I usually take about 2-3 seconds for each push up though.
From personal experience, bench press has never been an indicator of how many pushups I can do non-stop. The only way I increased my reps of pushups was to, well, do more pushups. As Opsimathia mentioned I would do different types of pushups and lots of them.
I would shoot for 500 pushups per training day and shoot for sets of 35-40. As they become easier, increase reps and mix in more difficult pushups (decline, diamond, knuckle, etc)
Ye try taking whatever you can bench 10 times,
but do it 5 times and focus on really exploding when you hit it away from you, like you're trying to throw the bar away from you.
have short rests, 20-30 seconds, and repeat for 5 sets.
this should get you more explosive and help with your speed.
My guess is that you already have the necessary strengh, but need to be able to channel more of it which is why I suggest working on getting more explosive....
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As Opsimathia mentioned I would do different types of pushups and lots of them. 
