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Comment by jaden | Hacker News Reader

After reading that those who could do at least 40 pushups without stopping [0] had a 96% lower risk of heart disease, I started doing pushups each day until I could do 40. I'm surprised by how much better I feel.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.h...

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Is it correlation or causation though? I.e., does “targeting the push-up metric” actually entail lower heart disease?

How long did it take you to get to 40 consecutive pushups and what method did you use to get there?

Not the OP, but the method that worked for me when I was training for the military years ago was to (situation permitting) drop down and do five push ups every half hour for most of the day. Do that for a week, then the next week add five more. In a few weeks you’re doing 20-30 push ups every half hour and the maximum you become capable of doing if you have to take a fitness test goes through the roof.

This technique is called "grease the groove" and it's useful anytime you've plateaued on reps for an exercise.

Edit: also focus on your form!

Has anyone tried it? I believe you want to try for 50% of maximum.

The technique is discussed here for pushups.

http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/

Got up to almost hundred (98 or so on my best attempt) using https://hundredpushups.com/

One method is doing sets of 10 reps (or whatever number of pushups you can do in a row right now) and gradually reduce the time between sets. For instance, you start resting 60 seconds between sets. After a week, you rest 40 seconds between sets. And so on and so forth. After a few of months you should be able to do 40 pushups in a row.

I was able to get to 20 pushups and I kept increasing by one or two a day. Then when I hit around 35 I pushed myself and keep going until I hit 40. It took a little over a week and a half I think.

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