Family pushups

Last night we did family pushups -- kids, wife, everybody but the cat. It was fun, and here's how you can do them too, in a way that you do not wear yourself out, but still do way more pushups than you think you can.

I've been playing with Pavel's Ladder, a way to accomplish Synaptic Facilitation, also called the "grease the groove" method, credited to Pavel "the evil Russian" Tsatsouline. The goal is to do high volume pushups without approaching failure. Here's how we did Pavel's ladder as a family:

I did one pushup, and stood up. Everyone else dropped and did one pushup to match me. Then I dropped and did two (one, two), again everyone matches my two pushups. I did three (one, two, three), everyone did three. I did four, everyone did four. I did five, everyone did five. When someone says, "I'm done" or "I don't think I can do the next set," we all drop back to one, then two, then three, etc.

We did this as a family three times back to back to back -- completing two ladders of 5, and one ladder of 4, meaning that we all did 40 pushups within a few minutes!

I myself have done almost 800 pushups since Saturday (not including the pushups done in Karate class), by doing Pavel's ladder every other day.

Try Pavel's Ladder, and grease the groove baby!