When you don’t have a solid bench press setup how do you get in heavy pushing stimulus?
The answer is weighted pushups, a certain convenience to it when you have the strength to have people stand on your upper back for them, and a person with you.
First you have regular old vanilla pushups.
Second you have people lay on your back, parallel to this is doing one arm pushups.
The third step is people sitting on your upper back.
The fourth step is having them stand on your upper back.
Parallel in demand to these second through fourth steps is putting a resistance band across your back. Which step it parallels is dependant on what size/thickness of resistance band you use.
A light band is a very small amount of extra resistance, a strong band (which I know to be grey) is low rep type stimuli – the medium purple band a nice training area, again these band descriptions dependent on being at human standing on your upper back strength levels.
For ease of setup, and nicely enough more physically challenging, with someone standing on your back for weighted pushups the reps start at the bottom, chest touching the floor.
This is not only a push/press muscles exercise. It is full body. My quads and abs fire hard from this.
This, and similarly loaded top of the pushup position weighted planks is one of those real uncommon ways to have a diesel strong midsection/core.
Once you have a person standing on your upper back, you can still do more than add reps from there.
You can add weight. Hats off to you when you can have two or more not small people stand on you for weighted pushups.
I’m not yet at that level.
However, in the past I’ve had my buddy hold onto either pairs of dumbbells or weight plates.
Soon enough I may have him do so with weight plates again.
I too have had a different, heavier training partner stand on my upper back.
When you want to be strong, no circumstance will get in the way.
With desire one becomes the king of improvised training stimuli – that’s the answer to the jacked guy whether he’s military on deployment, the oft tauted and possibly mythological jacked prisoner, the man doing street workouts, those jacked guys lifting with scrap yard assembled equipment, etc.
“It’s the fire in the eyes, not the external circumstance. Go get jacked my friend.”
– me
Persistence & Tenacity