Acc to pages 237-38 of “The Sports Gene” by David Epstein, Herschel Walker, the 1982 Heisman winner and 12-yr NFL running back, started, at the age of 12, doing push-ups and sit-ups every night, and worked his way up to doing about 5000 of each exercise from 7 to 11 PM every night, 7 days/wk, 365 days/yr. Now, at age 51, he still does 1500 push-ups and 3500 sit-ups every night. All of this training was/is in addition to his football practices and now mixed martial arts practice.
Also, on pages 234-36, Epstein details 6 weeks of Pam Reed’s race schedule in 2012: Badwater Ultramarathon (135 miles in about 31 hrs through Death Calley, CA, she was 2nd female overall); 2 weeks later a track relay where she ran for 8 straight hours; 1 week later the IM NYC in 11:21; the next weekend, IM Mont Tremblant in 12:17. Kind of makes concerns about doing long races on back to back weekends sound silly:)
Yeah I read that in his book as was blown away. Common theme with athletes at their level. Work ethic.
On another note and not to derail I have seen guys bench 225 multiple times that cannot even do 20 pushups.
That makes sense though. 225lb will always be 225lb. For those who are reasonably fit, the difficulty of that 225lb bench press generally goes down as body weight goes up, whereas the difficulty of the pushup increases as body weight goes up. Basically, if you’re a 350lb O-lineman 225lb should be easy, but having to lift up your massive body weight will be more difficult. I can’t bench 225 no matter how hard I try because that’s 150% of my body weight, but for our 350lb football player it’s a mere 64%–just by going about his daily routine and moving his own mass around he regularly exerts forces on that order without giving a second thought to it. Just out of curiosity, I did a pushup with my hands on a scale–to see exactly what kind of weight I was pressing when I did a pushup. The number was ~110lb (I weigh 150). Assuming the football player has a similar mass distribution (i.e assuming he doesn’t skip leg day), he’d have to press 256lb to perform a pushup.
I had a cousin that weighed ~500lb at one point (played college football, stopped, but kept eating like he was)
When doing a pushup you are generally pushing 40-60% of your bodyweight, the difference becomes even more pronounced in regards to pullups where you pull 100% of your bodyweight and stabilization is a bigger issue. At 250lbs. I could deadlift nearly 600 and powerclean ~325, but I could do a grand total of maybe 8 pullups. At 190 my maximal strength is down about 25% but I can do ~40 pullups if I am fresh. You’ll never see big guys do pullups. But, relative strength is essentially meaningless in football; you want to be as large as possible without sacrificing speed and agility.