It till till I was 55 to learn I had bad form, bad balance and absolutely no variety.  More about that below.  But going back a few years... like about 40... after I'd being doing pushups for several months as a 15 year old teenager, I walked into the school gym which the first 15 rugby players used for their training.  No one was there but me, which was my first mistake.  I'd never done weights before, not even dumbbells, so there was a risk I could seriously injure myself with no one around.  So anyway, I sized up this bar with some large weights at each end and decided I'd try to lift it.  The thing that really appealed to me about it was that the bar and weights totalled 100 pounds.

As I approached the bar, I was thinking, this will be a great way to test my strength from all the pushups I'd been doing.   Now while I'd been doing heaps of pushups, I was still rather lean and didn't have much bulk on me.  And if I'd known any better I would have left the thing alone.  But, boys being boys (we always get the blame) I went for it.  To my surprise I was even able to lift it above my head.   What was my second mistake?  No one saw me do it.  So when I told others no one believed me. But I knew!  Now, after doing 10's of thousands of pushups, I want to share with you three serious mistakes to avoid when doing pushups.  Here's 3 secrets to using pushups for long term physical and aerobic strength.