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One of the most common requests: I can’t ever do pull ups or push ups, how do I get there? You need to ask yourself. Have you truly treated those moves as skills to get better at? Rather than just exercises that you do as part of some randomly strung together routine.
It’s not enough to exercise or train. You need to actively get better at it. It’s not enough to do a push up. You need to focus on getting better at push ups and progressing to deeper push ups and move on to dips and pressing. It’s not enough to hang. You need to move on to rows and chin ups.
Now for some people getting better at training or exercise is interpreted as do as many different types of activity as possible or sweat as much as possible while exercising.
Both of these perspectives are limiting and provide very poor returns on time spent exercising. Doing the same exercises slightly faster while making them no harder is akin to a 15-year-old taking great pride in finishing a 1st grade workbook quickly. No one benefits greatly from the accomplishment.
If you treat exercise as a skill. And you should. The number 1 priority should be to ask yourself: How can I make this a little bit harder and produce some more force or resistance?
If body weight squats become quite easy for you. Doing double the number or 100 squats isn’t the answer. One answer could be to add load to the squat. Or work on your squat depth by going much deeper and being as stable as possible. And there’s also useful variety: you could do a strict single leg that literally doubles the weight on one leg and places a much greater demand to stabilise on the one working leg.
Treating strength as a skill allows you to look beyond calories, sweat and soreness. It shines a light on what really matters: the ability to produce force and all the good things (adaptations) that does for your tendons, ligaments, bones, heart and muscles.