So, my mother got me a copy of Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym book, and I'm trying his workout plan. For the first week, everything is done as "ladders" where the plan is to do one rep, rest, two reps, rest, etc, until you've hit a number of repetitions where you feel failure might happen in subsequent sets, then do n-1 and so on down to one rep. He says that the rest period should be equal to the work period in length, and the ladder should take 7.5 minutes (if you finished a ladder before then, you start back at 1). The thing is, I was trying it with pushups and I barely made my way through two repetitions of the ladders (first time, with a high of five and the second one with a high of three) before my arms were rubbery enough that I couldn't get a single rep in.
Since each pushup was taking only a little more than a second, the rest periods were short too. I didn't even feel like I could exit the push-up position without running out of time. Should I be taking more time in between? Only count the time from when I'm out of position? Should there be rest periods in between ladders?
I know he has various DVDs and an app for his program, but I'm loathe to put more money in if the answer is simple.