So is it weird that I can do only do 35 push ups, but I can do 10 dips with 45 pounds added? Whats going on here am I doing the dips wrong?

TL;DR: It depends, but that is a normal situation for people who don't train specifically for high reps.

If you never train high rep push ups then no, that's not weird at all. If you spend 8 weeks doing high rep push ups 3-4 days per week you'll almost certainly be doing at least 80 good push ups without stopping by the end of it.

As a side note, this is why periodization is required to produce the highest performing athlete possible. You have to build the machine for, and then fine-tune it to, the performance required of it.

Strength has a considerable carryover to your endurance, including long distance running. There are plenty of studies that consistently show that marathon performance is improved by lower body strength training. For push ups, if you are twice as strong as someone else that is more or less the same size and weight, you're going to use substantially less muscle mass during each push up. This means that you have more muscle sitting around, ready to step in when the parts that are working first need to take a recovery break. Even without any endurance training, assuming both people are equally untrained for high rep stuff, the stronger person will be able to do waaaaay more push ups right from the start.

Cool exercise science info:

However, it is important to understand that you cannot take full advantage of the carryover if you are not training for endurance, because strength and endurance come from different places.

Strength is force production, which comes from contractile fibers, plain and simple. The more actin-myosin protein bundles you have in parallel, the stronger you are. Period. You may not have learned to USE that strength yet, but it IS there. Learning to USE maximal strength is a neurological adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying learning the skill of efficiently recruiting nearly all of your muscle mass at one time during.

Endurance comes from metabolic adaptations. The major adaptations are:

1) Mitochondrial size and density (# of mitochondria in the muscle)

These are where all aerobic metabolism takes place. These are also where creatine gets recharged, which is why aerobic fitness makes a big difference in recovery between sets.

2) Capillary density (how many gas-exchange blood vessels are in a particular amount of muscle)

This determines how easily your body can get the oxygen it needs, but it also determines how easily your body can get RID of lactate and hydrogen ions, helping to slow down acidification in the muscle. More acidic muscle tissue is less capable of force production due to impaired energy production.

3) Concentration of glycolytic enzymes in the muscle cells

These are what produce your anaerobic endurance energy. It can ONLY come from glucose, so your glucose energy system adapts to high rep exercise by increasing how many enzymes are present so that it can produce more ATP and regenerate the cofactors necessary for this process.

4) Energy storage inside the muscle, particularly near mitochondria You tend to see changes in where glycogen is stored, and it tends to pile up where it is needed the most. This is quite interesting, and I'm afraid that I haven't delved into this area recently enough to say much more than that.

5) Cardiac Output: This is out much blood your body can circulate per minute. Depending on how you exercise you will end up with a heart that is capable of squeezing out a higher % of the blood it can hold, a heart that squeezes out blood with more force, and/or a heart that can hold more blood at one time.

All of these adaptations can contribute to anaerobic endurance as well as aerobic endurance, both because more blood flow means more effective heat management and because more blood flow means more effective removal of inhibitory metabolites and more delivery of bloodborne energy sources, such as blood glucose.

6) More blood

As you grow new blood vessels, you tend to carry a bit more blood as well, because our bodies have to maintain a certain amount of blood pressure in order to effectively deliver oxygen and nutrients, as well as collect CO2 and other 'waste' products.

7)Myosin heavy chain isotype

This is the actual energy production enzyme that powers muscle contraction. Technically, it powers the release of myosin from actin, because it takes no actual energy to make actin and myosin attach and contract: It takes energy to release myosin from the actin once it is bound. That's why you see rigor mortis: The stiffness of dead tissue. Once all ATP is used up, your muscles are completely contracted until the proteins start being digested by enzymes in the cells and bacteria, etc etc.

So this is a somewhat advanced concept, but we see different heavy chains in endurance fibers than we do in mixed-type or pure power fibers. They are able to use ATP ad different speeds, and even appear to produce somewhat different amounts of torque at the molecular contraction level.

Heavy chain switching is a much slower adaptation than the other endurance adaptations. Research I am familiar with suggests that significant shifts take several years to occur.

/r/bodyweightfitness Thread