Pull ups and Push ups

if you weren't there to improve your physical fitness then why would you be PTing at 0500?

'Grease the Groove' training, have never found any way to increase strength faster, especially when muscle mass is not the goal.

http://humanmachine.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/grease-the-groove-for-strength/

Written by a top-notch exercise scientist.

Basics are, strength is largely skill, like hitting a baseball or dancing. The more you practice a skill, the more efficient your neural pathways get at performing that motion. Strength has far more to do with skill and far less to do with muscle than most people think! Tough muscle and connective tissue is just your body's adaptation to increasing the 'safe zone' for expressing strength, IE allowing the body to express more strength without hurting itself. This is where the 'mother pulls car off of child' stories come from, emergency adrenaline overriding the safety limits of the body and expressing all possible strength. (usually leaving the person quite injured in the process)

Also, like any skill, you learn best when fresh. The first lift of a workout is literally the most useful, with diminishing returns for every following lift, because you are your most fresh and able to express strength without limitation. Ideally to gain the most strength, you would lift in small rep sets all day long.

You can actually do this in a way. Set a trigger, either a timer or a situation, and do your target exercise whenever you hit the trigger. I do single-legged squats and pushups every hour at work, my phone always running a timer. You could set a situational trigger like in the link, where every time you go to the kitchen you do a pushup. Either way, you end up doing a TON of very useful reps every day without getting all sweaty or needing to go to the gym.

Again, I have done a LOT of working out, and I have never gained strength faster with any other method.

I don't see how this would do much for muscular endurance. Military exercises and drills tend to focus a whole lot around muscular endurance with only some emphasis on muscular strength.

Plus, Pavel persuaded his 60-year-old father-in-law, Roger Antonson, to do chins every time he went down into his basement; each day he would do between 25 and 100 chin-ups. After a few months of such training (and a few days of rest), Roger knocked off 20 chins, more than he had been able to do 40 years earlier in the Marine Corps. That did it. I decided to test Pavel’s formula: Specificity + frequent practice = success.

'Grease the Groove' training, have never found any way to increase strength faster, especially when muscle mass is not the goal.

http://humanmachine.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/grease-the-groove-for-strength/

Written by a top-notch exercise scientist.

Basics are, strength is largely skill, like hitting a baseball or dancing. The more you practice a skill, the more efficient your neural pathways get at performing that motion. Strength has far more to do with skill and far less to do with muscle than most people think! Tough muscle and connective tissue is just your body's adaptation to increasing the 'safe zone' for expressing strength, IE allowing the body to express more strength without hurting itself. This is where the 'mother pulls car off of child' stories come from, emergency adrenaline overriding the safety limits of the body and expressing all possible strength. (usually leaving the person quite injured in the process)

Also, like any skill, you learn best when fresh. The first lift of a workout is literally the most useful, with diminishing returns for every following lift, because you are your most fresh and able to express strength without limitation. Ideally to gain the most strength, you would lift in small rep sets all day long.

You can actually do this in a way. Set a trigger, either a timer or a situation, and do your target exercise whenever you hit the trigger. I do single-legged squats and pushups every hour at work, my phone always running a timer. You could set a situational trigger like in the link, where every time you go to the kitchen you do a pushup. Either way, you end up doing a TON of very useful reps every day without getting all sweaty or needing to go to the gym.

Again, I have done a LOT of working out, and I have never gained strength faster with any other method.

I don't see how this would do much for muscular endurance. Military exercises and drills tend to focus a whole lot around muscular endurance with only some emphasis on muscular strength.

If you read the article, you would know that the specific example was increasing muscular endurance for pullups.

Plus, Pavel persuaded his 60-year-old father-in-law, Roger Antonson, to do chins every time he went down into his basement; each day he would do between 25 and 100 chin-ups. After a few months of such training (and a few days of rest), Roger knocked off 20 chins, more than he had been able to do 40 years earlier in the Marine Corps. That did it. I decided to test Pavel’s formula: Specificity + frequent practice = success.

Also, Maximal Strength leads to increased endurance as well. The lower % of maximal you lift, the less it takes out of you, and the less constricted the muscle gets, allowing more consistent blood flow for oxygen delivery and lactic acid removal.

Too bad you don't have an assisted pull up machine.