For those with some sort of sports-med or legit trainer background, I have a couple of basic questions.

The punchline is that I have had lots of injuries in the past due to my career. Throwing up heavy weights usually results migraines. I got me bell rung overseas by rocket/mortar blasts, + been involved in multiple car crashes. Also I have had multiple back and neck surgeries, due to those things.

I am doing (for me) high reps of pushups every 3 days. Often due to daily life stuff, this can get stretched out to every 4 days or so.

Would I be overdoing it, if I tried every other day? Or should I stick with 2 day rest periods in between?


TIA

Try it and see. If it starts to negatively affect you (in the ways you mentioned above), then slow down.

There are all kinds of advice, schedules, programs, and such but the bottom line is that you just gotta figure out what works for you.

What is your objective with the push ups?
Just do a lower number and throw in some other exercises too and do it daily?

I am not so much concerned about headaches. Pushups rarely effect me like putting up weight. I am wanting to know how many days I should give my muscles a break in order to promote growth/gain strength.

A long time ago, in the Infantry we did pushups pretty much every day we were not in the field. That said, we have come a long ways since those days and I am curious how many days most rest between upper body workouts

Grunts still do em every day

The objective is gain endurance, upper body strength, etc. The usual stuff.

I am doing other things on the off days, but I am interested to know about rest periods, and what is optimal.

how many and how many sets are you doing each day?

I have worked up to 500 on "push-up day". I only reached this # about 6-7 weeks back.

I normally stretch it out over a number of hours, though today I managed to get done in 2.5, which I think is my best time.

Normal routine is to do a couple bigger sets, then down to 10 at a time, then 5 at a time as I get tired.



Years ago I was going to a selection for something, and I had a guy who was already in the outfit I was trying out for, basically coaching my training.  

He had me on his "5-5-6" program.

It took me a bit to work up to it too, but the punchline was a 6 day routine, followed by a restricted diet.

It was :

Monday 500 push-ups
Tuesday 500 sit-ups
Wednesday 6 mile run
Thursday 500 push-ups
Friday 500 sit-ups
Saturday 6 mile run

AKA 5-5-6.

Sunday was a rest day, and I could eat whatever I liked.

It worked, and I passed my selection.

That said, that was more than 10 years ago now.

Not a trainer or med guy. From my own older and fucked up body. Every other day or even 2 works well. Normaly I have 8-10 excerises or machine sets in the mix and then alternate days. Sometimes I push to hard and need 2 to recover. I also busted my self up a bit over the years.
Your body will let you know...

I laugh now, but my grandpa used to say "If I'd of known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself".

Now I know exactly what he was talking about! I am not all that old either.

500 a day... I would think you are more likely to injure yourself from overuse.

That also would take up a lot of time.

Curious what kind of reps sets you were doing to give you migraines when you were lifting, sometimes people get tension headaches and a little neck stretching will make the headache go away. Also maybe not lift quite as much weight or don't do the breath hold bracing deal but just try to breath normally.

As far as days off however many it takes for you to feel comfortable doing the exercise again. I only bench 2 days one week and one the next. It alternates with overhead press in a 3 day a week routine.

Depends how old you are.

< 30 1 day rest between, > 40 perhaps 2 days rest.

The 500 on "push-up day" does not seem to be adversely affecting me (as far as I know). Today I am a bit sore, but if like normal I will be G2G the next day.

I will be 47 in a couple months.

I think I will stick with the 2 rest days between P.U. days.

Never mind

If you can do a lot of them, you can probably do them every day as long as you feel okay.

If you start doing different progressions and get them difficult enough to do less than 10 per set, then start taking more rest days.

Once you start training for endurance you can usually train more often.

You could try every other day.  If you find that you aren't sufficiently recovered to complete your next workout, go back to 2 day rest periods.  It's not rocket surgery.

Added February's results up.

Not as much as I wanted.

3, 270.

I am going to try to reach 5,000 this month.  

2 days rest between.

Today it took 2 hours 35 minutes to get to 500.

Hopefully with time I can improve on the time too.

I do push ups daily, they are a part of my stretching and warmup routine. I do weighted, incline and decline pushups for arm days but you shouldn't have any problem doing them daily in moderation wit proper form. Going to fast and shit form is what will cause injury. If you're muscled are warm and stretched and you use good form no reason why you can't to them  as described  daily.

I'll start off by saying I am a noob when it come to working out. But 500 on your pushup days seems excessive. Wouldn't switching to a harder variation, or doing weighted push ups make more sense? Doing 5k push ups a month for 1 year+ seems like it'd really wear out your joints. I just don't see how spending 2.5 hours doing 500 push ups is gonna be as beneficial, or any more beneficial than say doing 100 with a 20+ weighted vest/back pack/weight. To each his own I guess. I'd look at my motives if I was you. Are you trying to increase fitness and stamina levels? There's tons of pushup programs and variations to accomplish this. Or are you just trying to increase your number as a bragging right. While being able to do 500 pushups is very impressive, in my inexperienced opinion, harder variations in half the times will be better for you.

All day everyday man, haha. At least that's how I did them while I was in basic training. I usually just do like 60 daily these days. I'm such a slacker. Usually three sets of 20 reps. That or maybe I'll try to do as many as I can, usually get up to 45 or so. I don't really try as hard as I could. I have some friends who do like 1,000 pushups throughout a day and can do 100 in a row. So ya know do as many as you can as often as you can if you want to keep improving.

I do not consider myself to be an expert, but I have some experience in this area. I have 4 years of experience as a personal trainer and I am now 2 months away from graduating as a Physical Therapist Assistant.
The general rule is 48 hours of rest between workouts using the same muscle. (If it was a workout adequate to fatigue the muscle.) Some people need more rest time.  
If you work the same muscle group at the same time every other day, then your 47 hours of rest is close enough.
But here's the rub:
(This may not apply to you, OP.) What most people call a push-up is actually less than half of one. They don't go all the way down or all the way up. They are simply pulsing up and down with a slight bend in their elbows. All its good for is building their ego- "Brah, I can do 1,000 push-ups without stopping." Sure ya can, sport.
If you want to make the most of your push-ups then SLOW DOWN and go from elbows locked to chest barely touching the ground. Try them with a 2-second descent and a 2-second ascend. If that's not challenging enough, make it 5 seconds.

TLDR:
Slowly perform full range of motion push-ups with maximum effort every other day for best results.

I just don't do them. I did enough in the Marines.
Only reason to do pushups is to pass PT tests. 
There's a lot of other exercises that work the same muscles, better.  

What is he goal, just max sets of push-ups? What else did you do during that  2 1/2 hours?

Even if you break the PUs into bite size chunks of 10, that should still take well under an hour, and if you can't do that then you probably have something substantially jacked up in your training plan.

We do a workout at my job, run every set of stairs in our football bowl stadium with a set of 25 push-ups at each. That's 32 sets, so 800. The sets are more than manageable and we'll switch them up, wide, decline, diamond, etc to keep from getting bored. Still only takes 1:45ish on a bad day. It's not for any legitimate training purpose other than it breaks up the dang stairs.