[Achilles]

Well, to be honest with you without doing a pushup for about a month and just doing weights I could still do about 90 pushups on the APFT. You can keep doing pushups just don't do any the day before you work your chest out with weights, the day of, or the day after. Doing extremely high repitition excersizes like pushups, for me at least, I start to plateau really fast. Do you see a large improvement in your pushups every week? After about 3 weeks, I don't. A scientist in Russia about 20 years back did a study and the best increases in strength were from the guys who were doing 3 sets of 6. You can always do heavy sets then do your last set with drastically less weight for conditioning. Or, you could lift weights hard at the beginning of the week then do a lot of boxing on a day later in the week for conditioning. Recovery and diet are key for these. Definately keep running and doing cardio if you want to be in good shape for rugby, but eat even more food to make up for it. As for sit ups, do them on a decline bench with barbell weight on your chest once or twice a week, and on other days just do them like you normally do.

You can PM me if you want a good chest workout.

I haven't tried kettlebells yet, but they look like a pretty good solution to strength vs endurance. Regular cals (used alone) don't do much for me.

Just my .02