In a prior article about the pandemic, I implored you to use the downtime it’s created to improve your health by increasing the time and intensity of your workouts.

A further development, the governor’s stay-at-home order, doesn’t have to stop you from doing that. Yesterday’s article, for instance, illustrated four ways to modify Canoe Twists, an exercise for the abdominals, and serves as proof that all sorts of workouts are possible. You just need to be more resourceful than usual in this unusual time.

But to be resourceful you need be motivated. And since many people are motivated by fear, let’s see if I can scare the sweatpants off you.

Recent studies cited in The New York Times show a link between how severely the coronavirus affects a person and how severely overweight that person is. In other words, the obese are more likely to do serious hospital time - or die - if they get the disease.

Moreover, many health experts forecast a second wave of the virus before the winter. Others predict that pandemics will now occur with greater frequency.

Oh, and don’t forget the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that predicts the obesity rate in the U.S. will increase to nearly 50 percent in 10 years.

So now it’s time to put those sweats back on and discuss the many ways to do pushups, so you can improve your fitness regardless of its current level.

The first modification is well known: do them with your knees on the floor. While this may seem too easy to be effective, it’s a great way to establish that oh-so important mind-to-muscle link.

So many muscle heads who bench press worry too much about how much weight they can lift for a single rep and too little about the form. As a result, an exercise designed to tax a specific muscle group, the pectorals, doesn’t really because the workload gets shared among the triceps, the deltoids, and the lats.

By performing pushups from your knees, you can slow the movement and experiment with the width of your hands to find a style that places the most stress on the pecs.

Another variation that really isolates the pecs is to do incline pushups by placing your hand on stairs.

This was one of the few exercises I could do in the first week after fracturing my femur. And with a little creativity, the movement not only worked my pecs but also winded me.

That’s because once I got comfortable with the motion, I started touching my nose to the edge of the step and pushed up so forcefully that my hands would leave the step and my torso would rise to a point where it was nearly perpendicular to the floor. If you really think you’re in shape, try doing 35 of those without a pause.

But if you think you’re not, that’s no sweat. You can do the incline pushups off a higher step and not as forcefully, always keeping your hands on the step.

Or you can perform the standard pushup that you did in gym class. Do them slowly touching your nose to the ground if you want to build muscle, or do a shorter, faster motion if you want to improve muscle endurance.

The key to using this exercise effectively - as well as designing a full and effective coronavirus workout - is to be resourceful.

I’d like to think I did so recently after recalling the scene in “Supersize Me” where Morgan Spurlock takes a fitness test before his monthlong McDonald’s-only diet. During the pushup test, the trainer made sure Spurlock did full reps by placing one fist atop the other and having Spurlock touch them with his chest.

So I folded up an ankle weight to two-fists-together height, placed it on the floor, and touched my chest to it while doing as many fast reps as possible. I immediately did a set of abs afterward and repeated that sequence without a break five more times.

The work was brief, but intense, intense enough that afterward I was ready to move on to another body part.

Another way to intensify pushups is to grasp the handles of two hexagonal dumbbells and keep only one foot on the floor.

In retrospect, this two-part series didn’t actually accomplish what was implied by the titles. You were never given a full workout.

That was by design.

You are unique, so your optimal workout, diet, or even rest day has to be a product of experimentation, experimentation done by you. On you. What these columns illustrate is that it really is possible to work out as intensely as you want when you don’t have access to a health club.

As long as you’re resourceful.