Nils

One thing missing from the thread: push-ups train a fraction of your upper body and nothing at all of your back.

Eight months of pushing with no pulling is worth knowing about, both because the visible change you were hoping for depends heavily on the back, and because the shoulder does not love an imbalance that large maintained for that long.

If you want to keep this minimal, adding any rowing movement: under a table, a bar in a doorway, a resistance band on a door anchor: will do more for how you look than another twenty push-ups. Same time cost.

For question 3, the two things that moved me most, both narrow:

Read intervals, not notes. Deliberately stop naming the second note of a pair and instead see the distance. Practise by taking a simple line and saying "up a third, down a second, up a fourth" without naming anything. Your hand cares about distance, not letters, and this converts the page directly into hand movement with no naming step in between.

Practise looking away. Play a bar, look at the ceiling, finish it from memory. This forces the habit of taking in a chunk and playing it, rather than reading continuously with your eyes glued one note ahead of your fingers. Eyes ahead of hands is the single behaviour that separates fluent readers, and it cannot happen while you are decoding.

Both are about ten minutes a day and neither is fun. They work faster than they have any right to.

Which brings you to question 3, and the answer is pushing - and it is exactly the technique your question is circling.

Shoot the entire roll at 1600 instead of 400, deliberately, then tell the lab to "push two stops". They develop it for longer, which raises the density of the underexposed frames to something printable. That is how people shoot 400 film in a dim bar.

What it costs, so it is not sold as free speed: more grain, more contrast, and shadows that stay empty. Pushing does not recover detail that never got recorded, it lifts what did. Two stops is routine; three is a look rather than a rescue.

The key point for you: it is a decision about the whole roll, made before you start shooting, because it changes the development.

That explains the pattern precisely, fewer each day rather than a steady number. I had read it as them regrouping somewhere and coming back to check.