Shock pulse method is a widely used technique for condition monitoring of rolling bearing. However, it may cause erroneous diagnosis in the presence of strong background noise or other shock sources. Aiming at overcoming the shortcoming, a pulse adaptive time-frequency transform method is proposed to extract the fault features of the damaged rolling bearing. The method arranges the rolling bearing shock pulses extracted by shock pulse method in the order of time and takes the reciprocal of the time interval between the pulse at any moment and the other pulse as all instantaneous frequency components in the moment. And then it visually displays the changing rule of each instantaneous frequency after plane transformation of the instantaneous frequency components, realizes the time-frequency transform of shock pulse sequence through time-frequency domain amplitude relevancy processing, and highlights the fault feature frequencies by effective instantaneous frequency extraction, so as to extract the fault features of the damaged rolling bearing. The results of simulation and application show that the proposed method can suppress the noises well, highlight the fault feature frequencies, and avoid erroneous diagnosis, so it is an effective fault feature extraction method for the rolling bearing with high time-frequency resolution.