It’s been a great week. I hope it was the same for you all as well. I mean how can you have a bad time when Thanksgiving just happened. If you guys were anything like me then you have eaten to your hearts content. Then you woke up on Friday regretting all the food you just ate 12 hours earlier.
I have found the only cure for a food hangover is to just drown your shame in more carbohydrate goodness. Mission accomplished.
Moving on.
One of my favorite exercises is the push up. It’s so portable and just an all around nice guy or girl; exercises aren’t gender specific.
Over the years of coaching and doing fitness testing and teaching classes. I have noticed one thing; people really suck at doing push ups. The push up has gotten this strange stigmatism that it is some easy beginner exercise and is not worth doing and being cast aside for bigger better exercises like the bench press.
Before I tell you how to fix your push ups I will first sell you on the benefits of this exercise.
The push up will get you ripped tone abs, shredded arms and delts, all while developing a nice perky pair of pecs. All this in only 10 minutes a day. Well at least that’s what this one commercial I was watching told me.
The truth is the push up is a great chest and triceps exercise. But it does so much more then just chest and triceps. It also works core strength and allows your shoulders to move through a greater range of motion.
The push up is very easily modified to increase and decrease the difficulty. Unlike the bench press, your hands aren’t fixed to a barbell, making the push up much more shoulder friendly for those with shoulder problems.
Common Mistakes and The Fix
Elbow Flare
One of the biggest mistakes is flaring the elbows out to the side. Instead of having a 45-degree angle at the armpit, most will have a 90-degree angle. This is not optimal for shoulder health.
Yes, you can develop more torque with your elbows flared out and end up doing more reps or more weight, but what you can also end up with is a pissed off shoulder as well. I’d rather have a happy shoulder then a pissed off one any day.
The Fix
If you can’t do a push up without flaring the elbows then you will need to elevate yourself, doing pushups off of a bench or a raised bar. This will take some of the weight off and make the push up easier, allowing you to focus on your form.
Mistakes: 1. Forward Head Posture 2. Curved Back/Leading with Hips 3. Shrugging the Shoulders 4. Elbows Flared
Leading With The Hips
A lot of people seem to think that you start the push up with the hips. Well, they might not think that but they end up starting with them, instead of leading with the chest.What you end up with is a group of people hip thrusting the ground.
Amusing, yes, correct, not even close
Your hips drop for a few reasons. 1. You don’t know to lead with your chest
2. You have a weak core.
The Fix
Doing plank variations and learning to activate your glutes will help keep you from dropping you hips. The push up is a very core heavy exercise. It is essentially a front plank but with elbow flexion.
Shrugging Shoulders
The shoulder shrug is another beginner mistake. What happens is the shoulder blades rotate up and in, instead of rotating down and back. This lessens the range of motion of the exercise and can cause shoulder impingement. Nether one of which, we are going for with this exercise.
The Fix
The shrugging motion is a compensation pattern. You are shorting the range of motion and incorporating more back into the motion, to make up for lack of strength.
If it’s just a movement pattern problem, this can be fixed by learning to rotate your shoulders down and back, gliding the shoulder blade across the rib cage. If this does not work then regress the push up.
Final Words
If push up were easy everyone would be doing them correctly. To do a proper push up you have to have adequate upper body strength and core strength. If you aren’t good at push ups then look at elevating your push up and increasing your core stability.
Best,
Josh Williams
