push-up

In this article I will introduce you the ultimate chest, triceps and shoulder exercise known as the PUSHUP.

Often pushups are considered as endurance exercise for your upper body, and the focus is mainly given to the well known chest exercise the Bench Press.

Many people, in fact don’t know that the Bench Press is actually hurting your body, starting from the rotator cuffs that are usually the most damaged parts together with your wrists and elbows.

Also Bench Press isn’t the exercise that will strengthen your tendons and ligaments, or maybe it will but in a long run.

This cannot be said about the PUSHUP.

Many times when I go to the gym, I see big guys doing 150 kg on the bench when someone mentions pushups they say:

Pushups? Am I a beginner or something? In fact, many of those who are categorizing this exercise as a beginner obviously didn’t know how to progress with it.

There are tons of variations of the pushup that even the best professional bodybuilders can’t do.

Don’t consider anyone that bench presses hundreds of pounds for master of pushups, in fact, I guarantee that there are few or none bodybuilders that can do 1 hand pushup with the body kept In straight position.

At the same time if you get to the point where you can do this variation, then for sure you can rival with any bodybuilder or even power lifter.

BENEFITS OF DOING PUSHUPS

girl-push-up

As I said before if done correctly pushups can target the muscles of the upper body in a great way.

At the same time doing variations of this exercise will target other muscles too, ISOMETRICLY of course.

By doing pushups there will be various muscle activations in your body, especially in the last, pecs, abdominals, lower back and also the leg muscles.

This will keep your body in straight form, and actually will provide great CORE activation.

Pushups if done progressively and with correct form can strengthen the tendons and ligaments in your upper body, and that is the key to keeping yourself injury free.

By strengthening these two you will have a great base if you want to progress to lifting weights later, so instead doing weight training, training that is only damaging them and at the same time hurting you I suggest you first to develop the needed strength with the pushups before moving to weight lifting or bodybuilding.

In fact, those weights-trainers that do implement pushups in their workouts, suffer less from joint injuries than those who aren’t implementing the pushup in their training.

We reached the part where pushups are working your strength levels too.

YES, THEY ARE.

If you work on the progressions that I will talk about in some of next articles from this pushup series, the pushup will provide massive strength gains and will leave people lost in words.

The shoulder rotator cuff that is very common injury around athletes ,is hurting while you perform a bench press, unlike in the uneven pushup progression or the 1 arm pushups where it is activated but isn’t damaged like when you bench press.

WHAT ABOUT SPEED?

Many guys consider that doing pushup in fast mode, will demonstrate their true strength.

WRONG.

Actually if you work pushup in tempo 2-1-2 down-pause-up it will provide great results, because by practicing the suggested tempo , you will notice tremendous strength gains.

If you got me wrong about that doing fast pushups is bad please don’t.

There are many events where pushups are to be done as fast as possible, eventually that will affect your athletism and your endurance, but that should not to be performed on a constant basis

But wait, the same muscles are working when I do those fast pushups.

Maybe, the same muscles work, OR maybe the explosive momentum is what gives you the reason to think that fast pushups and slow pushups are providing the same results.

Remember that bouncing off the ground while doing pushups isn’t what will make you stronger, those are known as cheating reps so please DON’T CHEAT yourself!

Second fact is that our human bodies and their joints adapt better to regular slow movements instead of the explosive one, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you can’t do fast pushups, I’m just saying it’s better progressing from slow to fast, let the muscles adapt and gain the needed strength first, before moving to those clapping pushups.

Note that it’s good to mix both methods, because that will provide the best results possible.

So here is the end of this first part of this long series of articles about the Pushup.

In the next part of this Pushup series, I will speak about how important is the technique when doing pushups, and also for how you can implement the pushup in your workouts with the possibility of constructing your own training program.

The next article will be online, on Thursday.

So stay tuned, 

TRAIN HARD, TRAIN SMART, EAT HEALTHY

traininghard