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Push ups are to the exercise world what a white teeshirt is to a wardrobe. Versatile, simple, elegant and can be scaled for any occasion and skill level.
Things you need to know:
Push ups work everything. Upper back, chest, arms and stability of your torso. Even the legs maintain tension on a push up. But it is primarily an upper body movement.
When you do a push up on the floor, your upper body is dealing with 60-70 percent of your bodyweight for the actual ‘pushing’. The rest of the weight is on your legs, hips and spine.
If push ups hurt your wrist, you should look into using handles to create a ‘neutral’ wrist and also work on gradually loading a ‘flexed’ wrist.
Push ups get easier by elevating your arms while keeping your feet at a lower level.
Knee push ups suck. They don’t allow for comfortable movement of the shoulders especially for beginners for whom the exercise is recommended.
Even if you have no push ups at any height, a combination of planking and free weight/machine pressing can help you get to a push up.
You can get better at push ups by doing rows, upward rotation, bench presses, floor presses, overhead presses, dips, planks, tricep curls, pike holds, bicep curls, machine presses and lateral raises.
Once you get more than 15-20 push ups in a row, there is more value in making the push up variant harder.
Push ups get harder with a weight vest, by elevating your legs, tucking legs in and/or increasing depth.
As versatile and awesome as push ups are, there are many other exercises you could include to achieve the goal of greater pushing strength.
Focus on driving your weight into the base of the palms (where the palm meets the wrist). A common mistake is to load the push up at a point where the fingers meet the palm. This can feel uncomfortable.
Focus on maintaining your weight on your hands. A common issue with push ups especially when your hands are elevated is to shift too much of your weight onto your feet. It is crucial to maintain weight on the balls of your feet and not let your entire foot rest or take too much of the load.