Hot answers tagged push-ups
28
Your muscles only build while they are resting. Exercise breaks them down and works them hard. When you are not working your muscles, they start rebuilding themselves and making them strong.
In short, rest is an important aspect of building strength. If you can't go past the 65 barrier, it's possibly because they aren't getting enough rest in between. ...
15
Speaking specifically to push-ups:
They don't require any equipment
They are fairly effective
They exercise a wide range of muscles (chest, triceps, shoulders, abs)
They can be easily modified depending on fitness level and target muscle(s)
They are easy to learn
They are pretty safe
It's easy to track progress (I could do 25 push-ups last week, this week ...
15
Livestrong.com has a great article about variations in push ups:
Regular push-ups
Plyometric push-ups, the goal is to push yourself off the ground to develop power. Careful, it's tough on the wrists
Diamong push-ups, involves making a diamond shape with both hands. Pushing up like this focuses on the triceps.
Staggered push-ups, basically ...
14
Many muscle groups are involved, including hand, arm, chest, shoulder, back strength... it really depends on where your weak link happens to be.
I would suggest first making sure that you can do regular flat-hand pushups with good form. Once you can do that, then try raising up onto all five fingers. Once you have those down, you can start taking fingers ...
14
The biggest risk of injury comes from overuse, particularly if you are getting older. Body weight exercises are very safe, and the biggest real risk of not doing them correctly is wasting time because you won't get the results you want.
The key to pushups is keeping your body straight as a board. If your body is sagging in the middle, it's likely because ...
13
You can get a rough measurement by holding pushup position with your hands on a bathroom scale. I suggest doing this with your arms fully extended and locked to prevent yourself from actively pushing against the scale and skewing the reading.
For me, it ended up being about 75% of body weight.
13
Pavel Tsatsouline's The Naked Warrior focuses extensively on bodyweight exercises, and the one-armed pushup is his choice for a daily upper-body exercise. A couple hints from TNW:
Use an incline. Do the pushups against a couch or a bench and gradually reduce the incline to keep the effort at a challenging, but not impossible, level.
Experiment with the ...
12
Both!
Varying up the positive/negative tempo and time under tension will target slightly different muscle fibres and other supplementary muscles.
So I would recommend aiming to improve different metrics, such as:
Total reps
Total reps as fast as possible
Total reps with 3-4 second negative.
Push up variations such diamond push ups or feet elevated push ...
12
Well, doing a push up aint so hard :) If doing a proper push up is too difficult for you, try changing the leverage.
When doing a push up flat on the ground, youre lifiting a certain % of your body weight. If you lift your chest, arms and head higher, you change the leverage, so you will be lifting a lower % of your body mass, and doing the push-up will be ...
11
There are 4 types of muscular development:
strength - exerting your maximum possible force for one rep
power - exerting force for short periods of time
mass - increasing the size of the muscle
endurance - ability of cardiovascular system to supply oxygen to muscle
Don't
Developing strength won't help the clap push-up, because you usually want to do more ...
11
Simply put; no.
Diet is 80% of the battle when it comes to weight loss. Focus on this before any other area.
Also, you cannot 'spot-reduce' fat.
Push-ups are a useful exercise but they should not be your only exercise. Too many push-ups (and little else) will lead to posture issues.
Consider adding squats, pull-ups, planks etc - these are compound ...
11
It sounds like as you push yourself to complete the 50 push ups your body is getting out of proper form.
Here's an article with a video on push up form: the first part of his speech is a person's tendency to push their head forward as they get tired - doing this myself, I can feel the tension increase on my neck and cause the strain you're describing.
...
10
The row is the exercise that best antagonizes the push-up.
It's an easy conclusion to make just by considering the force vector of the push-up. The direction of force is outward and perpendicular to the body. If you reverse that vector, you have a row.
To clarify further, imagine only the upper arm and the chest when doing a push-up (imagine you just ...
9
When I was in the Army, we did wide-arm push-ups, elevated push-ups, diamond (close-hand) push-ups, push-ups with resistance (someone putting pressure on your back or a sandbag on your back) and push-ups on our knees.
The variations in resistance, targeting different muscle groups, and working towards a burn-out all contributed to breaking the muscle down ...
9
There's an aspect not covered yet. Knuckle pushups place more stress on the bones of the hand compared to the open palm pushup. Martial artists take advantage of that fact as a way to toughen the bones in the hand so that when they punch something hard, the hand doesn't break. Essentially, the body responds by increasing calcium deposits at the knuckle ...
9
Handstand work
I don't see a particular reason to wait before starting handstand work. Get upside down now, and work on your handstand progression in parallel with your one-arm pushup goal.
My handstand work involves handstand holds, "running" (alternating hands), and handstand pushups as deep as I can go (which is not far). I do barbell overhead presses ...
9
What is minimal? We can minimize equipment, we can minimize time, but to determine the minimal exercises we need to know more about who is asking the question. Someone who is morbidly obese with emphysema would have a minimum workout of "walk to the end of the driveway every day". An Olympic athlete might have ten workouts a week just to keep from ...
8
There is this great training program that gets you do 100 pushups. It is well thought, well presented and works.
The key to any strength exercise is to split your training to sets. The number of sets and repetitions depend greatly on your training goals.
On a side note, Ι would suggest considering pull ups.
8
Bench press
Can use a lot more weight, so it's ideal for the low rep anaerobic range. It's for mass building.
Can be assisted by a spotter, so you can go to failure. This is good for breaking plateaus and stimulating growth.
More dangerous if you don't have a spotter. The bar can fall on your chest if you have no more strength to get it back up.
You can do ...
8
Yes, it's normal to lose that much strength or more after a protracted period of sickness and non-training. Don't fret.
Yes, improving your stamina will help you get more reps. So will improving your strength, or your cardio. Mostly, doing lots of push-ups will get you better at doing lots of push-ups. If you want to add weight, I'd forgo the 5 kilos and go ...
7
If you're totally un- or de-trained, you might run into trouble recovering between sessions. That might happen anyway, particularly if you don't sleep or eat enough. But I bet it'll work fine.
These programs, however, are not well-regarded due to their focus on strengthening one movement while ignoring its opposite. You do a lot of pushing and a lot of ab ...
6
Frequency, weight to use, sets/reps are all point-in-time individual specific settings. What works for you today many not work tomorrow or for anyone else. What I would recommend is:
incremental improvements - start light and slow and build up
if you're not fatigued, getting injured and see improvement, continue increasing intensity
if you start to see a ...
6
Here's a good link with illustrations and videos for doing push ups.
Some simple things to remember:
wide hand position = working the outer chest/pecs
close hand position = working the inner chest/pecs.
You can vary intensity by elevating your hands (easier) or elevating your feet (harder). There are many push up variations including:
dive bombers, ...
6
I asked this question on physics.stackexchange.com for you: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9129/what-is-the-force-on-the-arms-in-a-pushup . The answer is 50% of your body weight assuming equal distribution of mass vertically and weightless arms and head. It will be more than 50% when you factor in arm and head weight and your exact vertical mass ...
6
First - I'd recommend just forgetting training for one-arm pushups and probably even nix the diamond pushups. You need to work on the primary movement first, then expand to variations.
Next, if you really want to increase the number of consecutive pushups you can do, I'd suggest doing them more frequently - maybe every other day. A few extra sets of pushups ...
6
There are a few different things that can cause this:
1. Uneven rib cage. It's possible that the right side of your rib cage could poke out slightly more than the other side, pushing those muscles out further than the other side. I have this issue with my ribs under my upper abdominal muscles, causing a slight bulge (virtually unnoticeable to anyone but ...
6
In theory, you can. Stamina can be trained with any kind of muscles, as long as you are getting training is a very high volume (which implies a low intensity).
Note that stamina consists of muscular endurance (which depends on the muscles that are trained), and cardiovascular endurance (which depends on the whole cardiovascular system)
In practice though, ...
5
There sure are, check out this article - 7 Muscle Targetting Push Up Variations
Push Up Variation #4: Biceps
You’re probably thinking that traditional push ups work your biceps just fine, and you’d be right. They do. But they tend to get a little stale after a few days and you forget to maintain the integrity of the moves, losing nearly all the ...
5
@Aardvark's answer is excellent, and I'd like to add one more to his list...
Everyone already knows about them
Compare this with the burpee, which is also an easy to learn, safe, effective, easily modified, easily tracked, equipment-less workout, but much less widespread.
5
(I assume you can already do a fair amount of "normal" pushups with good form)
The main limiting factor are probably your fingers - while you have muscles in most of your body otherwise, fingers are mostly tendons and fingertip pushups put a lot of stress on them. Unfortunately, tendons develop much slower than muscles and so whatever issue you might have, ...
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