Push Ups and Progression

Push-ups are a simple yet effective exercise that strengthen the chest, arm, and shoulder muscles. They work your core muscles as well as upper body muscles, helping to improve your overall fitness level. Progression is the key to successful push-up training, as a progressive increase in repetitions and sets will help to improve muscle strength and provide even better fitness results. Begin with a set of one or two repetitions, and gradually increase the number while adding additional sets of different variations as

Transcript

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This is Brent, President of B2C, talking about a push-up, a very versatile exercise that
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is great for the chest component of our resistance training progressions. I'm going to have
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Mike come out, a good friend of mine, demonstrate a push up for us. The first
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thing I want you to think about is that the push-up is nothing more than a
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dynamic plank. So I want to get Mike set up in the perfect plank position. The way we're going
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to do that is first align our kinetic chain checkpoints his feet are going to be hip
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width. I have Mike dorsiflexed here so that the balls of his feet touch the floor. The
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reason we do that is if we can get the balls of his feet to touch the floor he can then
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engage his quads and glutes and push the balls of his feet through the floor,
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reinforcing triple extension mechanics and getting his hips nice and
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stable. From there we can tuck him under a little bit, draw-in, and we've got a
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perfect plank. Now, the question is can he do it dynamically with a push-up. So
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let me go ahead and see a push-up Mike. You can see, he can keep that plank
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position. Now, let's talk about some things that happen in the upper body that
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might not be so great. First thing we usually see is sometimes people will come
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up, but they won't come up all of the way. Can I have you collapse - you're perfect. How many of
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you have seen this type of push up? We want to make sure that when people push up, they come all
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the way up into protraction. This is good. This increases serratus anterior strength,
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and stabilization of the scapula. The other thing I see is, I'm going to have Mike descend
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into a push-up, but show us the scapular elevation that's common with
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people who can't support their shoulder girdle. Good. We see a lot of that, a
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lot of people up here. Alright, obviously Mike can do a perfect pushup, so
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let's go ahead and show everybody what perfect pushup looks like. The next type of
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progression we'll talk about is our relative flexibility progression. So our
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relative flexibility progression is first, arms close to the side. So if he lets
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his elbows pass right by his side, this takes very little flexibility, it takes
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very little stability from the scapular stabilizers. Even somebody with upper
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body dysfunction, their arms fall forward during an overhead squat or they have a lot of
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tightness, that protracted shoulder girdle. Most can do an elbows close to
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the side, do one more for me, push up, without pain, without discomfort, without
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reinforcing that compensation pattern. As we work on that with our corrective
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exercise program, we'll then progress to a transverse plane push-up, or a wide grip push up.
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From there, if somebody gets optimal
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flexibility and stability in the upper body, then we can go into a push up with
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rotation. Push-ups with rotation have some great advantages, they increase serratus
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anterior strength, stability, as well as
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mobility as he opens up his whole chest. Now, if all of this is too hard, we need
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to decrease the amount of weight we use, all we have to do is drop down to the knees.
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All of those same progressions apply, save for push-up with rotation, it's a
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little awkward to do a push up with rotation on your knees. We could add
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stability to these exercises or add instable environments to these exercises
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by either - let me have you go back into a regular push-up - we can go to a push-up with one leg.
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Have people think about getting longer than high.
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If we really wanted to be mean to Mike we can have a stability ball under his legs
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or if we wanted to do really hard, under his hands.
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We can put
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medicine balls or Airex pads for people who are down on their knees. Don't get them up too high.