4 Ways To Get More Push Ups
Push ups, for all their simplicity, are still an awesome exercise for building upper body strength and helping build shape.
They can be done anywhere, anytime which make it one of the easier exercises to practice when it becomes something you want to improve. So long as you’re equipped with the knowledge on how to perform them safely, and avoid those frustrating plateau’s that can leave you feeling like you’re never going to get any better!
That’s why I’m going to give you right now, some of the best ways to improve your push ups.
With push up progression being a massive part of our strength program, we’ve seen countless clients increase their push ups by up to 400% in some scenarios!
Whether you’re working on making the switch from your knees to your toes, or are trying to hit double digits and beyond - this post will serve as your complete check list on how to ensure you reach that target, sooner rather than later!
1. Strengthen The Right Areas
Push ups, like many other exercises, are often best improved by simply repeated practice. However, they’re also an exercise that sees a lot of different muscle groups come together and work to see the movement executed.
Of course, a strong chest is helpful, but consider exercises that allow for you to get stronger triceps (muscles on the back of your arm) and a strong core.
Skullcrushers, Dips and Close Grip Pressing movements are great for building strength in the back of your arms. Whilst classics such as any and most plank variations will work really well for developing a strong enough core to avoid your hips dropping to the floor as soon as you venture onto your toes.
2. Repetition With Form
As mentioned, repeated practice is a solid way of improving your push ups, so long as you’re repeating the right movements. Repeating “poor form” over and over again might see some short term results, but usually comes with a ceiling before injury or general aches begin to place a cap on just how high you can take it.
Follow this simple set up for your push ups and begin practicing at your next opportunity!
Place hands on the floor, with your wrist directly underneath your shoulders.
Come up onto your toes (or place your knees on the floor with your toes also on the floor further back), and squeeze your butt.
Lower your chest down towards the line between your hands, with your head coming down ahead of your hands (this should make a triangle shape between the crown of your head and your two hands.
Lower to a depth that allows you to push back up to begin with, keeping your elbows pointing down towards where your feet or knees are placed on the ground.
Breath in as your lower yourself whilst deliberately breathing outwards as you push to the top.
It may feel awkward at first if you’re not used to it, but have faith and stick with it to keep your joints safe and healthy, while setting the groundwork for your push up numbers to skyrocket.
3. Know The Regressions & Progressions
There are countless variations and exercises that can really help strengthen a push up, but to keep it simple for this post, we’ll talk solely about the push up itself and how it can be altered depending on your ability.
Great to know if you’re starting out, while just as good to know for when you eventually and inevitably become stronger and are looking to challenge yourself some more.
There’s 2 very simple things you can change, to alter the difficulty of this exercise. Number one being something we refer to as “Lever Length”. The shorter the lever, the less resistance felt, and vice versa. Dropping to your knees shortens the length that your body is off the floor, making it lighter, in the same manner that moving onto your toes increases the lever length to make it more challenging.
The second thing is the angle. A standard push up is all but completely horizontal to the floor. To make it slightly easier, you can place your hands on something raised from the floor like a box, bench or step, moving you away from that horizontal position, and slowly becoming more vertical to create less resistance by working less against the gravity that keeps all of our feet on the floor! Likewise, placing our feet on that same bench, box or step will have us working into that gravity, and making us more horizontal, before eventually the angle of the push changes to a point where it slightly moves away from the push up movement itself.
4. Manage Your Bodyweight
Losing excess body fat will always make these bodyweight moves easier for us. This is the same for every bodyweight movement. The less resistance we’re faced with, the easier the move will be.
It’s our muscles that do the work, so if losing “weight” is on your mind, we always recommend you do so mindfully and take the very simple steps to ensuring that you can successfully drop body fat, while maintaining every bit of muscle you can, and with it, stay as strong as ever!
There’s too much to go into as a side note on this post, you can check out some of our other posts on losing body fat if you’d like to know more.
To keep things simple though - regular resistance training (2-3 times per week) combined with a diet made up of mostly whole, natural and single ingredient foods whilst staying active and hydrated, will be more than enough for most people to see some initial results over the coming weeks and months!
Let us know what you made of this post. Will you be trying some of these methods in your own training?
If getting stronger and leaner is on your agenda, then get in touch with us today and talk to us about how our programs can get you there!