REMINDER: Strong Body-Strong Mind Workshop – Austin, TX (Saturday, June 18th)
Hey fitness pros/fitness enthusiasts in the AUSTIN, TX area. I’ll be down there next weekend (Saturday, June 18th) – along with my wife, Dr. Lisa Lewis – for our inaugural Strong Body-Strong Mind Workshop.
Topics covered include:
1. The Art of Coaching & Behavior Change – not only learn the ins and outs of coaching your clients on the gym floor, but also learn some cool Jedi mind-tricks on mindset and avoiding negative self-talk to boot.
2. The difference between external and internal cueing (and why one is better than the other).
3. Introversion vs. Extroversion – and as it relates to be an effective coach.
4. Breaking down squat and deadlift technique.
5. Why squatting ass-to-grass isn’t for everyone.
6. Why our cat is the cutest cat ever.
And much, much more. CEUs via the NSCA are available.
For more information (location, payment, etc) you can go HERE.
Today’s guest post comes from former CP intern, and current Boston University assistant Strength Coach, Dave Rak.
Dave likes deadlifts, Jason Bourne, and Chipolte. He’s also single. Ladies?
Push-ups are a main staple in any strength and conditioning program. They are a great body weight exercise that can get you really strong, and in case you didn’t already know…strong people are harder to kill and just flat out more useful in general. When that Zombie Apocalypse happens you can thank me.
For those of you who struggle with push-ups don’t worry Tony and I got your back!
Note from TG: I’ve actually written on push-up progressions in the past. THISone was targeted towards women, but can easily be applied to men who struggle with push-ups as well.
THISone just talks about the general badassery that is the push-up.
Okay, I’ll stop interrupting Dave.
Some people lack the core strength and upper body strength to bang out a perfect push-up. A typical regression is to elevate the hands to make the push-up easier and then progressively lower the angle of the hands until you reach the floor. Often times the second you go to hands elevated push-ups it’s like you hit the self-destruct button and your athlete just falls apart. Elbows flair out, the hips drop, and your eyes start to bleed from witnessing this debauchery. For the visual learners, just check out the picture above.
An alternative to elevating the hands (typically on aerobic steppers or the pins of a power rack) would be to use a band as assistance on the way up from your push-up. The band takes some of the athlete’s body weight away and allows them to complete the push up in its natural position. When you elevate the hands the shoulder is in a more flexed position compared to a standard push-up, it’s not the same pattern and it changes the exercise.
Now I’m not trying to split hairs between the two, but to me the simple fact that the athlete can go through the exact motion of a push up is important. I look at it the same way as if you were to unload a squat with a TRX, you are just grooving that pattern.
Go through the movement pattern, get comfortable, get strong, and then dominate the world!
Another benefit of using the band for assistance is it is easier for the athlete to create tension in their back and glutes compared to a hands elevated push-up on a box. The athlete will be able to “pull the ground apart” and then if the band is placed at the hips it can even have an RNT (Reactive Neuromuscular Training) effect for the hips. Peep the video and you’ll see what I mean.
Band Assisted Push-Up
Also, what’s one reason that people suck at push-ups? A weak upper body (and core, yes that too). The band will allow you to load the upper body while doing your push up without compromising form. On the flip side, elevating the hands will take more of the load away, yes you can work on core stability but it is more difficult to load the upper body.
Who Did I Steal It From: I saw a coach at Mike Boyle Strength & Conditioning doing this with a private client waaaaayyyyy back in the day when I was an intern. So, whoever that guy was, high five!
What Does It Do: Allows you to the go through the correct movement pattern of a push-up and strengthen that pattern.
You can teach the push-up easier. It reduces the “oh-shit” factor during the exercise so it shifts the focus from not falling on your face to actually engaging the proper musculature.
The band allows for a RNT effect to teach keeping the hips extended and how to engage the glutes/maintain pelvic positioning.
Progress the movement and add more resistance.
Change the location of the band to add more load to the upper body.
Give your athlete confidence because they are actually doing a push up with the rest of their team. Having them do a hands elevated variation may make them self-conscious. You put the 45lbs plates on the bar and not the 25 and two 10lbs plates on right? Same idea, look like everyone else and build confidence.
Coaching Ques: The thicker the band the easier the push up will be. Start in a prone position with the band in the crease of your hips. Hands under your shoulders, pull your shoulder blades into your back pocket (thanks for the cue Tony!)
Open the pickle jar with your hands (stole cue that from Jill Zeller) meaning pull the ground apart with your hands to engage your lats and create torque/tension in your back.
Squeeze your butt and don’t let the band push your hips back, body in a straight line.
Pull yourself down to the floor and drive away.
Notes– Move the band to the quads to load the upper body more, you can also play with the height of the pins/J-Hooks for more or less band tension.
Give these a try, and remember Chuck Norris does not do push-ups he pushes the Earth down.
Author Bio
David Rak is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist through the NSCA (CSCS). He is currently a Graduate Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach at Boston University pursuing his Master’s Degree in Coaching. Dave oversees Wrestling and Women’s Golf, also assists with Men’s Basketball and Men’s Soccer. He received his Bachelor’s in Exercise Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and completed internships at Mike Boyle Strength & Conditioning and Cressey Performance. Upon his completion of his internship at MBSC, he continued to work part time at Mike Boyle Strength & Conditioning for 2 and a half years while he finished his undergraduate degree.
It’s no secret that I love push-ups and that I feel they’re an important component of any well-rounded fitness program. They offer a bevy of benefits ranging from improved upper body strength (pecs for days!), improved scapular kinematics, and core activation.
As such, in relation to the last point, push-ups serve as an excellent assessment tool to gauge a person’s ability – from an anterior/posterior perspective – to control the entire lumbo-pelvic-hip area.
If someone can’t maintain a neutral spinal position doing something as standard as an (un-loaded) push-up, do you think it’s going to be a good idea to place a heavy barbell on their back?
They’re also really smart, love to go for walks on the beach, can cook like no one’s business. And OMG, I can’t tell you how funny they are. Just the other day we were watching an old episode of Friends – you know, that one where Joey’s lounge chair breaks and Chandler tries to replace it? – and push-ups was like “and that’s why you never bring two rams in heat to a tap dancing recital.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Eh, I guess you had to be there. Trust me, it was HIL-arious.
Anyways, basically all I’m trying to say is that everyone needs more push-ups in their lives. I know they’re often deemed “wimpy” or a waste of time, but I truly feel they’re one of the rare exercises that provide a lot bang for our training buck, and can easily be “tweaked” to the lifter depending on his or hers needs or goals.
Which brings us to today’s Exercise You Should Be Doing
Slideboard Push-Up vs. Band
Who Did I Steal it From: I originally heard about this variation from my buddy, Nick Tumminello, in an article he wrote for T-Nation a few years ago – HERE.
What Does It Do: Well, we get all the prerequisite advantages – upper body strength, core activation, shoulder health, and we get a ton of leeway in that we can make them as easy (0r challenging) as we want depending on the person we’re working with.
The main advantage of THIS variation, however, and as Nick noted in the article linked above:
Slide board band push-ups increase muscle tension around the shoulder joint by forcing the posterior shoulder muscles to contract by resisting the band pulling the hands together. Many people who can’t perform a normal push-up due to shoulder pain can successfully perform this variation pain free.
Key Coaching Cues: In terms of basic technique, all the same “ingredients” still apply.
Keep chin tucked – don’t poke it towards the ground.
Abs should stay tight or braced (sometimes I’ll gently tap the stomach to help the trainee engage their core).
Squeeze the glutes (provides more posterior pelvic tilt and keeps people out of lumbar hyperextension).
Hands/elbows should be directly underneath the shoulders.
Likewise, hands should be around shoulder width apart.
Knees should be locked and legs in a straight line.
The entire backside should make a straight line.
Elbows should not flare out during the set (it places far more stress on the shoulders), nor should they be glued to your sides (which causes too much “crowding” and will cause people to go into excessive scapular anterior tilt). Instead, the upper arms should make a 45-degree angle to the body.
Chest touches floor (or in this case, the slideboard) on every rep.
Another key point I want to note is how to “finish” each rep. Try to push yourself away from the floor as much as possible at the top of each repetition (scapular protraction). By doing so, you’re allowing the scapulae to function through a full ROM (adduction AND abduction), and you’re inviting the serratus anterior into the mix as well. Never a bad idea.
You’ll note in the video I do a fairly decent job of doing it correctly. You’ll also note the lame music in
the background.
Specific to this variation, though, is you’ll need to grab a mini-band (or something equivalent) and wrap that around your wrists. Place your hands on top of the “footsies” that come with the slideboard and as you perform your push-up, you’ll need to place tension in the band by pulling it apart and then preventing it from forcing your hands together.
This will help activate the posterior shoulder.
NOTE: for those who don’t have access to a slideboard you could easily use a pair of ValSlides or even those cheapo furniture gliders you can purchase at your local Home Depot. Either way, the objective is to perform these on a slippery surface.
Try them out today and let me know what you think!
My girlfriend has been away for a month travelling Europe, and after putting my HAZMAT suit on and cleaning the hell out of our apartment I picked her up last night at the airport.
I’m taking today off from work (and blogging) so that she and I can, “reunite.”
BOM CHICKA CHICKA BOM WOW.
[Lucky for you I was fairly productive while she was away, and today I have another article I wrote, this time for T-Nation, about a couple of my favorite “glue” exercises. What are “glue” exercises. Click HERE to find out.]
Push-ups are like the Rodney Dangerfield of the fitness community – they get no respect.
Often deemed a waste of time, or worse, “too easy,” push-ups are generally an after-thought with regards to exercise selection. I mean, who has time to do push-ups after four sets of bench presses, seven sets of incline presses, and 14 sets of decline presses? Dude, everyone knows you have to hit all the angles!
What’s more, if you really want to blast the pecs, you can’t forget dumbbell flies, cable flies, and the pec dec!!11!1
Sarcasm aside, it’s readily apparent that push-ups aren’t quite as “sexy” as their bench press counterparts, and aren’t considered a high priority for most trainees when it comes to getting their pecification on.
Heck, they’re not even in the same stratosphere as the bench press. I mean, when was the last time you walked into your gym and saw someone rocking some legit push-ups? Let alone perform them correctly, or with any external load?
Yeah, I thought so. You’re more apt to see a Real Housewife win a Pulitzer.
Nevertheless, if I were to make a top five list of exercises that give you the most bang-for-your-training-buck, push-ups would easily make an appearance. For starters, most people can’t do them correctly, let alone do them for reps, so that alone means something.
Ironically, people have a tendency to do what’s easy and what they’re good at. Push-ups, for all intents and purposes, are considered “easy” by most standards…
….but not a lot of people are good at them.
Most of the time you see the following: for the visual learners in the crowd, refer to the picture to the right.
1. Head juts down
2. Excessive lumbar curve
3. No scapular retraction (or protraction)
4. Abs “sag” (rectus abdomimus picks up the slack for woefully weak external obliques)
5. Limited range of motion (it looks more like an epileptic seizure than a push-up)
While I’m not going to break it down joint by joint and cue by cue, here are some standard things to focus on when trying to perform a proper push-up:
Keep chin tucked – don’t poke it towards the ground
Abs should stay tight or braced (sometimes I’ll gently tap the stomach to help the trainee engage their core)
Squeeze the glutes (provides more posterior pelvic tilt and keeps people out of lumbar extension)
Hands/elbows should be directly underneath the shoulders.
Likewise, hands should be around shoulder width apart
Knees should be locked and legs in a straight line.
The backside should make a straight line. Here, I LOVE using a PVC pipe to place on people’s backs so as to teach them what a neutral spine should feel like. There should be three points of contact – the back of the head, in between the shoulder blades, and the sacrum*** Photo courtesy of elitefitblog.
Elbows should NOT flare out during the set. Instead, they should stay tight to the body, or at a 45 degree angle.
Chest touches floor on every rep
NOTE: For those interested, you can check out THIS post where I discuss some push-up variations for women (and men) who can’t yet perform a standard push-up from the floor.
Moving on (because I don’t want to make this a “how to” post), compared to the bench press, push-ups are a closed chain exercise, which offers a gulf of advantages, particularly with regards to scapular kinematics and overall shoulder health.
In short, when you’re lying on your back performing a bench press, your shoulder blades aren’t able to move – they’re stuck in place.
Conversely, with a push-up, the scapulae are now able to move more freely, which has huge dividends towards overall shoulder health.
It’s not uncommon for someone to walk into the facility complaining of debilitating shoulder pain (in no small part to the amount of benching they do), only to realize that they can perform push-ups pain free.
Thirdly, push-ups offer a lot of variety. Whether I’m working with an elite athlete, a newbie, or with someone who has a bum shoulder, push-ups offer me a lot of leeway, and I can make them as easy (or challenging) as I want. Literally, the options are endless.
Lastly, and arguably most important of all, from a anterior-posterior perspective, push-ups are a fantastic way to train the core in a more functional manner, as you have to learn to “engage” all the stabilizers in the lumbo-pelvic-hip area to achieve better pelvic alignment.
With this established, the prime movers now appear stronger because the stabilizers are doing their job and force is more easily transferred.
Suffice it to say, I really feel that push-ups should be a staple in everyone’s programming, and it’s unfortunate that they’re often dismissed altogether.
That said, while the first step is to make sure that everyone can perform a push-up correctly (see points above), lets be honest, they can be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Sometimes we need to kick it up a notch, and with that in mind…..it’s not uncommon for us to make them more challenging by adding things like bands, chains, etc.
When those aren’t an option, here are some other variations I like:
T-Push-Ups (with DBs)
The first point to consider is that DBs aren’t necessarily mandatory here. For some, just using body weight alone will be challenging enough.
Even so, the key thing here is to make sure that the body is locked into place. A HYYYYYOOOOOGE mistake I see is when trainees tend to rotate with their lumbar spine first and then with their upper torso.
Instead, what should happen is that the rib cage should be locked into place with the lower back so that the entire body moves in unison.
From there, I generally shoot for anywhere from 4-5 reps/PER SIDE.
1-Arm Bodysaw Push-Up
This is definitely one of the more advanced push-up variations we implement at Cressey Performance, but one that’s definitely popular amongst our athletes and clients.
Obviously, having access to a slideboard is useful, but not mandatory: purchasing a ValSlide or even a pair of those furniture glider thingamajigs would be advantageous (not to mention cheaper).
Here, all of the same rules apply with regards to push-up technique, but with the addition of the slideboard, there’s a definite increased challenge on core stability (especially with the increased range of motion). Additionally, there’s a bit of a unilateral component which is unique and something I feel is important to consider.
Again, much like the t-push variation above, I like to implement sets of 5-6 reps per side.
Push-Up Kickthrough
Admittedly this is a variation that I’ll only typically use as part of a metabolic circuit, but it’s still kind of badass (despite the Katy Perry playing in the background).
The premise is pretty standard – perform a push-up, and then bring the contra-lateral knee towards the opposite elbow – maintaining a neutral spine as best you can, of course.
I prefer to do this version for time (20-30s) as part of a circuit, but you can certainly shoot for a standard # of reps per side, too.
And that’s it. While I could easily sit here and plow through 20 more variations, those are just a few (hopefully) new push-up variations you can start to incorporate today. Just so we’re clear, though, I still feel it’s imperative that people learn to do REGULAR push-ups correctly. Once that’s in the bag, the options are endless.
