Too Much Information About Pushups
The simplist compound movement
Pushups are classic. The Drill Sargent demanding the recurit “drop and give me twenty.” The Presidential Candidate who challanges a heckler to a pushup contest. They’re a part of every training montage1. But if you want do more than just copy what you see on TV, or at least get better at copying from TV, I have some info for you.2
Pushup Basics
A pushup is a body weight compound movement. Because it’s a bodyweight movement3, you don’t need any specialized equipment to do it or to do most of the variations, which makes it easy for people who don’t have access to a gym. It’s also a compound movement4 that hits three muscle groups at once5, which makes it very time efficient6.
To do the basic pushup:
Lay on your stomach
Place your hands palms down under your shoulders
Hold your body ridged, flexing your abs and glutes often helps
Lower youself down so you’re almost touching the ground, but don’t take the weight off your hands
Repeat until you can’t do anymore9
Congratulations, you’ve done a set of pushups.
Is that it?
No.
There are variations on the standard pushups to change their muscular focus10, lots of variations for making pushups easier or harder for the target muscles11, pointless variations that make them more unpleasant for no good reason12, and variations for injury prevention.
Muscle Focus
What I describe above might be called the basic pushup. It hits all three muscles pretty evenly. To change the muscular focus you want to either change you hand position or decide where you put your elbows (did you notice I left that part out?).
The hand position I describe above is a blance between chest and arms. It’s what I’d recomend for someone who hasn’t been training for 3+ years13. If you widen your hand positin, you’ll make things easier on your arms which makes your chest more of the limiting factor giving you more of a chest stimulus. If you narrow your hand position, like with a diamond pushup, you will make the movement harder on your triceps and they’ll get more stimulus from the exercise.
The other variation I mentioned in this section is elbow position. Pushing your elbows out to the side while you do a pushup creates more of a focus on the pecs, and pushing the elbows back towards your hips puts more focus on the triceps. This is a personal preference, I use elbows out as a default. My reasoning is that my arms get more workouts from other movements and from life and I want my chest to catch up.
Making Pushups Easier
If you have trouble doing at least five pushups in a set, you should do something to make them easier. The best way to do that is to decrease the load. The load on the pushup is your bodyweight, and that’s hard to change quickly, but it’s your bodyweight at an angle. The flatter the angle, the more weight you have to “push up”, the more vertical the angle14, the less weight is resisting your motion15. You can make the angle more vertical by either putting your hands on a table or other raised surface or bend your legs and use your knees instead of your feet to rest.
Making Pushups Harder For Some Reason
If your sets are getting too big, as in you’re doing more than 20 in a set, you want to think about making your pushups harder16. The obvious solution is to do the opposite of the above, instead of raising your hands raise your feet. Put your feet on the couch, coffee table, or whatever you have around. You’ll do fewer pushups, but get the same or more stimulus. The alternative is to add weights, a weighted vest or heavy objects on your back will make it harder. Just be consistant about what you do.
My favorite way to make pushups harder is to add a deficit. You lower your body BELOW the floor to get a deeper stretch on your pecs and tricpes. If you can’t phase your torso through the floor17, the next best thing is to make two platforms for your hands. Books, yoga blocks, and pushup handles are all good for this. Anything stable that will support your weight and of equal heights will do. You want your chest to go deep enough that the front of your ribs dip below the platforms you make18.
I strongly recomend starting with deficit pushups, even if you need to be on your knees, the deep stretch is worth it.
Injury Prevention
Injury prevention is super important. The injury risk from pushups is very small, so small I wouldn’t add this section at all normally, but people keep telling me they’re avoiding exercise to avoid injury so I’m adding it and I hope it’ll help.
The most common way a healthy person can hurt themselves doing pushups is by sticking to some form that causes joint damage to them specifically. Everyone’s joints and muscles are connected in their own way, and individual varation will be relevent every once and a while.
Most of the time joint issues are from holding your hands in the wrong spot19, pointed in the wrong direction, or pushing your elbows in the wrong way. If you think this is happening to you, try a different hand position or elbow position. As long as you’re lowering yourself slowly all the way down and pushing youself back up, you’re doing great. If it feels good and you’re going deep, no wrong answers.
If your joints hurt a little during a set, try finishing the set and see if they just needed the warm up to feel better. If your joints hurt a lot during a set or the pain starts mild and gets worse, STOP doing pushups with your current technique. If you can’t find a technqiue where your joints don’t hurt, consult with a physical therapist or personal trainer that you trust, or avoid the movement.
If you have a diagnosed injury of the shoulder or elbow, ignore everything I’m saying and ask a professinal you trust what you should do. If instead you just have general aches and pains that comes from being out of shape or old, do the movement while being very attentive to your form and avoid inducing more pain during the exercise itself.
Basically all injuries in new lifters from pushups will be joint injuries. In theory it’s possible to hurt youself in the muscle directly by doing a heavy load20 and pushing yourself up too explosively, but it takes many years of training to get that strong and it’s hard to accidently load a pushup heavy enough to hurt you.
How to get started
Get some books on the floor and do some deficit pushups. Change the angle of your body at lockout21 until you’re doing between 5 and 2022. If you’re worried about getting hurt, higher rep ranges are going to be safer from an injury perspective. Do a couple of sets23. Repeat it later in the week24. Congrats, you’ve started one third of a beginner exercise program.
Or they were.
I had planned to get a post out last week about the work of Dr Eric Trexler and exercise adaptation as it relates to burning Calories, but family and work have eaten too much time. So last week was nothing and this week will be pushups.
Bodyweight compound movements are also called Calistenics and they’re great. They’re not better than free weights or machines, but you will always have your body with you and you won’t always have equipment.
Compound movements are movements that load the movement of more than once joint. In this case you’re flexing the shoulder and elbow. The other common type of compound movement flexes the knee and the hip.
It’s stimulating your pecs (chest muscles), triceps (the biggeest and least glamourous arm muscles), and the anterior deltoid (the front part of your shoulder).
But maybe instead of three sets of pushups you’d rather do three sets of machine flyes, three sets of front raises, and three sets of pushdowns. If that’s what you’d rather do, I’m not your mom. I just think it’s a bad plan for a newbie.
Roll Credits
I’m sorry for the previous footnote
The point where you can’t do anymore is failure. It’s also fine to stop a few reps shy of failure. Two reps shy of failure is fine, but 5 or more reps shy of failure is probably too much.
Any pushup you do will stimulate the tricps, pecs, and front delts, but you can change the blance between them. Do you want to focus on your triceps right now? You can do a different kind of pushup.
Harder on the target muscle means you get more growth from the movement. The simpliest way to make a movement harder is to add more weight, but more weight equals more injury risk. Adding more stress on the target muscle without adding more weight doesn’t increase the risk of injury to your joints.
Really? Yes. A good example is knuckle pushups which make your pain tolorance and knuckle durability the limiting factor. This might be good for training you to be a better martial artist, I don’t know, but it won’t help grow muscle or lose fat.
If your new to lifting you can basically max out your effecitve stimulus for every muscle.
Vertical as in head up, feet down. The other way is harder, not easier.
I’m not doing the trig here.
You want to keep your sets from getting too high because after a certain point you’re not lifting enough weight to challange you muscles enough to force growth. But even before that point, it’s harder to tell proximity to local muscular failure at higher rep counts than lower ones. They actually have studies on this.
Most people can’t
You’re looking to stretch your pec muscles here, so if you have a lot of tissue on your chest for whatever reason, you’ll want a higher platform for your hands to get the same muscular stretch.
Ex fingers pointed forward, fingers out by 30 degrees, fingers out 45 degrees, etc
Angle or weights
Lockout is when you’re all the way up and your elbows are “locked out”
It’s unlikely you’ll need to make things harder. Doing 20 slow and deep deficit pushups with good form takes a lot out of you.
Two or three is probably good.
Two to four times per week will be great.
Pushups are a staple in jiu jitsu, but I haven’t found a way to do them that doesn’t aggravate shoulder impingement, despite a successful bout of physical therapy last year. So, I do what I can (mostly holding forearm planks while everyone else does pushups) and keep looking for ways to exercise those muscles on off days without aggravating the tendon. Holding my elbows real close to my body and keeping my shoulders back and down are two things that help. Slow eccentric movement and careful concentric movement also help. Finally, I’ve stopped going past 90 degrees in my elbows. Dean Pohlman calls these “yoga pushups“. ~70 years old.