Hey guys, welcome back to my channel in today's video, I'm going to make it short and sweet,
but I want to touch base on pushups, how to do pushups properly. So proper pushup form, whether
you're a beginner, whether you're advanced and you just want to get stronger at your pushups, I'm
going to break it all down for you. In this video today. I've been doing personal training for over
15 years, and in this video I'm to break down the three most common mistakes I see when people are
doing pushups and why they're probably not getting stronger at your pushups. So make sure you watch
this video right to the end, because I'm going to give you the three most common mistakes as well
as fixes to make sure you're doing your pushups properly. To enable you to keep getting stronger.
Ladies, there is no reason why you can't work up to being able to do pushups off of your toes.
Getting nice and low to the floor and right back up. It's possible for everybody. One, if you use
proper form, which I'm going to show you in this video today, and two, you just keep working at it
and challenging yourself and right at the end, I'm going to give you one of the best exercises
you can do today to start getting stronger at your pushups and work your way up to doing proper shops
right off your toes with perfect form. Okay. We're going to dive right in and keep this short,
but just quickly, if you're new here, make sure you subscribe to my channel, hit that belt to be
notified. So you don't miss out on new videos coming out every single week. Strength, tips,
workouts, fat loss tips, nutrition, all kinds of things to help you on your fitness and fat loss
journey. And also if you enjoy this video and you want more form tutorials, make sure you give this
video a like, and leave me a comment below and let me know what other exercise you want to perfect
and get better at. I'm happy to help. Okay guys. So here we go. I'm going to
break down the three most common mistakes I see when doing pushups, how to fix them and
make sure you're using proper form to really get stronger in your pushups. So first things first,
I'm going to show you a proper perfect form. Well, I like to think I'm perfect pushup
and then I'm going to break down the three common form mistakes I see and how to fix it.
So what I'll do is break down proper form for anybody doing pushups off their toes.
But if you are a beginner and you're still doing pushups off your knees
and just looking to get stronger at those I'll break down the exact same form cues right after
the form cues for toes. So we'll start with toes right after that. I'm going to do the
exact same thing for doing pushups off your knees. It's good to know both because doing
both will actually help you get stronger and I'll explain that later. So first mistake I see very,
very often is an arch lower back. So not engaging your core muscles and your glutes properly
to support your spine and hold that steady, push up position. I'll show you what I mean.
This is often what I see. Okay. Arch in the lower back when I'm going down. Like so, okay. What that
does is put a lot of strain on the shoulders. A lot of strain on the lower back and actually
prevents you from getting stronger and lower into those pushups. Let me show you how to fix that.
So here is the form mistake. Okay, doing your pushup like so all we're going to do is
rotate the pelvis, engage your abdominal muscles and squeeze your glutes. So here we go again,
squeeze, everything is locked in, nice and tight. And then we can do
our pushup. Okay. See how solid my spine is there and how engaged my abdominals are. It's surprising
to a lot of people, how much the abs are actually working in a pushup exercise. So not only is it
going to help you build upper body strength, it's also going to help you build up your core
muscles. So that's tip number one, making sure you are engaging your core muscles and your
glutes to support that spine and hold you steady. And common mistake number two, wrists are not
directly underneath the shoulders and people collapsing. They're chin to try and get lower
to the ground. They feel like the foreheads lower and neck collapsed. They're going to get
lower to the ground in their pushup. But let me show you what I mean by that.
This is what I often see. Very, very common hands are out here. Not directly underneath my shoulders
and head is like this. So when people are doing pushups often causing their bum to come up, I've
seen some like this also, I've seen some like this all kinds of things, but wrists are not underneath
the shoulders. And again, that head tuck. So how do we fix that? Move your wrists back.
Make sure wrists are directly underneath the shoulders.
Okay. And I'm looking forward. I'm not looking down here. So again, I'm looking here. So my neck
is straight. I don't want this happening. Okay. Nice and soft. So form tip number two, make sure
you are putting your wrists directly underneath your shoulders, parallel to your shoulders, hold
that tight and do not tuck your chin down. So look to where you're going. Don't look underneath you,
that's form tip number two. Third and last most common mistake I see is a going way too far out to
the side. Okay. Also, rotating wrists and all of these things that actually just make it way harder
to do a proper push up. So what I'm going to show you on the mat here. We don't want them here.
We don't want them here. We want them at about a 45 degree angle. So let me show you
what it looks like when you're not doing them properly and the elbows are going too far out.
Okay? So again, even if my wrists are right underneath my shoulders, elbows are here
and sticking out elbows. So my elbows are pointing this way. I want them pointing this way.
So how do we fix that? Lining up our wrists right underneath our shoulders. Okay. Abs nice and tight
glutes tight, elbows are pointing to the back, up and down. A lot of people think if I stick my
elbows out, I'm going to get more chest activation through my chest muscles. But all you need to do
is keep that proper form and just widen your grip from right underneath your shoulders to a
little bit wider, still pointing your elbows back. You're going to get a bit more chest activation.
So if I normally put my hands right underneath my shoulders, I'm just going to go a little bit
wider to the outside of the mat. Abs tight, still pointing my elbows back. Okay. Up and down. Exact
same form. Elbows are at that 45 degree pointing backwards, not to the sides, but I'm going a bit
wider with my hands to feel a bit more through my chest muscles. So there you go. That's common
mistake number three that you don't want to make, if you're looking to get stronger at your pushups.
So there you go, guys. Those are the three most common four mistakes. I see, like I said,
in my 15 years, those seem to be the ones I'm correcting most often. There's a lot of other form
mistakes. I see. But if you're actually focusing on those three things and those three form cues,
you're probably going in the right direction and you're going to get stronger at your pushups. So
make sure you leave any questions below about your pushups. If you're feeling risk pain,
or any other things that you want to know more about how to get better at pushups, I'm happy to
answer any of your questions in the comments below or any other exercise you want to get better at.
Okay. So now that I've gone through all of the form tips off your toes, I want to go over
pushups off your knees as well. So right after I go over the three form cues again for pushups off
your knees, I'm going to give you my three main tips of how you can get stronger at your pushups
and what you need to do. As well as one simple exercise, you can do pretty much every day to
help you get stronger at your pushups, because it really helped me. Okay, so let's go over the
three main form tips I was talking about off your toes because we're also going to go through those
right now off of your knees. No arch in your lower back, making sure you're engaging your
core and squeezing your glutes. Two, make sure your wrists are directly underneath your shoulders
and your chin isn't tucked all the way down. Three, making sure your elbows aren't pointing
out and they're pointing back at about 45 degrees. So let's take a look at what that
looks like if you're doing your pushups off your knees. What I often see when people are doing
pushups off their knees. So first of all, this is what I often see like four mistakes again.
So here we are pushups off our knees. Okay, arch in the lower back. This is what I see. Okay.
Elbows are going out, but sticking out arch in the lower back core is not engaged. Okay? I don't like
to knock anybody down, but you're not going to get stronger in your pushups doing them that way.
Simple, simple fixes. Usually people just don't know any better. So that's what I'm here for.
I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do. So let's get back in that position.
So here I am arching my lower back. All I'm going to do rotate that pelvis. Abs tight, squeeze my
glutes. Okay. So here I am, my core is locked in tight wrists right underneath my shoulders.
Okay. Abs are tight and I'm coming down. Elbows pointing towards the back, not sticking out so
you can see my core is engaged as I'm doing my pushups, I'm getting nice and low. So if you find,
when you put your knees down, that they're too close to your hands, all you have to do is scoot
them back so that you're in a comfortable position with your wrists underneath your shoulders. Simple
as that, so my main tip is if you do pushups off your toes and they look like this, okay,
don't do pushups off your toes. You're not ready. Start off your knees by doing maybe
10 a day, trying to get as low as you can. And the more you do them, the stronger you're
going to get the lower you're going to get. The stronger your core is going to get. It's all about
repetition and patience and consistency. Just keep going, so there's no shame in doing pushups
off your knees; if you're doing them properly with the goal to get up to doing them off your
toes. But the main thing to focus on is form, form over reps, form over toes versus knees. The most
important is getting low in that pushup, abs are tight, proper form. If you can do 10,
if you can do five with good form, once you do your six, you lose form. Stop, take a breather.
Do them again later. So that's my first main tip of how to get stronger at your pushups.
My second tip to get stronger pushups other than patience and consistency
is to focus on building your core strengths. So not only should we be doing 10 pushups a day,
focus on holding a plank for as long as you can. So if you can plank for 20 seconds again,
with good form, keeping that core tight, glutes tight, same position as you are when you're doing
those pushups, you're only going to continue to get stronger at your pushups. So my best advice,
maybe do 10 pushups a day, aim for a 30 second to one minute plank with good form
every day. Continue to build up on that. And you will feel yourself getting stronger
in your pushups. Okay, we're almost done. My last and final tip is doing eccentric training,
so also known as negatives. So what that means is you're actually only working your muscles
on the way down, not on the way up. So you're going slow and controlled forcing your muscles to
not only work, but stabilize your body. And that's how you're going to get stronger in that lower
range. It helped me so much in getting stronger at my pushups. I'm going to show you what that looks
like. So eccentric pushups off my toes. This is what it's going to look like. I'm going down nice
and slow and controlled until I collapse. If you can push yourself back up, amazing,
go for it. If not get up however you want. So I'll do one off my toes. One off my knees.
There you go. In addition to practicing your pushups, going up and down, try adding in that
eccentric training or negatives a few times a week and feel yourself getting stronger.
I hope this information was really helpful today, guys. And I really hope this empowered you ladies,
who might be watching this, that you can do pushups off of your toes. It is possible.
You are strong enough. You just have to work at it. I am a walking example that it's possible.
I've had two babies with my youngest being 18 months old and I'm still able to rock out
some pushups because I continued to work at it. You can do it too, no matter who you are. All
it takes is consistency and patience and falling in love with the journey of building a stronger,
better version of you. Give this video a like if you really enjoy this information and you want to
see more video tutorials, just like this one, if you're looking to learn how to get stronger with
just your body weight, I've got a free four week lifestyle shift and workout calendar,
including all the workouts already on my channel with zero equipment
exercise. Just like these pushups that you can do at home in 30 minutes or less, click the link in
the description to download that free four week workout plan. And again, subscribe to my channel.
If you want to see more videos like this and you don't want to miss out on new videos every week,
thanks again for watching guys. And I really hope this is helpful. I'll see you in the next one.