The first mistake is one that you would think would go without having to be pointed out.
However, it's actually one of the most common mistakes we make, and it's not going full range
of motion on the pushup. And the reason for this is oftentimes a lack of body awareness as to what
full range actually feels like. I'll make it easy for you. You want your chest to touch the ground
all the way down to the ground on every single repetition. And you want those elbows to reach
full extension. Yes, lockout. Don't worry I'll talk to you about lockout and why it's safe later
on. But the point is all the way down until you touch the ground, all the way up to full lockout
is required on every rep for it to be right. So now for mistake number two, let's build off of
number one and just getting down to the ground may not be enough because what goes down to
the ground first matters. You see, if you're just dropping your hips down like this, well,
we have a name for them. They're called floor fuckers. The problem is you're not really doing
a full range of motion pushup. You're certainly not working your chest through a full range of
motion by doing this. Or the alternative is people just keep their hips way too high. Neither one of
these is actually going to give you the results that you're looking for when you do pushups.
So, what do you do? You try to find the target zone. And the target zone is really easy. It's
actually anywhere above the waistline all the way up to somewhere in the upper chest line.
This is the area you want to touch the ground first. If anything else touches,
you're not doing the exercise correctly. And one of the easiest ways that we can actually
make sure we do this properly is to do something called the tuck and squeeze. No, Jesse, not that
kind of tuck and squeeze, we're talking about the pelvis going into a posterior pelvic tilt
down and engage just like this. And once that happens, you lock in the rest of your body
so you're lifting up that area below the waist and you're keeping that target zone
squarely in line to make contact with the floor first and to do it properly.
But even with those two fixes in place, you're still not out of the woods because mistake number
three is one that your neck can actually do to betray you because your neck can actually break
through that previous tip to still make you do it wrong and it's by craning the neck or
reaching for the floor. And we actually do this to make the exercise easier. Right? Our eyes want
to get to the floor as fast as possible to make us feel like we've got to the bottom of the rep.
However, all that's doing is, again, shortchanging the range of motion on the rep,
usually going hand in hand with that high hip position we talked about in the last point.
Instead, keep that neck in neutral and let the target zone be your guide and you'll never mess
this up again. And that brings us now to those nuances of the pushup, where the details matter
and the difference between getting it right and wrong might be more of a surprise to you.
And we're talking about, first and foremost, the width of your hands on the floor because
there is a right width for you and it may be different than what's right for somebody else.
The first thing you need to do is realize where the repercussions are of getting it wrong.
If I have my hands too narrow, you can see that my elbow is no longer stacked over my wrist.
And to do the exercise effectively and safely, you want to make sure that these stays stacked all the
time. With the proper width this is actually going to take place. That elbow is stacked nicely over
the wrist and the joints are working properly. If I go to wide, once again you can see that this
alignment gets messed up and we're putting stress on the joints that doesn't need to be there.
Now I mentioned it being different for different people, that's because arm lengths are different
and body types are different, so it requires some sort of customization. Here's what you do
to find what yours should be like. You lay flat on the floor like this with your arms up overhead
and you simply slide your arms down into your elbows are about 45 to 60 degrees
away from your side. At this point all you have to do is slide your hands underneath
your shoulders and lift your body up. That's going to be the proper placement for your hands,
that's going to put you in that stack position and in position to do the best pushups possible.
Mistake number five is actually still what you do with your hands because how you turn them and
place them on the ground matters too not just how far apart they are. And if you turn them
too far inward, you actually mess up the whole mechanics of the pushup. What happens when you
turn them in is everything else comes along for the ride. We are one kinetic chain, remember,
so as we turn the hands in, the elbows flare out too much. And as the elbows flare and elevate,
we tend to get some additional stress in the shoulder in the form of impingement stress.
This is not a good thing when you're trying to do rep after rep after rep of a pushup.
So, what we want to do is fix that and it's as simple as just rotating your hands out more than
usual. You can either point your finger straight ahead at, say, 12:00 or turn them out even a
little bit more to about 2:00, which is going to increase the external rotation that happens
at the shoulder, providing you a little bit more stability in the joint and actually a little bit
more freedom of motion up and down. Now, some of you might be misled by the fact that turning
your hands in actually relieves another issue you might be having with the pushup and that's wrist
discomfort. Because as we turn those hands in, we actually have less extension required
to get to the bottom of the pushup because you can see having to turn out does require quite
a bit of extension through the wrist. While that might be a temporary solution
it still doesn't get around the fact that the shoulder starts to bear the brunt of
that inward hand placement. So instead, if you find yourself with sore wrist doing the pushup
just simply either grab a pair of dumbbells to put your wrist in a neutral position or perform
the push up from your fist, which will also keep that neutral wrist position. Either way,
don't make the mistake of looking for the shortcut and the more immediate solution that's just going
to lead to longer term problems down the road. So now with the hand positioning all figured out,
we actually now have to move up the kinetic chain. And in this case,
it goes right here into the shoulders. And if you're making this mistake, you're kind of
screwing up the whole push up because from this point on, if you allow your shoulders to shrug,
you're ruining all the stability that you're trying to create in the first place. And we know
that stability is necessary for a properly performed pushup. You have to keep those
shoulders on, shrugged to not only create the stability in your torso, but to actually put
the chest in the first line of defense. In other words, the chest is the muscle that
will do all of the work as opposed to shifting the load to where we don't want it on the shoulders.
Now, to get this right, make sure that you're doing this from the right position.
Don't try to unshrug from the bottom of the pushup because all you'll likely do is pull your elbows
far too close to your side. Instead, get in the top position of the pushup and then pull
your shoulders down from there and I promise you we'll get it right every single time.
Mistake number seven actually builds off of mistake number six, in that what happens now
when you start to move, do you allow your shoulder blades to go with you or do you actually keep them
where you had them in the last tip? Well, a lot of guys will actually advise you to do the wrong
thing, and that is they want you to allow them to fold or retract as you go to the bottom of the
pushup and then protract as you come to the top of the pushup, you can see them spreading apart
on every single rep as they get back to the top. This is incorrect. This is going to cause
a lot of issues with you doing the pushup. Most importantly, it's going to take away the
brunt of the effort being done by the chest again. Remember I said you had to have the chest out in
front doing the work.? When we start to protract our shoulders as we get to the top, that is
exactly the opposite of what happens. The chest dips back and caves in and the shoulders come
forward and wind up taking over the movement. We don't want this when it's chest development that
we're after. So instead, when you unshrug your shoulders, you keep them there for the rest of
the exercise. Hold them in place, lower yourself down, it's going to keep your shoulder back.
It's going to put your chest out and it's going to allow you to get more work done for your chest.
If you really want to make sure you're doing this right as you come to the top, imagine turning your
biceps forward, squeezing yourself off the ground and allowing your arms to almost rotate and turn
forward. The second you do this right I promise you, you will feel the difference and you'll
never go back to doing it the old way again or maybe, as others have even advised you to.
Mistake number eight as a subtle one, but again, no less important if you want to do this exercise
properly. If you've ever watched someone do a bench press, you probably notice that the bar
does not move straight up and straight down. Instead, it moves it a little bit of an angle
from low to high. Low near the chest and higher up towards the neck as you get towards the top of
the lift. Well, that is the correct bar path where you have a body path on the pushup and
it's the same thing. You want your hands to be relatively lower on your chest line
at the bottom of the repetition and a little bit higher as you get to the top of the rep.
And the way we do this is just altering our body in space since our hands are obviously fixed to
the floor. And this is actually pretty simple by just rocking yourself ever so subtly on the floor
during every repetition. So, as you go down, allow your toes to rock your body just a little bit
forward and you'll see that that puts the hands a little bit lower on that chest line. And as you
come back up, allow those toes to again pivot you back once again, realigning those hands directly
beneath your shoulders. If you do this right, it not only feels better, but natural. This is the
body path that you should be following when you do your pushups and just this little subtle tweak
is enough to make sure you get it right. Mistake number nine actually relates all the
way back to point number one, which was range of motion, because speed is a problem. Speed is
actually the enemy of good form, and it can actually betray all intention is to create
full range of motion. See, in an effort to do more reps more quickly will either shortchange the rep
from the bottom or maybe even from the top. Or if you're an Oregon Duck Mascot, you kind of do
it from both ends. But the fact is you still want that full range of motion and using speed to get
there is always a problem. And I mentioned back in that first point that full range of motion
through the elbow means full extension of the elbow, and that's safe and healthy unless you add
speed to the equation. You see even a door that operates as a hinge, like your elbow is designed
to open all the way and close all the way. But when you try to slam that door either open
or close, you can be inviting some problems. Don't slam your joint into extension, you don't
need to and the best way to do that is to simply slow down the rep. The best Key I can give you
is two seconds on the way down and two seconds on the way up. This will not only ensure you get the
exercise right, but it allows you to do all the other things I talked about so far correctly.
And that brings me to mistake number ten, which is one that really gets under my skin,
probably the one that aggravates me the most when we're talking about how you program
the pushup. If you're doing 100 pushups a day or even ever tried them or if you're sticking
with the same pushup all the time, we got to talk. You have to watch this video over here, guys. Stop
doing 100 pushups a day. I guarantee you, you will find the right way to program the exercise.
If you're looking for a complete program, you can find them over at Athleanx.com.
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