Alright in today's video you're gonna learn three awesome progressions for
upper body strength three exercises for upper body strength so if you're a
softball player and you want to get stronger you want to hit the ball harder
throw a little faster these exercises are going to be
important for you
so if you're new to my channel I'm coach Dan Blewett I do lots of softball throwing
stuff strength and conditioning stuff mental training stuff and today's video
is another extension of that to help you long especially now that we're all kind
of stuck at home waiting out this coronavirus thing so the first video of
the three exercises that you're gonna see today that are made great for
softball players is the bar pushup aggression so the bar pushup
is just an elevated push-up you can do this in your kitchen on your kitchen
counter your hands on your couch on your bed there's a lot of places in your in
your house where you can just put your hands up and do a reduced resistance
push-up that then you can decrease over time which adds resistance as a push-up
and then build back up until you're eventually doing good push-ups on the
ground so let's see I'm gonna give you a full explanation of what this exercise
looks like okay so this is the bar pushup and this is just a really good
beginner way to get down to doing full push-ups on the floor so obviously if
we're gonna do push up off a wall be very easy because there's almost no
resistance of us pushing our body against gravity so with a bar pushup
we're about halfway so I'm gonna start with the bar in these safety cups on the
squat rack you could use a smith machine you can use any incline thing you could
use your kitchen counter if you wanted to but I'm gonna start here I'm gonna
make a mental note of what hole my cup is in so I can track my progress so from
here I'm just gonna find an even spot for my hands on the bar one thing you
definitely want to do is make sure you have a straight wrist here so you don't
wanna have your wrist sagging below the bar it's gonna put some pressure on your
wrists not gonna feel super comfortable and then from here I'm gonna get a
normal push-up position and I'm gonna lower the bottom of my chest to the bar
so you don't want your face your chin coming to the bar just like just below
your chest so from there it's gonna be a pretty normal push-up coming back so
basically you'll make a note of what Cup again your bar is at so try to stay with
the same piece of equipment so you can track your progress a little easier over
time and then alright after the first couple workouts
feeling a little stronger I'm gonna go down so I could move the cup down or on
for our purposes I'm just gonna put on this safety bar and now there's more
resistance because I'm closer to being parallel and on the ground so then this
process is just gonna repeat we're gonna go down hole by hole which is gonna
slowly add resistance until we can do good full push-ups on the ground for
probably five to six reps and then once we can do five or six reps on the ground
then we're gonna be pretty much just staying on the ground and getting
stronger adding reps until we can do three sets of ten and then we're pretty
much monny with push-ups okay so the bar push-up is a great tool again you could
do this anywhere you want it could be a squat rack could be a Smith Machine it
could be any incline service it could be your hands on a bench it could be
whatever is available to you but you just want to make sure you track your
progress you incrementally are progressing towards doing normal full
push-ups on the ground okay so if the bar push-up progression makes sense to
you definitely use that once you're getting close to the ground you're gonna
need good push-up form so let's go into a quick video of how you do good
push-ups from the ground okay so we're gonna go over how to do good push-ups so
really important exercise here so I'm gonna start with my hands at about
shoulder width I'm gonna turn my fingers just slightly outward so now out like a
duck but just slightly outward and I'm gonna put my feet about hip width or
shoulder width apart and I'm gonna kind of have a forward lean a little bit like
a bulldog so that more my weights distributed on the front of my body
because one of our goals when we do a push up is that our form is gonna stay
vertical the whole time as our elbow tracks back at about a 45 degree angle
so to get that if we're back here our elbows are gonna go like this which is a
really common error so we don't want this we don't want our elbows go on to
the side we want to have this sort of Bulldog stance where now as I go down my
form stay vertical and then I come back up so I'm lowering my whole body as a
unit my chest first
in my forms again we're gonna track back at about 45 degree angle and stay mostly
vertical the whole time okay and then my last exercise here if you have a barbell
in your house or some kind of bar you can probably rig this up just in the
corner of your either your little home gym or whatever it is and you can
definitely do this in school and a commercial gym anywhere else if and when
you get access to it so the landmine press is an awesome adjustable
resistance very safe sort of it's an upward incline press it's slightly
different than a push-up it's not a horizontal press but it's also really
really good for beginners and intermediate athletes especially
softball players this is the half kneeling landmine press we're gonna be
using an actual landmine equipment piece of equipment here you don't necessarily
need one of these you can actually just kind of wedge that the end of a bar into
a corner and it works the exact same way so we're gonna do is set up in a half
kneeling position I got one knee down one knee up I'm gonna have this bar just
about like a hands with in front of my knee I'm gonna get my core brace
I'm gonna start from this position right here so I got my hand above my shoulder
not below shoulders are level and from there I'm gonna drive my hand up I'm
gonna finish with a little bit of a scat punch I'm gonna pull right back down to
that same start position I'm gonna try to keep my elbow coming to a ground I
got thirty to forty five degree angle I don't want to get too tucked but I also
don't want my elbow way out to the side so I'm gonna start from here if you see
from the side I have about thirty to forty five degrees of clearance in the
shoulder again I'm not going real low with the hand I don't want my hand going
below the shoulder I'm gonna keep that shoulder kind of rolled back and then
getting a good scat punch when I get to the top right there so it's all one
smooth motion okay hopefully this video helps if you need help building workouts
for softball if you need to learn more exercises for your softball strength and
softball with specific training then stick around subscribe to my channel
share with a friend but I appreciate you
watching and I'll see you here in the next video