- What's up, Elite ThenX athletes?
It's Chris Heria.
Welcome to another video of Official ThenX.
Today I'm gonna be showing you
how to do more pushups.
But more importantly, how to do it right.
Let's get started.
(upbeat electronic music)
Alright, so let's get started.
The pushup is the introduction exercise
as well as the fundamental to all
upper body pushing exercises.
The pushup is a basic movement
that all beginners need to have mastered,
as it will translate to all other pushing exercises
for the rest of your fitness journey.
And that's why it's so important to master
the pushup from the very beginning.
Learning how to engage the right muscles
and the proper pushing motion,
and once you've mastered that,
all other pushing exercises
will be a lot more effective,
because they all stem from this motion,
because you're doing it the right way.
It's gonna demand more from your muscles,
and give you a great muscle contraction.
Which is gonna give you better results,
and make you a lot stronger, a lot faster.
For example, five perfect pushups
are a lot more demanding than 10 sloppy pushups.
The 10 pushups are gonna be a lot easier
because you're engaging less of your muscles,
which gives less of a resistance
and less of an overload on to your muscle fibers.
And when you're doing it sloppy,
you're also assisting with other muscles
to complete that motion.
Versus doing it with perfect form,
where you're adding more of a resistance
and overload onto the main muscles
that are supposed to be engaged
when doing a pushing motion, chest and triceps.
Making the exercise a lot harder,
but a lot more effective.
Remember, it's not how many reps you do,
but the quality within your reps.
There's no magic number that's gonna take you
to a fitness level or status.
Your body doesn't know once you've done 10 or 100 pushups.
All it knows is how well it engages
while doing this motion.
For example, just doing one pushup
for a duration of a whole minute
is gonna be a lot harder than doing 20 pushups.
Alright, so let me show you guys
what a pushup should look like.
(steady electronic music)
Alright, so there we have the pushup.
There's many different variations,
but that's gonna be your standard pushup.
Remember when doing pushups,
you're mainly trying to engage your chest and triceps.
So it's really important to make
a mind-muscle connection
to really try to focus on engaging
those particular muscles.
But while doing a pushup,
there are other muscles
that will be supporting this movement,
like your core and your shoulders.
But remember, these other muscles
only support this movement,
and the main motion is done
with your chest and your triceps.
And you want to keep that in mind
with every single rep to not break that engagement.
Remember, when you stop engaging
and stop using perfect form,
that's when you're gonna start using
other muscles to help with this movement.
Especially when you're trying to complete more reps,
and that's why it's important to stay
in perfect form as long as possible,
to be engaging the proper muscles.
The main goal is you want to be using
and emphasizing as much on your chest
and triceps as possible.
And the way you're gonna do that
is with your body alignment. (whooshing)
If your body is in perfect alignment,
the motion is gonna be more effective
on your chest and your triceps.
So to be in perfect alignment,
you want to make sure that you're in a straight line
from your heels, all the way up to your chin.
Creating a full body contraction,
starting from your calves to your quads,
glutes, core, chest, shoulders,
down to your triceps and your arms,
down to your forearms,
down to your grip on the floor.
If you're in this perfect body alignment
and you're squeezing your glutes
and engaging your core,
then your hips shouldn't be too high or too low.
They should be right directly in the middle.
If your hips are too high,
you're gonna be emphasizing
more of the pushing motion onto your shoulders.
And if your hips are too low,
you're reducing your range of motion
when completing a pushing exercise.
And with perfect body alignment,
you need the proper hand placement.
It's the first point of contact to the floor.
So you want to make sure
that you have a solid grip on the ground.
Now there's a lot of different pushup variations,
and your hand placement is actually
what determines what muscles you're emphasizing more on
while doing the pushing motion.
For example, the closer your hands are together
while you're pushing,
the more you're working your inner chest,
and the wider apart they are,
the more you're working your outer chest and spread.
And if your hands are supinated while pushing,
then you're working more of your long head tricep.
If your hands are pronated while pushing,
then you're working more of your triceps brachii and medial.
And this is why you want to be doing
different pushup variations
with different hand placements.
To be hitting all the muscles within your chest
and your triceps.
But for the standard pushup,
you want to have your hands shoulder width apart,
and your thumbs right under your chest.
Having your elbows out in the shape of an airplane,
not straight out, and not tucked too tight in,
but relaxed to your side, slightly at an angle.
You should feel comfortable going up and down
with this hand placement and position.
When your hands are placed right under your chest,
that's gonna allow you to push
with the correct alignment.
Ending with your arms straight
perfectly aligned at the top of your pushup
with your palm lining up to your chest,
and your fingertips lining up right to you shoulders.
If your hands are a little too high
or a little too low when you get to the top,
your hand placement could be a little bit off.
And for your pushup to be really effective,
you need to be doing them (whooshing)
with full range of motion.
When you're not using full range of motion,
you're restricting the amount of muscle engagement
that you can be using.
The only thing that you're strengthening
is a small portion of that motion.
For example, if you've ever seen half rep pushups,
you'll see that you're only engaging
a small portion of your chest,
and a small portion of your triceps.
You'll be able to do a lot more reps,
but you're actually limiting
the amount of strength you'll be able to utilize
in the full range of motion.
For example, you definitely won't be able
to do the same amount of reps
if you're doing them all the way up,
and all the way down.
Your muscles haven't been trained and strengthened
to reach full extension.
So you'll be very strong here,
but very weak when it comes to extending
the top portion of your repetitions.
And of course you want to have
the same consistency and strength
when it comes to your entire rep range.
This is only gonna benefit you
when you move on to harder,
more demanding pushing exercises.
And what makes your full range of motion strength
even more effective (whooshing)
is your scapula activation.
Being able to protract and retract your scapulas
with every rep plays a big role
in all upper body exercises.
So once you're in pushup position,
and your body is engaged,
the first thing you want to activate are your shoulders.
Starting off with your shoulders protracted
before you begin to come down.
That's gonna give you the maximum
full range of motion.
Once you're ready to start descending,
you're first gonna start retracting your scapulas.
That's gonna put more of an emphasis on your chest
and triceps to engage more muscles
as you go through the pushing motion.
You want to keep as much as that engagement as possible,
and contract your chest as you start to come down.
And keep in mind, as you're coming down,
your elbows should not be too far back
or too far forward.
Your forearms should actually be
in a straight vertical line.
And your chest should reach all the way to the ground.
At least that's the goal.
And once you finally reach the bottom,
you really want to engage in your grip
and your hands as well.
That's gonna give you the foundation
in your contraction and your technique
to be able to push right back up.
And remember when you get to the top again,
you want to push all the way through your body,
protracting your scapulas,
and engaging your chest all the way.
And that's how to do pushups with proper form
to make them the most effective
and start seeing results from doing pushups.
And one more tip to make sure
that you're doing it as effective as possible,
and something that I don't see
a lot of people doing (whooshing)
is to make sure that you're working
the eccentric motion just as hard
as you're working the concentric motion of the pushup.
When you're descending and you're engaging
in the eccentric portion of the pushup,
you're creating an overload and resistance,
and firing up your muscle fibers
just like you would do when you're doing
the concentric portion of this movement, pushing up.
So just imagine, if you're not engaging
when you're coming down,
and you're only engaging to push up,
then you're leaving half of the rep,
making it twice as long to build strength
and see progress.
So if you want the fastest, best results,
you need to be working the negative portion
of the exercise just as much as the concentric.
When you're coming down,
try to give as much resistance as possible,
and go as slow as possible.
And when you're coming up,
try to push and be as explosive as possible
to give it even more resistance.
Once you get stronger in the concentric
and eccentric part of the motion,
you're gonna do a lot more reps,
and the pushing motion in general
is gonna be a lot more effortless.
You're gonna get better at this motion
as an actual skill,
versus just using it to train your chest and triceps.
And that will translate into all other pushing exercises.
So once you've mastered your pushup,
increasing your repetitions is actually very simple.
The way you increase your repetitions
is by training your pushup in a drop set style
structured routine.
You want to start with the hardest progression
of a pushup that you can do with perfect form,
and max that out.
Whether that's one pushup, 10 pushups,
or 10 weighted pushups.
You want to completely max out
your hardest pushup capability.
And once you've done that,
you immediately go into the next hardest progression.
So if you're just starting off on pushups,
you would max out your pushups,
then going to the next hardest regression,
which would be explosive knee pushups,
maxing those out, moving down to knee pushups,
maxing those out.
And then finally finishing off with incline pushups.
And the way that this works is that
you continue the time under tension,
and you continue to work past
your normal point of fatigue
by reducing the overload
and continuing to work your muscles
when you would otherwise just normally
have stopped once you've fatigued
and couldn't do any normal pushups.
Training like this is gonna push you a lot further,
and it's gonna increase your repetitions like crazy.
I apply this specifically to all exercises
that I'm trying to increase my repetitions on.
Whether it be one arm pull-ups, muscle up, plants,
this is the main technique that I use
to increase my repetitions when I find a move
is very difficult.
And what I also supplement with this method
is using the different hand placements and grips.
Because like I mentioned before,
the different hand placements and grips
emphasizes more on a particular part
of the muscle you're trying to engage.
So the more well rounded a particular muscle is,
the better it's gonna perform,
the stronger it's gonna be.
Which will definitely increase your reps.
Another method that I like to incorporate
is to do the specific exercise
that you're trying to get better at
every minute on the minute
for a specific amount of time.
And of course you can play with that time,
depending on how difficult it is.
You could do it every 30 seconds,
or maybe every two minutes,
depending on how demanding this exercise
is gonna be on your body.
For example, if you can only do one perfect pushup,
then just do one pushup, wait 30 seconds,
and do another one, every 30 seconds,
for a whole hour straight.
Eventually, that one perfect pushup
is gonna turn into two consecutive perfect pushups.
Then you're gonna do two perfect pushups
every 30 seconds for an hour straight.
And you get the idea, eventually that grows,
and that's how you basically
increase your repetitions,
not just for pushups, but for all other exercises.
And that's actually gonna wrap up
how to do more pushups,
and how to do 'em right.
So thank you guys so much for watching.
I actually put together a proper structured
workout routine that you can do anywhere
multiple times a week,
that's gonna increase your pushups like crazy.
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Mad love, peace out.
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(whooshing)
(upbeat electronic music)