How To Improve The Push Up (And A Small Rant)

Hey there, Vic here and yesterday on the Facebook Page I went on a bit of a rant. . .

I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a stickler for technique.  And I’m sure that comes from my traditional martial arts back ground where my first instructor would pick apart my stances and blocks for being even an inch out of place.

But there are good reasons to strive for excellent technique in movement.  Maximizing work output, injury prevention, and flexibility improvement are all reasons to pay attention to factors that make up technique such as range of motion, skeletal alignment, and angles of force.

My particular pet peeve with the push up is range of motion.  Too often someone will claim a high repetition count for push ups while shorting the movement at the bottom (chest not touching the floor), the top (arms not straight), or both.  You can see what I’m talking about in the video below:

By contrast, check out the push ups in the next video.  You’ll see that his chest touches the floor and his arms are fully extended on every rep.

But is there a time and a place for movements with a shortened range of motion?  Yes, of course there is.  Power lifters will often intentionally reduce the range of motion in exercises such as rack pulls (shortening the range of motion of the deadlift) and by placing a block on the chest to reduce the range of motion of the bench press.  But this is done with a purpose in mind (working through a sticking point, getting the body accommodated to high-weight loads, etc.) and not due to haphazard technique.

Another reason to reduce the range of motion is because you are not yet strong enough to work through the full range of motion.  This is the situation that will be most applicable to the people who follow the 31 Day Fat Loss Cure, and I recorded a video on a simple way to increase the range of motion of the push up a while back:

Here are a few tips to help improve the push up:

• To train yourself to hit the bottom of the range of motion, pick your hands up off of the ground (yes, lay flat on your chest).
• To help keep your back straight, focus your gaze about 3 feet in front of you.
• Instead of pumping out your push ups as fast as you can, slow down and focus on the technique.  When you slow it down, the risk of hyper-extending your elbow at the top of the range of motion (the most common excuse people give me for not locking out the arms at the top) diminishes.

In my admittedly weird mind, there is beauty in a perfectly executed push up.  Strive for continual improvement of technique and work capacity, not for the sake of hitting some arbitrary number of repetitions, but for improving your fitness.

How is your push up technique?  What part of the movement do you have the most trouble with?  Let me know in the comments below.

Train Hard!

~ Vic

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Written by: vicmagary