Palm placement is a powerful push-up parameter

For basic push-ups, don’t lift your head to look forward: Keep your neck neutral and your hands beneath your shoulders. In the plank position, press down and up, bending and straightening your elbows.
For basic push-ups, don’t lift your head to look forward: Keep your neck neutral and your hands beneath your shoulders. In the plank position, press down and up, bending and straightening your elbows.

— Push-ups seem easy enough. Just place your hands out in front of you, make like a plank, down, up, rinse and repeat.

Unfortunately, for some people, it’s more like ... place your hands wherever they’ll support you best, wobble a few hundred times, arch your back, dive down and end up face-first on the gym floor breathing heavily.

Or worse still, end up with sore shoulders and aching chest muscles.

Why are push-ups so easy for some people when others can’t even manage one? The short answer is upper body strength, says Ana Girth, a trainer at the Washington Regional Center for Exercise in Fayetteville.

“Men are at a little bit of an advantage because they have more muscle mass than women and their muscles are a little bit thicker in the chest, arms and shoulders,” Girth explains. “But that doesn’t mean that all men can do push-ups and all women can’t. It really boils down to upper body strength.”

It’s easy to hurt yourself doing push-ups, Girth says, if you’re not using good form or if you’re trying to do an exercise that requires strength that you don’t have in your upper arms.

She recommends that beginners start by finding out whether they can do a basic push-up.

Basic push-ups work muscles in the arms, shoulders, chest, abdominals, legs and gluteals, according to Girth, but most people feel the burn mostly in their upper bodies.

Bending your knees so they rest on the floor instead of doing the push-ups on your toes decreases the workload, but hand placement determines which muscles will be working the hardest.

Keeping your hands under your shoulders and your elbows flared out to the side at no more than a 45-degree angle balances the work among muscle groups on the front of your body and your arms and upper back, and that lowers the likelihood you’ll develop a shoulder injury down the road.

Balancing the workload this way helps keep the shoulder joint stable, she says. It also ensures the triceps muscles - those on the backs of your upper arms - will develop strength.

Placing your hands farther apart, in turn, helps you work your chest muscles more.

Some beginners find push-ups easier to do with their arms winged out at their sides, but if they don’t have strength and tone in their triceps already, they’re overdeveloping the chest. That puts more stress on the shoulder, and not merely during the exercise. People who overdevelop their chest muscles increase the stress that ordinary motions of everyday living place on the shoulder’s rotator cuff.

JUST THE BASICS

The technique for a basic push-up is:

  1. Start with your knees on the floor and your hands in front of you.
  2. Lean forward on your hands. “Always keep your hands underneath your shoulders,” Girth says.
  3. Hold yourself in a plank position, keeping a straight line. “Your shoulders should be flat, your glutes tucked in,” Girth says. Keeping your abdominals braced is also important because it takes away some of the weight that could be transferred to your wrists as you press off against the floor.
  4. Keep your elbows as close to your sides as possible. “The more your elbows flare out, the more stress you’re going to put on your shoulders and elbows,” Girth says. “That’s what’s going to cause injury.”
  5. Lower yourself down slowly, then rise back up again. Be sure your neck is neutral and you’re not peering up or down. That will also help prevent neck or shoulder problems.
  6. Repeat. Girth starts her clients out on three sets of 10 to 12 push-ups, but she suggests you let your body decide what number is right.

“Do them until you can’t do any more,” she suggests.

NOT BEST PRACTICE

There are some definite pitfalls to avoid.

Sagging is bad because it throws more weight onto your wrists and can strain your lower back, too.

Your chest should come closer to the floor than your nose or chin do. Eric Cressey, a strength and conditioning expert in Massachusetts, whose video tutorials are available online at ericcressey.com, ex-plains that people who tend to get to the floor first with the head usually have poor upper back and neck posture. They substitute motion in the neck for good range of motion in the shoulders.

Placing your hands very wide apart could make doing the push-ups easier, but that’s also allowing weak muscles to stay weak, Girth says. “You’re going to be using the muscles in your shoulders and pecs” instead of the triceps muscles, she says. And not including the triceps in the effort can make a shoulder injury more likely.

But what if you can’t even manage a basic push-up?

BABY STEPS

If you don’t have the strength in your triceps to manage standard basic push-ups on your toes, try a wall, incline or modified push-up.

Wall push-ups could be renamed wall push-aways.

Simply take the form you’d use for a basic pushup and flip it 90 degrees: Stand on the balls of your feet a little bit away from a wall with your feet side by side and hands on the wall in front of and below your shoulders.

Assume the stiff-as-aboard position: Brace your abdomen and gluteals so your whole body is stiff. Bend your elbows and keep them tucked close to your body, then push away from the wall so your elbows straighten. Repeat.

“Wall push-ups take a lot of the body weight you’re using in a basic push-up off, so it’s not all on your arms,” Girth says. “You’re still going through the range of motions and are able to get those muscles working.”

Incline push-ups are another way to limit some of the weight your arms have to lift.

Use a gentle hill, a bed, a chair or any inclined surface as a place to set your hands so they’re higher than your feet. “You’re not using all your body weight, but it’s a little more difficult than a wall push-up,” Girth says.

Once you’ve mastered incline push-ups, it’s time to tackle the modified pushup. Yes, this is what’s often called the “girl push-up” - although Girth balks at the term.

“There is no such thing as the ‘girl push-up,’” she says.

Instead of balancing your weight on your toes with your legs and torso lined up in the plank, your knees should be bent and your ankles crossed.

This push-up will take a lot of the weight off, but if you place your hands wisely, you’ll still work those triceps almost as much as a standard push-up.

HAND PLACEMENT

Modifications don’t just make push-ups easier. Pushups can be modified to be harder, too.

“There are a million modifications,” Girth says. Some of the more common modifications include the decline push-up, T push-ups, staggered hands, medicine ball push-ups and the diamond push-up.

Decline push-ups are in some ways the opposite of incline push-ups. Instead of making it easier by having your hands off the ground, you make the push-up harder by having your feet off the ground on an exercise ball or chair.

The farther your hands are from the support of the ball or chair, the harder the push-up will be. For instance, if your knees are on the ball, the push-up will be easier than if your ankles are on the ball, according to Girth.

T push-ups are a variation on the side plank. And they’re so simple. Just do a basic push-up, then hold yourself on one arm and turn your chest to face the wall while raising the other hand so your body forms a T.

Staggered hands pushups feature one hand that’s under your shoulder as in a normal push-up and another that’s out to the side or slightly back. This helps strengthen your triceps on one side and your pectorals and shoulder muscles on the other. Be sure to switch back and forth, Girth says, so that you’re training the muscles on each side evenly.

Medicine ball push-ups are much like staggered hand push-ups, difficult because of the uneven burden placed on the right and left sides of the body.

Place one hand on a medicine ball, the other hand on the floor, and do a push-up. As you push away from the floor, roll the ball to your other hand, catch it by placing your hand on top of the ball, and do a push-up with the medicine ball under that hand. Then back it goes.

The diamond push-up is one of the more difficult to do.

Exercisers place both hands close together directly under their chest with thumbs and index fingers touching to make a diamond shape between them. They use that as the platform for the push-up, putting all their weight underneath them and toward the center of their chests. The exercise works the triceps muscles more than most other push-ups, Girth says.

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 01/28/2013

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