The Neglected exercise

The story of push-ups is a sad one. In this age of science and technology, the simple push-up is an often neglected form of exercise in spite of its simplicity and effectiveness. It is hard to imagine how an exercise that develops so many muscles can be ignored by so many people. The potential variations make them perfect for beginners as well as fitness veterans.

When most people begin lifting weights they abandon the push up for more hardcore exercises such as the Bench Press once they can start doing more than 15 repetitions. What most people don’t realize is that there are ways to progress the push up to bring it back into a range more suitable for increasing strength and hypertrophy.

Another benefit of performing push up’s is that you recruit more muscle groups than when performing a bench press. You also help to balance out the rotator cuff musculature that can get serious imbalances if you rely too heavily on bench press.

Some of the ways we can advance the push up are as follows.

• We can change the elevation of either the arms or the legs.
• We can add external resistance, we can drape chains across the back, use elastic bands, put a plate on the back, the possibilities are only limited by your creativity.
• We can also add an element of instability into the mix to really fry those stabilizers.
• We can also incorporate a row into the movement to further destabilize the core and work the back muscles.
• Finally we add an explosive element in by performing plyometric pushups.