PRESS UP
not dress up
When powering out a push up, you’d ideally ensure that
your spine is in a totally neutral and position and that the abs are tightly
engaged throughout the movement. You’ll also want to avoid letting your back
collapse as this would place undue stress on the lumbar region (which would
become hyper extended). This is where you’ll need a strong core, and that
musculature around your midsection will help to maintain a correct spine
position to carry out the rest of the motion correctly. It’s a high plank
position with added chest engagement, so as a basic foundation of the exercise,
your abs should absolutely feel the burn in tandem with your arms and chest!
2) SHOULDER THE BURDEN:
Repeated practice of the press up will develop the scapular and rotator-cuff
muscles, to help stabilise your shoulders. If you choose to pursue the bench
press instead of press ups, that’s ok but you aren’t forced to use those
muscles anywhere near as much, thus the compounding benefits of the exercise
are lost!
3) LEG UP:
Maintaining what is effectively an active, very
dynamic plank engages all sorts of unexpected muscles. A proper session of
press ups, executed on tiptoes and with straight and engaged legs, requires the
engagement and constant activation of the quads. It’s not one you feel
immediately but after a while, it’s one of the more prominent lactic burns that
suddenly takes over!
4) ARM FULL:
With the pivot point being your elbow joint, something’s got to get that body
back up to the starting ‘high plank’ position… Cue the upper arm, or more
specifically, the triceps brachii and the brachialis, which work
antagonistically like a little team to control your trunk’s horizontal pitch.
Both anterior and posterior deltoids do their fair share of the stabilisation
at either end of the motion, and even the forearm gets in on the action at the
nadir of the press up (this is especially the case in the narrow-grip variant).
Warning: slender arms are an unavoidable consequence.
5) THE TREASURE ‘CHEST':
This is the main attraction. Many women I know often think it’s not for them,
that it’s purely a ‘guy’ exercise: I couldn’t disagree more. We ALL need a
strongly conditioned chest to help lift or push anything heavier than a sack of
sweet potatoes. It’s also one of those ‘just in case’ muscle groups that you
might need to spring into action, with serious power, at a critical moment;
just letting the sternal and clavicular (the two constituents of your ‘pecs’)
shrivel up is simply no way to go. The humble press up can rehabilitate those
neglected little fellows, and develop a strong muscular ‘armor mesh’ across the
breadth of the chest, from hitting the outer-pec at the base of the motion, to
the inner pec at the top.
HOW TO EXECUTE THE CLASSIC
PRESS UP IN 4 STEPS:
1. Lie on the floor face down and place your hands about a shoulder-width apart
while pressing your torso up at arm’s length, on tiptoes.
2. Next, lower yourself downward until your chest almost touches the floor;
inhale as you descend.
3. Now, press your upper body back up to the starting position while squeezing
your chest, and exhale as you do so.
4. After a brief pause at the top-most contracted position, you can begin to
lower yourself downward again for as many repetitions as needed until you reach
utterly fatigued failure!
