Help for those who want to do push-ups

If you want to incorporate push-up in your workouts, you have chosen an excellent exercise not only for you chest, shoulders and triceps, but for your whole core since it is done in a plank position. Having said that, I know I have read many people here who say they cannot do them, so they do them on their knees. While that works, it removes some of the value for the core, and completely removes any to the legs. I know when you do them that way you are hoping to work your way up to doing a full push-up, but did you know there is another way to do this without doing it from your knees.

The answer is leverage. When you do a push-up on your knees you are changing the leverage to make it easier, but that is not the only way to do so. The other way to do this is to raise where you place your hands higher. Put them on the edge of a bench, or something even higher if that is still too difficult. That will allow you to do a full push-up and gain the benefits of that exercise. Since you will be able to do more repetitions you can increase your strength. It also allows you to increase and decrease the difficulty. So if you can do one of two push-ups on the floor before your muscles can't do another, you can them move up to a bench and do several more, or something even higher and do a few more. Then rest a while 60-90 seconds, and repeat. You will find your ability to do push-ups will be greatly improved.

As an aside, a good way to work on form is to do what are called ladders. Do one push-up, then rest the amount of time it took to do that one push-up. Then do two, and rest as long as it took to do two. Then do three, and rest as long as it took to do three. Repeat the pattern increasing the number you do, but don't do so many you come to failure. Instead when you have done as many in a row as you think you can without failing, work your way back down using the same pattern in reverse. When you get back to one, rest a minute or two, then repeat. Sometimes the ladder will just be doing on rep over and over again. Remember the point is not to get to the point where you cannot complete the whole move, if you add another one and do fail to repeat all of them, you have gone too far. Start going down the ladder.

I hope this helps.

I have to give credit to whom credit is due, this is a summary of one of the things Mark Lauren teaches in his book, "You Are your Own Gym" This book is well worth reading.