Train Like an Athlete by ATHLEAN-X (Video Podcast)

The pushup exercise is one of the most simple, common yet butchered chest exercises when it comes to form. The issue is that most of the time when people perform pushups they are not aware of what is happening with the rest of the their body, and therefore their form suffers. In this video, I’m going to show you how to do a perfect pushup every single you do them. In fact, I’m going to show you how to instantly correct how you do them and be able to tell the next time you do one improperly so you can prevent that.

There is nothing that screams amateur more than not being able to perform a perfect pushup rep. Again however, this is actually quite common to see someone not do a push up properly. It starts with the innate cheats that the exercise promotes. Let’s break it down.

We know that the goal of a push up is to lower our body to the floor and then push ourselves back up. As the chest and arms fatigue however, there is a tendency to try and take some of the stress out of them and shift it somewhere else. The first thing you see is a shortened range of motion by the arms during the descent. Instead of bending the elbows to 90 degrees, the amount of elbow bend is greatly minimized to reduce the impacts of the exercise on the mounting fatigue.

The pelvis and hips are still allowed to drop however. This creates the feel and illusion that the body is still being lowered when it is just the lower body that is. This also makes it easier on the arms since the knees may ultimately touch the floor which will offset the amount of load being borne by the arms during the movement.

Next, we see people do the opposite and instead of sagging the lower back and dropping the hips they actually raise them up to the sky. What this does is shift the focus of the work away from the chest and onto the shoulders. With the shoulders having to do more of the work, there is a temporary reprieve for the chest and arms and the pushup becomes possible to perform a few additional reps. In both cases however, these cheats are incorrect and are going to take away from the benefits of the exercise.

What you need to do is focus not on the arms but on the chest and the pelvis. If you can connect the two in your head and make sure that the pelvis never moves an inch without the chest moving with it (or vice versa) then you will ensure that you do every rep properly. You can actually reinforce that you are doing this right with your phone. Simply place the phone between your shoulder blades on your upper back and start doing your pushups.

If you lift your butt up too high you will find that the phone slides towards your neck and head. If you drop the hips and sag the lower back, you will find that the phone slides towards your butt. Again, either one of these is incorrect and will take away the results you should be seeing from your pushups in your chest workouts.

This is just one example of how doing an exercise incorrectly can impact the gains you see from your workouts. If you are looking to get every exercise right and see much faster muscle growth because of it, head to http://athleanx.com and get the ATHLEAN-X Training System. Start training like an athlete and realize the benefits that doing so can have on your physique.

For more videos on how to do a proper pushup and the hardest pushup variations for building a bigger chest, then be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at http://youtube.com/user/jdcav24 and make sure you turn on notifications so you never miss a video.