STOP DOING PUSHUPS LIKE THIS | 10 Worst Mistakes!
The pushup is not only one of the most commonly performed exercises, but one of the ones that gets performed incorrectly most often as well. In this video, I am going to show you the 10 most common mistakes when comes to doing pushups and how to avoid them so that you perform them properly every sin
The first mistake is one that you would think would go without having to be pointed out. However, it’s actually one of the most common mistakes we make, and it’s not going full range of motion on the pushup. And the reason for this is oftentimes a lack of body awareness as to what full range actually feels like. I’ll make it easy for you. You want your chest to touch the ground all the way down to the ground on every single repetition.
And you want those elbows to reach full extension. Yes, lockout. Don’t worry I’ll talk to you about lockout and why it’s safe later on. But the point is all the way down until you touch the ground, all the way up to full lockout is required on every rep for it to be right. So now for mistake number two, let’s build off of number one and just getting down to the ground may not be enough because what goes down to the ground first matters.
You see, if you’re just dropping your hips down like this, well, we have a name for them. They’re called floor fuckers. The problem is you’re not really doing a full range of motion pushup. You’re certainly not working your chest through a full range of motion by doing this. Or the alternative is people just keep their hips way too high.
Neither one of these is actually going to give you the results that you’re looking for when you do pushups. So, what do you do? You try to find the target zone. And the target zone is really easy. It’s actually anywhere above the waistline all the way up to somewhere in the upper chest line.
This is the area you want to touch the ground first. If anything else touches, you’re not doing the exercise correctly. And one of the easiest ways that we can actually make sure we do this properly is to do something called the tuck and squeeze. No, Jesse, not that kind of tuck and squeeze, we’re talking about the pelvis going into a posterior pelvic tilt down and engage just like this. And once that happens, you lock in the rest of your body so you’re lifting up that area below the waist and you’re keeping that target zone squarely in line to make contact with the floor first and to do it properly.
But even with those two fixes in place, you’re still not out of the woods because mistake number three is one that your neck can actually do to betray you because your neck can actually break through that previous tip to still make you do it wrong and it’s by craning the neck or reaching for the floor. And we actually do this to make the exercise easier. Right? Our eyes want to get to the floor as fast as possible to make us feel like we’ve got to the bottom of the rep. However, all that’s doing is, again, shortchanging the range of motion on the rep, usually going hand in hand with that high hip position we talked about in the last point.
Instead, keep that neck in neutral and let the target zone be your guide and you’ll never mess this up again. And that brings us now to those nuances of the pushup, where the details matter and the difference between getting it right and wrong might be more of a surprise to you. And we’re talking about, first and foremost, the width of your hands on the floor because there is a right width for you and it may be different than what’s right for somebody else. The first thing you need to do is realize where the repercussions are of getting it wrong. If I have my hands too narrow, you can see that my elbow is no longer stacked over my wrist.
And to do the exercise effectively and safely, you want to make sure that these stays stacked all the time. With the proper width this is actually going to take place. That elbow is stacked nicely over the wrist and the joints are working properly. If I go to wide, once again you can see that this alignment gets messed up and we’re putting stress on the joints that doesn’t need to be there. Now I mentioned it being different for different people, that’s because arm lengths are different and body types are different, so it requires some sort of customization.
Here’s what you do to find what yours should be like. You lay flat on the floor like this with your arms up overhead and you simply slide your arms down into your elbows are about 45 to 60 degrees away from your side. At this point all you have to do is slide your hands underneath your shoulders and lift your body up. That’s going to be the proper placement for your hands, that’s going to put you in that stack position and in position to do the best pushups possible. Mistake number five is actually still what you do with your hands because how you turn them and place them on the ground matters too not just how far apart they are.
And if you turn them too far inward, you actually mess up the whole mechanics of the pushup. What happens when you turn them in is everything else comes along for the ride. We are one kinetic chain, remember, so as we turn the hands in, the elbows flare out too much. And as the elbows flare and elevate, we tend to get some additional stress in the shoulder in the form of impingement stress. This is not a good thing when you’re trying to do rep after rep after rep of a pushup.
So, what we want to do is fix that and it’s as simple as just rotating your hands out more than usual. You can either point your finger straight ahead at, say, 12:00 or turn them out even a little bit more to about 2:00, which is going to increase the external rotation that happens at the shoulder, providing you a little bit more stability in the joint and actually a little bit more freedom of motion up and down. Now, some of you might be misled by the fact that turning your hands in actually relieves another issue you might be having with the pushup and that’s wrist discomfort. Because as we turn those hands in, we actually have less extension required to get to the bottom of the pushup because you can see having to turn out does require quite a bit of extension through the wrist. While that might be a temporary solution it still doesn’t get around the fact that the shoulder starts to bear the brunt of that inward hand placement.
So instead, if you find yourself with sore wrist doing the pushup just simply either grab a pair of dumbbells to put your wrist in a neutral position or perform the push up from your fist, which will also keep that neutral wrist position. Either way, don’t make the mistake of looking for the shortcut and the more immediate solution that’s just going to lead to longer term problems down the road. So now with the hand positioning all figured out, we actually now have to move up the kinetic chain. And in this case, it goes right here into the shoulders. And if you’re making this mistake, you’re kind of screwing up the whole push up because from this point on, if you allow your shoulders to shrug, you’re ruining all the stability that you’re trying to create in the first place.
And we know that stability is necessary for a properly performed pushup. You have to keep those shoulders on, shrugged to not only create the stability in your torso, but to actually put the chest in the first line of defense. In other words, the chest is the muscle that will do all of the work as opposed to shifting the load to where we don’t want it on the shoulders. Now, to get this right, make sure that you’re doing this from the right position. Don’t try to unshrug from the bottom of the pushup because all you’ll likely do is pull your elbows far too close to your side.
Instead, get in the top position of the pushup and then pull your shoulders down from there and I promise you we’ll get it right every single t