The Official Push-Up Checklist (AVOID MISTAKES!)

The Push-Up is one of the most commonly performed exercises in the gym, unfortunately it is also one of the most often misperformed exercises. In this video, I’m going to give you a step by step checklist to make sure that you are nailing every piece of the pushup correctly so that you get nothing

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to talk about the pushup. One of the most common exercises performed in the gym.

However, it’s also one of the most commonly mis-performed exercises. I feel that what happens with this exercise is we don’t pay it the same attention as we do, say, the bench-press. That’s ironic because we’re going to cover both exercises side by side, creating a checklist so you can see the commonalities between the two exercises, therefore hopefully better understanding the cues that you’re looking to integrate and make sure you follow them when you perform this exercise. So, you make sure you get the most out of it. Are you ready?

As I mentioned in the opening, if you’re looking at the two exercises, they are very much the same exercise. One is being done with a barbell and one is utilizing your own bodyweight as the resistance. If I were to lift my knees up onto a pair of dumbbells to try and equate the torso positioning here, you can see the mechanics of the ‘pushing’ portion of the exercise is the same. We want to make sure we’re doing the same thing across the board, utilizing the same mechanics and focusing the same attention to get the most out of it. We start at the top here and work our way down.

That is with the head and neck. Where do you want your head and neck to be? Well, we don’t want them to do this. If you were doing a bench-press you would never try to push your head back into the bench. Although, that is a common flaw.

As people try and generate more force away from their body, they do everything they can to produce force from the opposite direction. Often times, pushing with the back of their head. That not only creates neck strain most often, but it’s also taking away from the mechanics of the exercise and how to do it properly. What we want to do is make sure, if anything, we keep our chin down and tucked in, so we prevent that from happening. With the pushup it’s the same thing.

We’re not trying to bend our head all the way back or flex our head all the way down toward the ground, sometimes creating the illusion that our eyes and body are getting closer to the ground before it actually does. That’s why we do that. What we want to do is keep it in neutral and maintain that position from the very first rep, to the last. The next thing we want to do is look at the shoulders. The most important thing you can do here is un-shrug them.

What do I mean? If you look at a bench-press, one of the most common flaws people make is, in an effort to create that tightness or retraction that they hear we should have on the exercise, they pull up into this shrug. That’s not what we want. As a matter of fact, we want the exact opposite. We want the shoulders together, but we also want them down.

We can do that by consciously un-shrugging the shoulders here. The secondary effect of this is that it’s going to put the elbows in a better position as we perform the press. Why? Because as we shrug up the clavicle is going to change its angle, dragging the scapula along with it. As those two go together we know the relationship between it and the shoulder joint itself, you’re going to change the mechanics of the shoulder joint.

Mostly elevating it inside the socket, creating a higher elbow angle as you go down into the press. We’re going to cover that in depth as we get down here. But the most important thing you can do is start by initiating a conscious un-shrugging of the shoulder. It doesn’t just apply for the bench-press, obviously. It does the same thing here in the pushup.

Before you even descend into a single rep, consciously pull your shoulders down and back. We’ll get into the specifics of what you want to do with your scapula next, but the most important thing you could do here, before you do anything else, is un-shrug those shoulders. Moving onto the upper back, the most important thing you could do here is create stability and tightness through here. Why? Because it’s what provides the stable base from which you will press off.

Whether you’re doing a pushup or a bench-press. Let me explain. When people tell you to retract your shoulder blades what they’re trying to do is tell you to create tightness there. Why? Because the bar will start and end over this base, if you’re doing this exercise properly, and we’re going to talk about this more when we talk about bar path later on.

The fact is this: you have your most force and power when you can push off something stable. If I were to give you one opportunity to produce your highest vertical jump ever and I give you two chances to do it would you rather do it off sand, or off this hard floor here in the gym? Most likely, if you’re smart enough, you’d be choosing the hard floor in this gym because you know you could generate the most force into that floor to push off in the opposite direction. The same thing applies here in both the bench-press and the pushup. You want to make sure you consciously pull your shoulder blades together and make them tight.

Create as much tightness as you can right through that shoulder girdle. Realize that’s where you’re going to be pushing off and generating force in the opposite direction. If you get this right, guys, I promise you, not only will the pushup become easier, but the bench-press will as well. The next part is one that catches some people by surprise. That is activation of the glutes.

We know that your body’s ability to perform any exercise is infinitely made better if you can involve, not just the upper body, but the lower body as well, where some of the strongest muscles in your body reside. When you’re looking at a bench-press you actively want to contract your glutes. This provides additional strength and force in that opposite direction from the ground up. As I push the bar away, I can drive my feet down, creating these equal and opposite force here, to allow me to do that with more efficiency. We can do the same thing here when we do the pushup.

I want to make sure that I’m not lazily hanging out in the pushup position, but I’m actively contracting my glutes. The second I do this – we call this ‘plugging the energy leaks’. You create more total body tightness. You create more efficiency from the top down throughout the entire kinetic chain. So, when I do a single rep, I’m not losing it and having the force dissipate from what I’m generating, pushing into the floor throughout the weak spots of my body.

Tightening the glutes alone will give you an instant fix, and an instant plug of that common energy leak, allowing you to do this exercise better. An additional benefit to not only getting your upper back tightness and your glute activation in place is that you’ll also fix the positioning of your thoracic spine. Why? As we tighten from below and tighten from the top the thoracic spine will follow. We’ll get proper extension.

We’ll give ourselves a chance to allow the chest to get out in front, as opposed to letting the shoulders get out in front. This is an important distinction to make when we’re trying to press safely. We know if the shoulders tend to dominate the movement, not only will we have an underdeveloped chest from doing the exercises, but we’re also putting ourselves in a position of a likely impingement and damage in that joint over time. By fixing the upper back and by fixing the glutes we’re correcting the thoracic spine’s positioning as an additional benefit. Up to this point, all the items in our checklist were things you could change or modify before you even did a single repetition.

But at some point, we’ve got to get