These Pushups Will Change Your ENTIRE Body (GUARANTEED!)

Standard pushups can build your upper body but they can’t change your entire body like the ones I’m going to show you in this video. As a physical therapist and strength coach, I know there’s more to building a resilient body that lasts over time than just building muscle. Here, I’m going to show yo

We all know the push-up is a very effective exercise for building up your upper body. But what if I told you that as a physical therapist, there are variations of the push-up that I know you’re not doing right now that could have farreaching benefits beyond just building up your upper body strength. Meaning more flexibility and more mobility. I’m going to show you those variations today. Make sure you do them right and get you started on them so you can start to see the benefits.

So, the first thing we can do is make sure that you’re doing the regular push-up right cuz there’s bigger benefits if you do one simple change. And that is instead of just going halfway down or even 3/4 of the way down and guessing how far down you should go, go all the way down to the ground like this and perform a simple lift of the hands that we call a hand release. And what that will do is take away the momentum that you might be using to your advantage at this point, but more importantly give you a chance to engage muscles that never get engaged, and that’s the rotator cuff along the back of your shoulders. The push-up itself is actually going to internally rotate your shoulders if that’s all you ever do. But if you engage those rotator cuff muscles with the simple hand release at the bottom, then you actually can start to balance out the musculature of the shoulder to make sure that you’re not developing bad posture in an attempt to actually work on your push-ups.

The next one we’re doing is actually going to extend beyond just the rotator cuff to work your entire back. And again, most importantly, your low back and that area of your spine that we never work, it’s the thoracic spine. Really important for good mobility and posture. All you have to do is extend the exercise a little bit further. So you get in position once again.

You come down to the ground. And here you perform your hand release. But from there you shoot your hands out in front of you and then lift up. Okay. As high as you can go with your arms and lift your legs and quads off the ground.

It’s going to strengthen your low back, your midback, and your upper back. Come down to the ground. Slide your hands back under your shoulders. Press up like you normally would on the push-up. So down.

Lift the hands up. build off of that benefit of the first exercise. Out in front of you, come back down. Lower. Again, this hand release version in the superman position builds off of the first exercise and gives you another option for getting more benefits than just the upper body work.

One of the earliest signs of a degenerated hip is a loss of hip flexion or the ability to get into this sort of deep squat position. We can actually build that right into a push-up with something actually popularized by the boxer Mike Tyson called the Mike Tyson push-up. And all you do here is you get into this position where you’re as deep into a squat as you can possibly be. Whatever your hip joints will allow you to be. And then what you do is you shoot your body out, straighten your legs out, and come down.

Now, there’s no hand release portion here, but just into this bottom position of the push-up. From here, you’re going to push yourself back into this hip flex position. And what you’re getting at the same time, if you focus on the arms, is a flexed shoulder right in this position here with extension through that thoracic spine again, which is that really important area for mobility. So, you get shoulder stability, shoulder mobility, and flexibility at the same time that you’re working into those deep joints of the of the hip. Get into that flexion of the hip and the bottom position.

So, down deep into this position here. Come in and down. Sit back as far as you can. Deep into the hips and come down. Now, you don’t want to rock too much.

If you rock forward too much, you’re going to start to feel this exercise become a lot more difficult because the front delts will take on a lot more of the work as the arm starts to travel behind your body. Instead, try to keep it about the level of your face as you get down just past your face here. Clear your hands and come down. not way out here like that because you’ll make the exercise too difficult unnecessarily. Remember, it’s the hip flexion portion of this that really should be your focus.

Not all push-ups have to be done face down. As a matter of fact, if you’re willing to change up the position, you can start to tap into some muscles that are sorely in need of more attention. And how to do that is with an exercise I call the back widow. So, for this, we’re going to do our push-up this way, facing up. And all you want to do is bend your knees and get your elbows just about 45 degrees away from horizontal.

All right? So, tuck it right down to about here. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to push up with your elbows to try to engage all the muscles of your mid and upper back. Okay? A little bit into the low back, too.

And at the top here, you’re essentially doing a supported crunch. So, you’re going to certainly engage your core, too. But with your elbows in this position, I want you to feel as if you’re almost going to rock your hands forward like that to help engage those muscles and lift and squeeze your body off the ground. Now, this is one I don’t want you to to speed through. I don’t want you to be doing your reps like this.

I want you to purposely slowly engage the muscles on the back side right along the spine and into the scapula. And I want you to hold them there for about 3 seconds. and then lower slowly. Up, engage, come down and lower slowly. And again, the longer you’re up in this position, the more you have to engage your core to sort of hold you there isomemmetrically.

Now, if you want to see what that looks like straight ahead, you’ll look at those muscles start to light up. When I get here, press up and squeeze. You can see how much work they’re doing. Come down. It’s nice and slow.

Up and squeeze. Again, sometimes what people will do here in error is they’ll push too much with their feet trying to get themselves up and they turn this into a bridge where you’re basically fighting against yourself. You’re trying to come up, but you’re bridging up at the same time. You’re not able to get the range of motion. If you can quiet this down and not really push through the feet, but think about pushing through the elbows, you let your hands rock a little bit, you’re going to drive the movement through the upper back muscles, which is exactly where you want to feel it.

and again get more of that thoracic extension that we’re also sorely lacking. Now, this next one might be a little bit more on the difficult side. However, I will tell you this, the benefits will match that difficulty level. In other words, if you put in the effort to build up to these, you’re going to start to see a lot of benefits in terms of building up your entire upper body because it hits your triceps, your shoulders, and your chest equally well in addition to actually helping to contribute more to that thoracic extension and shoulder mobility that we’re lacking that we’ve already been working on. So, this is called the dive bomber push-up.

What you do is you start in this downward dog position, which is going to require good hamstring flexibility, calf flexibility in order to keep your knees straight and get into this initial starting position. And what I want you to do is swoop yourself down to the ground and then pretend that there’s a fence right here. Okay? Just about this high. And your goal is to get your head under the