You CAN Increase Your Pushups (JUST DO THIS!)

If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible, it’s true; you can increase your pushups. In this video, I’m going to show you how to increase the number of pushups you can do right now by offering a simple progression of pushup variations to increase the difficulty and intensity of the exercise.

And so if your dream has always been to be able to  do some really cool things with pushups like this, well, you’re on the wrong friggen video  because I can’t do any of that shit. But I do promise to help you find the right type  of pushup to help you build more muscle today.

What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. So look, unless you are in the military right now or your goal is to simply do more  pushups, I think we could all agree, pushups are more of a means to an end to something  bigger and in this case, a bigger chest. If you’re looking to build a bigger chest through pushups  I would ask you not to try to simply increase the number of pushups you’re doing, but to actually  increase the difficulty of the pushup that you’re doing. Think about it this way.

When an athlete  is trying to build more muscle in the gym, they have the option to simply add more weight  to the end of the bar in the form of progressive overload, which is a tried-and-true method for  doing that. But what is the calisthenics athlete do? Or what is somebody that’s just looking to  build their body through pushups? You have to find a more difficult version of the pushup. Something that mechanically challenges those same muscles in a more difficult way to provide  the progressive overload that you’re looking for.

In this video, I’m going to show you exactly  how to do that from beginner to advance, what level of pushups should you be  doing, and how do you progress yourself to make sure you’re building muscle? Let’s  start breaking them down one by one. So when you’re trying to build muscle with  pushups, you need to make sure that the volume that you’re accruing is effective volume. In  other words, the reps that you’re doing or doing something. And when we’re talking about just  doing a certain number of pushups or increasing the number of them, you’re not ensuring that.

And  there’s a big relationship between the overload that you create through choosing more difficult  version of the pushup or more challenging for you and the number of reps that you do. So what  we have to do is pick a rep range, and for me, I always say somewhere between 20 and 30. If  you can get to 30 of any variation of a pushup, it’s time to stop doing that pushup and instead  focus on something more challenging. So what would the beginners do? Well, let’s  say we start all the way at the bottom a knee pushup.

If you can do 30 knee pushups, it’s time  to move on. But if you can’t do them like this, you need to focus on doing them correctly. And  what we’re doing is keeping that straight back and keeping that butt down. Because far too  often people do this and it makes the exercise not even really that effective for the chest,  it turns out almost more to a shoulder exercise. But instead, if you keep that butt drop down  and you will lower your chest down in every rep and importantly, on all these pushups you’ll  see extend your elbows all the way out.

At that point when you can hit 30, it’s time to move on  to the next exercise, which would be this. And this would now be the classic pushup. So  we get those knees off the ground and again, lower yourself all the way down, touch your chest  to the ground and come up. And the key here, as always, is to get that full extension of  the elbows. I’ve made videos all about this in the past.

In fact, Pushups are Killing Your  Gains, and that is because people always cut off the last two inches here, which is the most  productive part of the exercise. If you can get through full extension and you can work your way  up to the point where you can do 30 of these, then it’s time to move on to the next variation. Well, now the next challenge will become the hand release pushup. And what’s interesting about this  is that slight little additional movement at the bottom is going to do a few things to make this  a lot more difficult and challenging. Number one, it’s going to slow the tempo down, and  any time you slow down tempo on a pushup, it becomes more difficult.

And the tendency is  to rush through our reps to get to that number again. But with the focus now on increasing the  difficulty level to drive that muscle growth, this is now an option for you. And here again,  what it does is also challenges some different muscles to the rotator cuff. The simple  act of lifting your hands off the ground is going to engage the rotator cuff, which is  a shoulder stabilizer muscle that’s important to the move. But more importantly, it’s  just increasing the range of motion of every single repetition that you do, ensuring  that you get your chest down to the ground.

But if even 30 repetitions of the hand release  pushup is below your ability level, well, it’s time to now start doing something different and  that is playing with the tempo of the exercise. I mentioned how slowing them down makes them  more difficult, well, if you do a pause pushup, you’re going to have a more challenging time  doing the exercise. But again, challenging equals more muscle growth. In this case, you simply go  down to the bottom and you pause for about three seconds on every rep. Again, it’s actually more  difficult to hold this pause in this very shallow, low depth position because your muscles are still  firing to hold you there.

But when 30 repetitions of these aren’t even able to make your arms quiver  anymore, well, we still stick with the same theme of tempo, but we move on to a more challenging  exercise and that’s the one and a half pushup. In other words, for every one pushup you’re doing,  you can do an extra half. You have to go down, have the body control to lift yourself up halfway,  go back down again to the hardest, most difficult range of the pushup and then push yourself back  out of it again. Again, we’re playing with the tempo, but more importantly, here we are, playing  with the overload and tension felt by the chest, and that is the main driver of the exercise s  ability to build more muscle growth for you. But if even those are now no longer providing a  challenge for you, what are you going to do now?

Well, again, we have another option for tempo,  and this time we take it to the extreme. These are slow motion pushups, and what we’re talking  about is five seconds down and five seconds up. And what makes this more challenging is the five  second eccentric or the lowering portion of the rep. And why that’s challenging is because that’s  actually an additional driver of muscle growth. Well, now you’ve got two things working at  once, you’ve increased the difficulty level and you’ve added that extra component.

But once  again, your goal here is 30 when you can do 30 of these, once again, it’s time to move on. And at that point, the best thing you can do is actually start to decrease the number of points  of contact that you have with the ground. The pushup is done with four points of contact on the  ground, two hands and two feet. But when we start to lift one of those off the ground, the exercise  becomes instantly more difficult because now the remaining limbs are in control of more and more  body weight. So what are we talking about?

Well, we have exercises like the prowler pushup, which  is going to again take one of those feet off the ground, shifting more of that load, especially as  we anteriorly shift our whole body weight forward. Then we have the spider man push pushup, which is  going to open up that hip, take it out to the side once again, creating more overload for the muscles  that are pushing the rest of your body weight up with one less limb helping out. And of course,  we can do the step three push