Everything Wrong With Push-Ups!

Nearly everyone has done some form of push-ups in his life, but in general most people are still terrible at doing this exercise with proper form. It starts with the basic push-up and continues in all other variations. If you finally want to make some gains and stay healthy, you have to identify your weaknesses. Most mistakes can easily be avoided if you follow some simple tips and improve your body awareness, no matter if you are a beginner or already pretty advanced. The first mistake is half-wrapping. This is a pretty basic tip, but most people still do it wrong. Doing push-ups like that is just a waste of your potential, even if you stop only a few inches before you reach the ground. The deeper you go, the more you increase the work for your chest. Going deep with full control also challenges the muscles around your shoulders and shoulder plates to stabilize your joints and build more control in these positions. If you aren't able to go all the way down, just swallow your pride and do incline or knee push-ups with full range of motion. In this way you can target your chest optimally and build the necessary strength to do the push-ups on the ground later. We even suggest to do push-ups on your fists, push-up handles or any kind of object which lets you go a little bit deeper than doing it on your wrists. Of course you should master the proper push-up on the ground first and build the necessary shoulder stability and control. This mistake gets even worse if you do decline push-ups. If you aim for proper body tension during this variation, your head will touch the ground first before you are able to reach the full range of motion in your shoulder joints. Most people try to compensate this by overextending the spine. This brings your upper body back to a horizontal position like in a regular push-up and decreases the higher difficulty from the decline angle. In addition it might also harm your spine because you passively hang in your structures instead of stabilizing the position. This is the reason why we recommend to do this exercise on push-up handles or parallettes. This allows you to use the full range of motion and maintain the correct joint alignment at the same time. The second mistake are very wide push-ups. Most people think that wide push-ups are much better to train the chest. But the truth is that narrow push-ups showed a higher EMG activation during a study from 2005. A very wide push-up position is simply not optimal, because it limits the range of motion in your shoulder and with that also the range of motion for your chest. As already explained in the first mistake, you get a better chest activation if you can go deeper and the narrow grip is perfect for that. In addition it's also much better for shoulder health to do push-ups with elbows closer to your body. A very wide grip usually leads to more outflared elbows and internal rotated shoulders. This is one of the worst joint positions in a push-up and is not recommended. There is no true benefit of doing really wide push-ups. But if you still want to do them, you should rotate your hands into an outward pointing position. This puts much lower stress on your wrists and you get a better shoulder position due to the external rotation. Please keep in mind that a narrow grip doesn't mean to do diamond push-ups. In a diamond push-up you mainly want to target your triceps. That is the reason why you push more from your elbows and don't aim for the same range of motion in your shoulders. The third mistake are explosive push-ups with nearly no joint stability. Explosive push-ups look kind of badass and that is why lots of people like to do them. The biggest issue for this movement is the lack of control, muscle tension, joint stabilization and joint alignment. When you push yourself up in the air and can't stabilize your joints on the way down, you don't do your body any kind of favor. These variations can damage your elbows, your shoulders and your lower spine. Of course explosive push-ups are not wrong in general. But if your goal is explosive strength, we suggest the hand release push-up. Here you can adapt the difficulty easily to your level while keeping control over the movement. The stronger you become, the further you can release your hands from the ground. In general we suggest a minimum of 15 clean standard push-ups before you start with the explosive push-up variations. The fourth mistake is arching your back way too much while doing pseudo planche push-ups. The pseudo planche push-up or planche lean push-up is a shoulder focused exercise. The more you lean forward and the more your shoulders travel in front of your wrists, the harder this movement gets. Now this exercise is no piece of cake. Actually it's a very advanced push-up variation. If you lack in shoulder strength and body awareness, you will arch your back to be able to do it. The more you arch your back, the more you decrease the angle between arm and torso and with that make it less effective for your shoulders. In addition you also do your lower back no favor if you just hang passively in your structures instead of stabilizing the muscles around your spine. If you are not able to get a proper lean without arching your back, you should be doing it on your knees. It's way more important to get a decent lean, the right angle and lower back stabilization than to do it on your feet. The fifth mistake has to do with bike push-ups and nearly everybody does it when performing this exercise for the first time. The pike push-up is another shoulder focused exercise and not a beginner variation. The most common mistake of this variation is not keeping the same angle when you push yourself up and down. Most people have no problem to let themselves down with the correct body alignment but when they push themselves up, they move their body out of the correct angle. The pike push-up is more like an overhead press and not like a bench press so you have to maintain the overhead push position to do it right. If you can't push yourself up in this angle, you simply lack in shoulder strength and try to compensate it by changing the angle. Here we suggest to work with negative pike push-ups and switch to the normal version when you are able to do the concentric part as well. It's also possible to change the angle of this exercise a little bit. The more vertical you push, the harder this exercise gets. The more horizontally you push, the easier it gets. But always keep in mind that this exercise is still a vertical push movement so don't go below a 45 degree angle of your upper body. The next mistake has to do with handstand push-ups. The handstand push-up is a harder version of the pike push-ups shown before. The two most common mistakes in this variation are usually done at the same time. First, arching your back and second, flaring out your elbows. With this execution you put unnecessary load on your lower back, shoulders and elbows. If you're doing the handstand push-up with your back facing the wall, you're easily making the two mentioned mistakes because otherwise you can't get the right center of gravity. A much better and safer way is to do the handstand push-up with the belly facing the wall. This movement is much harder but eliminates all the downsides mentioned before. This execution allows you to do the exercise with a straight back, a much safer shoulder position and also with a higher range of motion. The key point for this exercise is to move your body out of its nearly vertical line and with that move your shoulders in front of your wrists. This movement allows a straight position in your spine and creates a much better movement path for your shoulders. Now we move on to the seventh mistake which has to do with archer or side-to-side push-ups. The goal of this exercise is to switch the focus more to one side instead of pushing yourself up with both arms equally. In this way you can make the standard push-up way harder and also work against imbalances. The more you extend the supporting arm the harder this movement gets. The most common mistake when it comes to this exercise is shifting your weight back to the middle position before or while pushing up. This usually happens because you are not strong enough to push yourself up on the focused side. To compensate the lack of strength you move your weight back to the middle position so that the other side can produce more force and helps you to get up. Doing your archer or side-to-side push-ups like that is not harmful to your body but it kind of kills the purpose and the benefits of this variation. So instead of shifting your weight back to the middle position choose a more narrow hand placement or do incline side-to-side or archer push-ups. The eighth mistake is an uneven and uncontrolled movement while doing sphinx push-ups. The sphinx push-up is a very triceps dominant push-up variation because you only bend and extend your elbows. Now if you lack in strength in this area it's very common to rotate your body to one side. With that you can lift one elbow off the ground first instead of doing it with both elbows at the same time. Another typical compensation is to flare out your elbows while pushing yourself up. Both mistakes make this exercise less effective but you can and should avoid them by walking backwards with your feet until you reach a point at which you can push yourself up correctly. Another option to make it easier are incline sphinx push-ups. This variation also gives you the option to increase the range of motion which is normally limited by the ground. But keep in mind that this also makes the exercise harder again. The ninth mistake is rotating and shifting your weight while doing one-arm push-ups. Everybody knows that the one-arm push-up is not a joke. It requires solid strength to be able to push yourself up with the strength of only one arm. So it can easily happen that you rotate your body or shift your weight to one side to make this exercise easier. Both mistakes decrease the stabilization aspect for your whole body and also the range of motion in your shoulder. Of course it's much harder to go up and down evenly without twisting and rotating your body but it's also way more effective. If you aren't able to do the one-arm push-up with the correct execution you can either work with archer push-ups or do incline one-arm push-ups. The tenth and last mistake is not about one specific push-up variation but about the training with push-ups itself. We often notice that people follow routines with fixed numbers of reps without any kind of progressions or variations for their level. It makes no sense to do a routine with 10 push-ups for 5 sets if you are able to do way more than 20. It also makes no sense if you are not able to do 10 proper push-ups and do all the mistakes shown before only to reach this random number of reps. A good routine can work with fixed numbers but there must be a way to adapt the exercise to your level. If you want to get deeper into this topic you should watch our other push-up videos in which we show you different routines that challenge you individually and with that you can make the most of your potential. You can find the link for the videos in the description. If you are looking for a complete step-by-step workout guide that follows the same approach but for your complete body you should check our workout programs on calimove.com. No matter if you want to get stronger, improve your mobility learn calisthenics skills or build more muscle we got the right program for you. Most of the programs only require a pull-up and parallel bars but we also offer a home workout program that you can do without any kind of equipment. If you have any further questions just leave a comment. I'm Alex and I'll see you in the next video.