Posts Tagged ‘Endurance’
Push ups are one of the classic bodyweight exercises. Every bodyweight training program I know of uses push ups in one form or another. As a result, the ability to perform a proper push up, for high repetitions is a fitness milestone in bodyweight training.
But there is more to this classic bodyweight exercise than high repetitions and bragging rights. As a matter of fact, some people get so caught up in high repetitions that they forgo proper form, reducing the strength and endurance gains, and increasing the risk of injury. In this article I’ll reveal an alternative to high repetition push ups.
But first, what is a proper push up?
A proper push up is an incredibly demanding full body exercise, requiring both upper body strength and a strong, stable core for proper completion. This is important. It is not just an upper body exercise. It is a full body exercise.
Start by lying on the ground with you feet together and your hands on the ground by your shoulders. Your elbows are flexed and should remain close to your body throughout the entire movement. Don’t flair your elbows!
Perform a push up by pressing with your arms until your entire body leaves the ground. In the up position, only your hands and toes remain on the ground. The body has to remain stiff and straight throughout the entire lowering and raising. The only thing that should move during the movement is the arms.
This is very important. The body should be straight at the top, during and at the bottom of the movement. This is accomplished by using your core stabilizer muscles, **** and legs to make your body as ridged as possible.
As you can see, your whole body is involved in completing a proper push up, not just your upper body. Upper body strength and core strength must be coordinated to do a proper push up. If either your upper body or core is weaker than the other, errors will occur and performance will be lowered.
Ok, once you know how to perform push ups, most people try to go for high numbers. Yes, being able to do 100 push ups is a sign of great strength and endurance. But striving for high numbers is not the only way you improve!
You can also improve push ups by going from easy to difficult. Increasing the difficulty of the push up variation is an excellent way to build incredible strength. This method allows you to keep the repetition number relatively low, reducing the risk of overuse injuries. Plus, it reduces the possibility you will sacrifice quality for quantity, furthering your chance of injury!
Here is an example:
- Start with incline push ups
- The increase difficulty by doing the classic push up
- Increase the difficulty again by doing decline push ups
- And finally make it harder by doing handstand push ups
You could also throw in one armed push ups to increase difficulty. But the point is this, there are more ways to improve your strength and endurance with push ups than just increasing the number or repetitions you can do in one set.
Let this push up progression example serve as an example of other bodyweight exercise progressions. A lot of people say they get bored with bodyweight exercise because they only try to improve by doing more and more reps. Now you know, increasing repetition is not the only progression method in town. And in many cases, more strength and endurance improvements can be made by going from easy versions of an exercise to more difficult versions.
By: Eddie Lomax
About the Author:
But there is more to this classic bodyweight exercise than high repetitions and bragging rights. As a matter of fact, some people get so caught up in high repetitions that they forgo proper form, reducing the strength and endurance gains, and increasing the risk of injury. In this article I’ll reveal an alternative to high repetition push ups.
But first, what is a proper push up?
A proper push up is an incredibly demanding full body exercise, requiring both upper body strength and a strong, stable core for proper completion. This is important. It is not just an upper body exercise. It is a full body exercise.
Start by lying on the ground with you feet together and your hands on the ground by your shoulders. Your elbows are flexed and should remain close to your body throughout the entire movement. Don’t flair your elbows!
Perform a push up by pressing with your arms until your entire body leaves the ground. In the up position, only your hands and toes remain on the ground. The body has to remain stiff and straight throughout the entire lowering and raising. The only thing that should move during the movement is the arms.
This is very important. The body should be straight at the top, during and at the bottom of the movement. This is accomplished by using your core stabilizer muscles, **** and legs to make your body as ridged as possible.
As you can see, your whole body is involved in completing a proper push up, not just your upper body. Upper body strength and core strength must be coordinated to do a proper push up. If either your upper body or core is weaker than the other, errors will occur and performance will be lowered.
Ok, once you know how to perform push ups, most people try to go for high numbers. Yes, being able to do 100 push ups is a sign of great strength and endurance. But striving for high numbers is not the only way you improve!
You can also improve push ups by going from easy to difficult. Increasing the difficulty of the push up variation is an excellent way to build incredible strength. This method allows you to keep the repetition number relatively low, reducing the risk of overuse injuries. Plus, it reduces the possibility you will sacrifice quality for quantity, furthering your chance of injury!
Here is an example:
- Start with incline push ups
- The increase difficulty by doing the classic push up
- Increase the difficulty again by doing decline push ups
- And finally make it harder by doing handstand push ups
You could also throw in one armed push ups to increase difficulty. But the point is this, there are more ways to improve your strength and endurance with push ups than just increasing the number or repetitions you can do in one set.
Let this push up progression example serve as an example of other bodyweight exercise progressions. A lot of people say they get bored with bodyweight exercise because they only try to improve by doing more and more reps. Now you know, increasing repetition is not the only progression method in town. And in many cases, more strength and endurance improvements can be made by going from easy versions of an exercise to more difficult versions.
By: Eddie Lomax
About the Author:
Coach Eddie Lomax, author of Workout Without Weights uses 6 different progression strategies to get the most out of bodyweight training for combined fitness, fat loss and physique building.
Pull ups are hard, but they are one of the few true tests of strength. I say this because some powerlifters can bench 600 or squat 800, but they also weigh 300+ and can barely manage 5 pull ups. This is one of the few exercises where you can measure relative fitness by comparing the ratio of the number of pull ups completed to bodyweight.
Some of you might get mad at me, talking about powerlifters training for strength rather than endurance, but the fact of the matter is that when I was powerlifting I could still do 15 pull ups at 195 lbs.
Now, let me take you back to high school gym class; the year was 1993, I was 15 years old. Mr. Buatti the gym teacher, who happens to bare a striking resemblance to Coach Buzzcut, called my name to stand up in front of the class and do an many pull ups as I can. The football jocks each knocked out from 10 to 20 and the wiry tough kid with only 3 fingers on one hand completed 14 of them. I got 3. It was humiliating.
Now we come back to the present. Recently I started doing pull ups again after a year layoff. On my first set, I got 5 reps. A week later I was up to 8 reps. Just yesterday I did a set of 11 reps. But I want more. I have done 18 pull ups before; I have also done 5 pull ups with a 45 lb plate hanging off a belt. So, how can I get back to that place? How can YOU get to that place?
The Pyramid Pull Up Strategy
This is the description of a little program that I have used to increase my pull ups quickly in the past.
Here are the instructions:
1. Start by doing one pull up.
2. Rest for 10 seconds, but don’t hang there. Stand on something and take all the tension off your arms and back.
3. Do one pull up more than you did in the previous step.
4. Go back to step 2 and repeat until you can’t complete the required reps.
5. Take a break for 2 minutes and do it again. Complete 2-3 sets.
You might feel weak because normally you can do 10 or 12 pull ups in a set, and you finish this exercise with a set of 6. We need to look at an example to see why this is so effective.
Normally I could do 3 sets of 11, 9, and 7 reps for a total of 27 reps at bodyweight. Using the pyramid I ended up doing sets of 1,2,3,4,5,6 then 1,2,3,4,3 and 1,2,3,1 for a total of 41 reps at bodyweight in nearly the same amount of time. That’s nearly a 50% increase in the number of reps in just one day!
Which protocol do you think will force your body to adapt and grow stronger?
Try completing a pull up pyramid twice a week for 1 month then see what your new 1 set max is. Over the course of 4 weeks I have gone from 5 reps to 11 reps by doing the pyramid once a week and 1 regular set of pull ups every other morning.
By: Steve Hanson
About the Author:
Some of you might get mad at me, talking about powerlifters training for strength rather than endurance, but the fact of the matter is that when I was powerlifting I could still do 15 pull ups at 195 lbs.
Now, let me take you back to high school gym class; the year was 1993, I was 15 years old. Mr. Buatti the gym teacher, who happens to bare a striking resemblance to Coach Buzzcut, called my name to stand up in front of the class and do an many pull ups as I can. The football jocks each knocked out from 10 to 20 and the wiry tough kid with only 3 fingers on one hand completed 14 of them. I got 3. It was humiliating.
Now we come back to the present. Recently I started doing pull ups again after a year layoff. On my first set, I got 5 reps. A week later I was up to 8 reps. Just yesterday I did a set of 11 reps. But I want more. I have done 18 pull ups before; I have also done 5 pull ups with a 45 lb plate hanging off a belt. So, how can I get back to that place? How can YOU get to that place?
The Pyramid Pull Up Strategy
This is the description of a little program that I have used to increase my pull ups quickly in the past.
Here are the instructions:
1. Start by doing one pull up.
2. Rest for 10 seconds, but don’t hang there. Stand on something and take all the tension off your arms and back.
3. Do one pull up more than you did in the previous step.
4. Go back to step 2 and repeat until you can’t complete the required reps.
5. Take a break for 2 minutes and do it again. Complete 2-3 sets.
You might feel weak because normally you can do 10 or 12 pull ups in a set, and you finish this exercise with a set of 6. We need to look at an example to see why this is so effective.
Normally I could do 3 sets of 11, 9, and 7 reps for a total of 27 reps at bodyweight. Using the pyramid I ended up doing sets of 1,2,3,4,5,6 then 1,2,3,4,3 and 1,2,3,1 for a total of 41 reps at bodyweight in nearly the same amount of time. That’s nearly a 50% increase in the number of reps in just one day!
Which protocol do you think will force your body to adapt and grow stronger?
Try completing a pull up pyramid twice a week for 1 month then see what your new 1 set max is. Over the course of 4 weeks I have gone from 5 reps to 11 reps by doing the pyramid once a week and 1 regular set of pull ups every other morning.
By: Steve Hanson
About the Author:
Steve Hanson has 10 years experience in the fields of exercise science and sports nutrition. He writes articles on all forms of athletic training and nutritional theories. View the blog to learn more about your favorite exercise and nutrition topics.
