Ahh, the push-up. An exercise that is sorely under-appreciated and misunderstood.
What is the push-up? A bodyweight exercise known to dominate military bootcamps and a way for coaches to layer "punishment" onto their teams? Hardly.
One of the first articles I wrote was on Anterior Humeral Glide during horizontal rowing which you can find here. I won’t spend a great deal of time going over what AHG is as that would just be overkill and I’ll leave the area of redundancy up to the creators of American Idol.
In the following video I’ll take you through how to prevent AHG during horizontal pressing, namely during the bench press and pushup. Thanks to our intern Jarrett for volunteering for the video even though I kinda through him under the bus; sorry man! Also for another great cue to boost your bench and to stay out of AHG check out Stevo’s article, Quick Tip to Improve Your Bench Press: The other 50%+ of the Equation
My internet buddy, Ben Bruno, recently asked me if I could test out the push/pull experiment he's conducting. You can read about it HERE in case you haven't already. Essentially, what you have to do is test your max reps on inverted rows and pushups, in order to gather a rough feel of how your pushing strength compares to your pulling strength on fairly comparable exercises. I was happy to help him out, and I was also curious where I stood personally. Here were the ground rules for the test:
I wanted to film myself completing this experiment, given that tests such as these with a large sample size can quickly lead to skewed results due to the proclivity of humans to fabricate their results, especially with regards to something like a physical test.
Case in point: peruse any exercise-related internet forum or youtube page and you'll quickly find various cyber warriors writing about how they can bench 405 for reps. Sure you can. In related news - I once took out Mike Tyson in a sparring match.
Anyway, here is my test below:
A few notes:
However, I still kept my elbows in on the pushups, chin tucked, core locked in, all that good stuff in an attempt to emulate a perfect pushup as much as possible. I stopped the test (especially on the rows) when I felt I was jerking too much instead of actually doing the movement correctly.
That's all for now. It was definitely a fun test and I look forward to the conclusions Ben draws from this particular study. I encourage you to try it out for yourself, and then send your results over to him on his page HERE.