Are You Performing Push-Ups the Right Way?

Avoiding these mistakes can have a lifelong impact

When it comes to cheating, no one can beat their own body. It can find numerous ways to make exercise easier. But this convenience comes with a cost: bad posture and lack of muscle growth.

Almost everyone has done some kind of push-up in their life. But many people are terrible at doing this simple exercise with proper form.

Most of the problems are quite easy to figure out and can be rectified by being aware of the body’s alignment and range of motion. But if ignored, it can leave a lifelong impact on your body, which would take a very long time to recover.

With that said, let’s dive into the mistakes.

Avoiding full range of motion

By far the most common mistake a lot of beginners make. Going halfway down and coming up. If you do push-ups like that, you do nothing good for your body. In fact, it’s just a waste of your potential. Even if you go to a few inches above the ground, you are losing a lot of potential gains.

What’s the biggest aim for doing push-ups, to train the chest, right? What do you need to train a muscle? Extension, contraction, and an appropriate weight. If you don’t go down deep enough you’re leaving the ‘extension’ far behind to catch you up and with that, the ‘contraction’.

The deeper you go, the more you increase the work for your chest. If you can’t go down deep, just swallow your pride and choose an easier variation like the inclined push-up.

Talking about the full range of motion, scapular retraction at the bottom, and protraction at the top of the movement can’t be ignored. It is one of the most important aspects of maintaining healthy shoulder mobility.

Moreover, those who have mastered this exercise and built up the necessary shoulder and wrist mobility can do it on push-up handles to get much better chest activation.

Slacking-off your lower back

One of the biggest mistakes you can make while performing push-ups is not keeping a straight spine throughout the movement. Many people either don’t have enough core strength or keep their core too loose to make the exercise easier.

This results in the reduction of range of motion and not just that, the posture imbalance and back pain you’ll suffer, will be staying with you a very long time.

It should literally look like a rod going in through your butt and leaving through your head.

So make sure to have enough core strength and more importantly, engage that core while doing the push-ups if you really want to make gains with push-ups.

Too Wide Push-Ups

“Okay, if the extension is so necessary, why don’t I do wide push-ups, and to get a better extension, let me keep my arms out wide.”

No, by keeping your arms too wide, you’ve already decreased your range motion, how are you going to train your chest optimally in that position?

Moreover, by keeping your arms wide, the chances of flaring your elbows out increase, and by no means is that a good practice. It puts a lot of unnecessary stress around your shoulders which can be pretty harmful in the long run.

Instead, a close grip push can be more beneficial as it can increase the range of motion, thus engaging both the chest and triceps optimally.

Explosive push-ups without proper stability

Yes, it looks cool, but it requires proper control, muscle tension, joint stabilization, and alignment.

When you push yourself up and can’t control your movement on the way down, you are not doing your body any good. Moreover, you can injure your wrist, elbows, and lower back this way.

Explosive push-ups aren’t wrong, but the way many people perform it, i.e. without any control and stability, makes it a bad practice.

If you want to practice this exercise, you may want to start with hand-release push-ups in which you push yourself up with enough intensity enough that your palms leave the ground. The stronger you get, the further you’ll be able to release your hands.

Summary

Make sure to check the following while performing a push-up.

• Don’t do half reps. Always go full range of motion, i.e., elbows locked out at the top and chest touching the ground at the bottom.
• Keep your core tight, or else live with lower back pain throughout your life.
• Avoid doing wide push-ups and flaring out your elbows.
• If you don’t have enough strength to stabilize your movement, avoid going for explosive push-ups.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for reading!!

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