Health and Fitness Beaufort: Perfect Your Push Up

Health and Fitness Beaufort: Perfect Your Push Up

“Hey EarthFIT fam, This is Coach Sam here. Today I’m going to show you a quick way to get into the perfect push up position so you’re doing those push ups with proper form each and every time. The reason you want to do these push ups with proper form is so you don’t make yourself susceptible to injuries. The two most common errors I see are improper hand placement and raising of the glutes too quickly. If your hands are in the improper placement, that could lead to shoulder injuries. And if you’re raising your glutes up, you could really put your lower back at risk. So I’m going to show you today a quick way to get in and out of a push up, which makes sure that you have great form. So we’re going to start by going to our knees and you’re bringing your hands on to your side. 

And then I want you to raise your hands in, now when your hands are out to your side and you’re bringing them in, they should be at chest level. You don’t want them up here, don’t want them down here. Just hit chest level. And then once they get to by your shoulder width apart your hands are just going to go straight up and then you can lower yourself down to the ground. Now you want your hands to be directly under your shoulders. Keep your legs back and lower yourself down. Okay, this is the starting position. Now before we actually do a push up, we’re going to do a quick hand release so you could feel your back, how it should be feeling while doing a push up. So you want to keep your head facing straight down and raise those arms straight above the ground, holding for a second and then lowering them back down… 

Now if you feel your back activating, that’s perfectly normal. That’s what you should be feeling. Your shoulder blades kind of coming together as you lift those hands up. So now we’re going to do another hand release, but this time we’re going to squeeze the glutes and activate our core. So our lower back stay stable. What we’re going to do this is we’re going to really squeeze the glutes and then push your belly button into the floor. Raise your hands off the ground and relax. So you should be creating a lot of tension throughout your core and your upper back there just doing those two simple movements. Now we’re going to put it all together and do a full push up. So again, you’re looking at the floor. Your hands are directly below your shoulders and this time we’re going to squeeze the glutes, push the heads into the floor and push yourself up off the floor nice straight back, and then nice and controlled on the way down and backup still squeezing that core and those glutes there. So that is how you can get into the proper push up position every single time. Keep you safe while you’re doing push ups. I’m going to demonstrate in one more time this time from the knees for those that do push ups on the knees, bring your hands out in above to chest level. Palms are up. We’ll just lower yourself down. Now you’re going to need to bring your knees back slightly here. Keep in, don’t cross them, keep them open like that and your hands or your shoulders directly under your wrist there. You’re just going to lower yourself now. And then same thing that we did from the floor you’re going to push your belly button into the floor, squeeze the glutes and release and relax, and we’re going to put it all together – squeeze the glutes, push the belly button through the floor, and press yourself up and then lower yourself back down nice and controlled and back up. So to recap, if you do this you’d be in the proper push up position, we really want to focus on squeezing the glutes and the core and making sure those hands are directly under the shoulders. I can’t emphasize that enough. A lot of the errors I see in a push up are direct result of the hands being too far.”