No More Girly Push Ups

Why do push ups?

Push ups are a fantastic compound exercise for building strength in your pectorals, deltoids, triceps and abdominals. Using your body weight, there are a number of adaptations you can use to progress or regress the difficulty of the exercise.

These are body weight exercises which involve knees on the floor, full extension on toes and narrowing your grip. Unfortunately, the knees on floor version are often described as ‘girly’.

However, to get perfect full push ups, it is important to practise the correct body position right from the start.

This is why doing push ups on your knees isn’t very effective when it comes to progressing from knees to full push ups. The body position isn’t the same.

What’s next..

If you have ever struggled with performing push ups in the full plank position, this tutorial video is for you. We will provide you with a series of drills to help you progress to the next stage.

The Drills

From the top drill – Eccentric Push up

This drill involves positioning yourself in the top position of a push up and slowly lowering yourself to the ground in a controlled manner.

Place your hands directly below your shoulders, raise your knees from the ground so that you’re on the balls of your feet and bring tension into your abs and glutes.

Now slowly bend your elbows and lower your full body towards the floor until your chest is touching. This is known as the eccentric part of a push up.

From the bottom drill – Concentric Push up

The next drill involves performing the second half of the push up exercise. Laying face down on the floor, place your hands directly beneath your shoulders.

Tuck your ankles under so that you are on the balls of your feet. Strengthen your abs and glutes so that you are in a steel bar position.

Now use your arms to push yourself away from the floor, 1 inch, in a controlled manner. This is known as the concentric part of a push up.

The Full Push Up

The third and final drill is the full push up. In progression to completing this drill on the floor, you can use a rack or bar preventing you having to work against the full force of gravity. 

As in drill one, position yourself in the plank position. Braced abs and glutes, hands directly below shoulders and feet on the balls.

Using control, lower yourself in a rigid position towards either the floor or bar until your chest touches. Now slowly, using the strength in your arms, push yourself back away from the back to your starting position.

Progressively, lower the height of the bench or rack closer to the floor, slowly increasing the exercises difficulty.

And there you have it, you are now on your way to the perfect military grade push up.

This post on how to get perfect push ups shows you how.

Here are the women of our Ladies Who Lift beginners class learning how to do push ups using the drills in this video.

This video is part of our five-part video training series Strength Made Simple: how to lift weights with perfect technique in just 5 days. To get free access to the full series, just enter your details on the homepage.