How to do a push up?

A well-known and easy-to-carry-out fitness exercise is the push up. You don’t need to buy advanced fitness gear for doing pushups, so you can easily practice them at home. It’s a good idea to do a few series of pushups three times a week. It will increase your muscle strength and you’ll feel fitter. But what is the right technique to do a push up?

Before you start with the real exercise, you should do a warming up. This will help to prevent injuries and increases the temperature in the muscles, which will strengthen them and make them more powerful. During the push up, you use the triceps, shoulders and your chest. So you should stretch these muscle groups.

1. Find yourself a place on the floor or another hard surface that's able to hold your bodyweight. Lie down on the floor with your hands on your shoulders and your toes squeezed.
2. Adjust yourself as shown in the picture below. This is the starting position. Your elbows should make a angle of 90 degrees with the ground.

4. Push yourself up until your arms are fully stretched out. Doing so, visualize to push the ground away from you. The force is mainly performed by your shoulders (Anterior Deltoid) and your chest (Pectoralis Major). The triceps also assists in this exercise. See the picture below for the final position.
5. Get back to the starting position, till the point where your nose almost hits the floor and your elbows form a angle of 90 degrees again.
6. The first time you practice this exercise do about 6 reps, take a short break of 45 seconds and make 2 other sets of 6 reps. Continue with another set till failure. Every time you train, increase the amount of reps by one.
7. During the breaks, stretch your shoulders, triceps and chest.

For muscle building, only practicing pushups won't give you visible results. You should also train the bench press, dumbbell fly and dips. For more variation, you can place your hands closer together which will work the inside of your chest and the triceps. A wider position of your arms will give more contraction on the shoulders and the outside of your chest.

You can also train under an angle, by placing your feet on a table and your hands on the ground. This will work your lower chest.

View the original article in Dutch: Push Up.

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