Pressups

loadabollocks

so are they good for building your arms up or just for strengthening whats there...

tim3115

Not sure what you're trying to get at here. I'm beginning to love them now personally. If I had a choice between benching and press ups, I'd choose the latter. I do ones with the hands close to the nipples when you're at the bottom and I focus on the whole body while doing it. Hard going.

brianthebard

They are great for shoulders arms and chest. Building muscle with them depends on the intensity and variations you do, and if you add extra weight if you feel you can. Tim, have you tried making a diamond shape with your hands under your chest? It will really hit your triceps-perhaps you are already doing that.

tim3115

Not sure what you mean Brian, got any picture of it?

To be honest with you, the ones I do currently kill me. Plus it feels great focusing the entire body on the movement.

wba88

i think he means triangle pressups. join thumbs and index fingers underneath ur chest (the space resembles a triangle) and do pressups

Cravez

loadabollocks wrote:

so are they good for building your arms up or just for strengthening whats there...

Press-ups Focus on Chest,Shoulders and Tri-ceps although somtimes i find after doing some bi-cep exercises press ups become alot easier.

Also the closer your width the more it focuses on your tri-ceps (as brian mentioned) and the wider it is the more it focuses on chest & shoulders.

However i wouldn't consider press ups bread and butter of my chest workout. The Advantage of them are that you can practically do them anywhere, without a gym and can do lots of different variations of them. Particularly useful if your on a holiday. The Disadvantage are that without much resistence to them you will not get sufficient gains, don't get me wrong. You WILL make strength/size gains from doing press ups when you start but after a while using your bodyweight it will become easy and you wont get much out of them (unless you can get someone to stick some weight plates on your back).

Basically what im saying is: Yes do them, but don't focus on them. The Bench should be your bread & butter. What id recommend doing is supersetting Dumbell Presses/Flyes for Press up's. Now THATS one hell of an exercise, you should be getting good gains from them and a good test of muscular endurance.

Hope that Helps

brianthebard

wba88 wrote:

i think he means triangle pressups. join thumbs and index fingers underneath ur chest (the space resembles a triangle) and do pressups

Yeah I should have explained further. To Michael, if you start to feel them getting easier, would you not elevate your feet on a chair/bench/bed so that you are lifting more weight? Perhaps a backpack with some plates in it would help if you don't have a weight vest or a partner to put plates on you.
I agree that the bench is the cornerstone of the chest workout though.

Cravez

brianthebard wrote:

Yeah I should have explained further. To Michael, if you start to feel them getting easier, would you not elevate your feet on a chair/bench/bed so that you are lifting more weight? Perhaps a backpack with some plates in it would help if you don't have a weight vest or a partner to put plates on you.
I agree that the bench is the cornerstone of the chest workout though.

I know what you mean Brian, iv tried elevation and also tried putting plates into a backpack but even doing so i haven't found it to be any better towards my training. Don't get me wrong Press ups are a good exercise, they are in fact a compound exercise but i myself have felt they haven't been beneficial towards training.

I can only see them being beneficial for Martial Arts or Olympic Bodyweight Coniditioning programs where your only training tool is your own body. I'm just throwing in my 2 cents but don't think im saying Press up's are bad!:D . Im just saying if your training is more powerlifting, bodybuilding then the bench should be the foundation of chest work. I do push up's myself every so often to get the blood flowing in the chest or when i have no time to work chest in the gym on a particular day.

Floyd Soul

I get what your saying. But yeah from a martial arts point of view they are the bread and butter. And they never get easy until you stop doing enough of them!

loadabollocks

i see. i'm getting into them at them moment...i was only doing them once a week at a fitness session, doing about 100/120 in sets of 20. now i do them every night, maybe about 60/90 in sets of 30. I acn feel the difference alreasy after two weeks. In the midweek session they used to kill me but now i am finding them much easier. The thing is i play handball (GAA version not olympic handball) where you need very quick reactions and it can be as much about speed and swinging technique as it is about strength. Would pressups make you stronger and maybe a bit slower do you think or will it would maybe even enhance speed?

brianthebard

loadabollocks wrote:

i see. i'm getting into them at them moment...i was only doing them once a week at a fitness session, doing about 100/120 in sets of 20. now i do them every night, maybe about 60/90 in sets of 30. I acn feel the difference alreasy after two weeks. In the midweek session they used to kill me but now i am finding them much easier. The thing is i play handball (GAA version not olympic handball) where you need very quick reactions and it can be as much about speed and swinging technique as it is about strength. Would pressups make you stronger and maybe a bit slower do you think or will it would maybe even enhance speed?

Clapping pressups may help here. Normal pressup position, but push yourself off the floor with force, clap your hands (not totally necessary, but fun) then catch yourself by falling back into pressup position. These can be fairly hard on your joints though.

http://www.exrx.net/Plyometrics/ClapPushUp.html

I don't know an awful lot about plyometrics, I generally read about them as being used to build explosive power, there are much more qualified people here that will probably tell you more in due course. Do you have a trainer or a training partner that can help too?

Chucky the tree

Pressups shouldnt make you slower as you wouldnt gain alot of muscle from them.

rubadub

I do them now on my "off days". I was watching a program about food on bbc2. They were seeing if being a veggie would lead to lower performance, and mentioned the role of protein and creatine in meat. They had the hurdler Colin Jackson on, he did a run on the show and still had a very good time, I think they said it was still good enough to be in competition, so he was obviously still in good shape.

To guage his performance he did pushups. He could do 55, then after a few weeks on a veggie diet he could only do about 50. These were very fast snappy pushups, not going way down deep. I did them the same way as him and could get out 58, so was well pleased.

I think it was Boru here that was talking of a guy doing just 1000 push ups a day and got a very good upper body. I find they work the abs well too. Christian Bale was meant to be doing all sorts of pushup variations for batman.

If anybody has a good link to all the variants please post it.

davyjose

Aye I'm up to around 250/300 a day (on off days too) since boru posted that. I definitely have noticed a very positive difference, not so much in bulk, but in overall power and strength. I find my benching has come along too.
Rubadub, if you point your toes while doing them (rather than use the balls of your feet), they tear the crap out of your abs.

Interesting to see some of the US military stats on push-ups(half-way down the link). Gonna go see where I stand later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_up

Dragan

Chucky the tree wrote:

Pressups shouldnt make you slower as you wouldnt gain alot of muscle from them.

Could just ask for some scientific validation behind the " muscle makes you slower" thing?

rubadub

davyjose wrote:

Aye I'm up to around 250/300 a day (on off days too) since boru posted that. I definitely have noticed a very positive difference, not so much in bulk, but in overall power and strength. I find my benching has come along too.

Helped my benching too. I am now veering towards only 2 full body workouts a week, monday and thursday. But pushups all over the weekend, usually since I am too hungover for a proper workout!
I knock a few out during ad breaks on TV.
Colin Jackson was doing them like the animated guy on the wikepedia page.

Seems I am just outside the "good" bootcamp range, but on the good side!. My goal will be that 99th percentile now, 76.

g'em

rubadub wrote:

If anybody has a good link to all the variants please post it.

This one's not bad, and I'll see what else I can come up with...

Aedh Baclamh

Can anyone link me to Boru's post on them?

Is it okay to do them every day?

rubadub

g'em wrote:

This one's not bad, and I'll see what else I can come up with...

Cheers! I like the warning about the crushed face :eek: Don't think I'll be trying that one anytime soon...

t-ha

Thinking about it, the key difference between a bench press and a push-up is the scapular positioning. In a bench press it's constricted, and usually people retract their scapulas fully for the entrie duration of the exercise. In a press-up, the scapula is free to move throughout and there is much better serratus anterior engagement. Given that, I actually think (putting aside loading) that the press-up is a better compound exercise than the bench-press.

@the OP, there are plenty of people here who know more about sports specific training than me - but to me I think the term 'specificity' is key. People go on about what exercises build functional muscle/strength and which build non-functional muscle and other stupid comments like that. If you believe that your body will respond to an exercise by becoming 'unfunctional' then take it up with God. Most people's bodies get better at tasks as they practice them so the question you need answered is 'are press-ups a task which, if I improve at them, will make me a better GAA player'? That's what specificity is all about.

For my money, I'd say the ability to do 50 press-ups in a single set is a good goal as a basic requirement of upper body endurance-strength (and not being a fat-ass). Beyond that I wouldn't bother pushing it too much and would concentrate on your lower posterior chain strength, core stability, speed and so on. The strongest guy on the pitch is usually the guy working off the best platform (lower posterior chain, quads, trunk) rather than the guy with the big shoulders and chest.

Shane190

Nuckle press-ups are the best..

davyjose

Shane190 wrote:

Nuckle press-ups are the best..

why is that?

Dragan

Shane190 wrote:

Nuckle press-ups are the best..

Indeed, what do they do with regard to muscular activation and load that makes them so good?

amazingemmet

Shane190 wrote:

KNuckle press-ups are the best..

Real men do cock push-ups:D