The only thing that keeps my head from exploding seeing a butchered pushup is marveling at how many things things need to be in place before you even attempt one. The widely held belief that doing pressing movements in the supine position (bench pressing), helps you do a pushup, is somewhat misguided. Pushups require Olympic level shoulder, core, and hip stability. Do not assume that happens automatically.
You have to earn your stability, and therefore, earn the right to pushups by learning how to create stability in the places your brain doesn't think to, or more precisely, forgot how to. Very few people can manage proper pushup position alone. To descend to the ground and come back up compensation free is amazingly difficult, but something you can definitely work up to if you understand how to regress this movement.
Regressing means decreasing the load of your bodyweight until you find a way to do it compensation free and that doesn't mean modified on your knees. When you modify the pushup by doing them from your knees you cut out more than twenty five percent of your body weight. That's tantamount to removing an arm to complete a squat.
This is why Grey Cook and other movement icons recommend finding the place where you can do the entire pushup compensation free and progress from there. And we already know how many times the brain needs to repeat a new pattern before it becomes a habit...fifteen hundred.
Let me explain to you why so many men can do a bench press better than a pushup.
What provides the majority of the stability in the bench press?
The bench.
What provides the stability in the pushup?
Everything.
Laying on your back, the brain won't see a need to fire the rotator cuff, it's reading nothing but stable green lights from the floor. Unless every effort is made to contract the rotator cuff muscles prior to descending into a press, they won't fire. Pec minor, bicep, and labral tears are common maladies among heavy pressers. Sounds ouchy.
Strength enthusiasts that can bench three times their body weight but can't produce a compensation free pushup make you wonder why simply flipping the movement over tends to make that pressing strength disappear.
It's because strength unused is useless strength.
If you can bench press four hundred and fifty pounds, does that mean you can push a four hundred and fifty pound block to the ground from standing position? Not a chance, because the core can't stabilize that amount of force. This is where the isolation principal fails. There's no doubt that the guy pressing tons of weight is strong. But how useful is that strength? Very, if he lies on his back lifting diesel engines off the ground all day.
Generally speaking, most people struggle with this movement. The majority of compensations come from the hips, which have to stay in flexion to manage the weight being transferred to the spine. It has to do this because the core is unable to handle the load.
Proper pushup position requires flexion be removed from both the hip and the knee. Another way to think of it is when in pushup position, contract the quads and glutes hard, creating stability and forcing the load into the core, where you want it. If you can't achieve this, the pushup needs to be regressed. Below are regressions you can make.
When attempting your pushup, think of sling shot pulled tight. It promises to deliver a pellet hard and fast but won't unless the base of the slingshot is stable. Fire from an unstable base and you have no power or control and that pellet drops to your feet. None of this is unlike the pushup. Your body, from head to toe, needs to find all the stability it can before attempting to use the arms like the elastic of a sling shot. Any bend in the ankle, knee, hip, or spine, means the sling shot will fire from an unstable base.
The value of this exercise exceeds any amount of time you might spend perfecting it. There's no reason that progressing this movement to the floor and beyond shouldn't be possible for anyone. But no one does a pushup without creating enough stability first. So use these to help keep my head from exploding, I may use it someday.
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