Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

The push-up is my favorite bodyweight exercise.

Although I personally love training with free weights in gym, a big portion of my workout revolves around bodyweight exercises- and that means lots of push-ups.

In fact, I once spent a year exercising around the world and did so without setting foot in a gym – it gave me a chance to really focus on bodyweight exercises as the only way to get fit, and changed my perspective on working out.

Today I’m going to share with you some of my favorite variations of the push-up that show you just how versatile and fun they can be. With this one movement and its variations, you’ll never have an excuse for not getting stronger again

Let’s crush push-ups!

Push-ups: Basic Scaling Variations!

I’ve already written a whole article on how to do a proper push-up years ago, but here’s a quick refresher! First, ZERO equipment is needed. This means you have no excuse not to do them. Second, they are an all-star compound movement: they work all of the muscles in your chest, shoulders, and arms, and even help strengthen your core (it’s practically a moving plank!).

If you are doing a proper push-up, your elbows should be tight at your side, not flared way out. Keep your arms at your side, and your core and butt tight so your body forms a straight line from head to toe.

One of the best things about push-ups is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re 200 pounds overweight or built like King Leonidas; there’s a type of push-up you can do TODAY. You can make them easier or harder, depending on your skill and your needs.

Let’s look at a basic level and work our way up:

Level 1: The wall push-up: Stand facing the wall, a few feet from the wall. Think of this like a vertical push-up. The further away from the wall your feet are, the more challenging it is! Too hard? Get closer!

Level 2: If you can complete wall push-ups with ease, level up to a lower surface. Place your hands on an elevated surface like stairs or the back of a bench, and complete a push-up with your arms close by your side. The higher the platform, the less difficult the exercise will be. The best part about the elevated push-up is that you can do it anywhere: use a kitchen counter top, a couch, or whatever floats your boat!

And here’s Staci with a more elevated platform:

Here’s me, with a lower platform:  Level 3: Now, if you don’t have access to a wall or elevated platform, or you’re ready to start working towards a classic push-up, consider the next step up: the knee push-up. Make sure you keep your body tight: from the top of your head to your knees should form a straight line. Depending on your current level, any of the above variations can get you started. The goal is to continue to progress the difficult as you gain strength, and then you can move up to the classic push-up! Dominated the classic push-up? move on to elevated push-ups!

Level 4: Elevated Push-Ups

Elevating your feet puts an increased amount of emphasis on your upper chest, shoulders, and triceps. Now, make sure you continue to keep your body tight and in a straight line – don’t let your butt sag! The higher your feet, the more of an emphasis on your shoulders and triceps, and less on your chest (thus the greater difficulty). Once you’ve mastered the classic push-up and started elevating your feet, you can mix in some challenging variations to keep things interesting!

The diamond push-up

When people think of building bigger arms, they probably think of doing more bicep curls. Actually, because the tricep is a bigger muscle, you’ll get bigger arms faster with a greater emphasis on building your triceps. And there’s no better way to do that than with a diamond push-up (or a triangle push-up, as pictured below):

Really focus on solid form here – diamond push-ups challenge your triceps and even your wrist tendons and flexibility. You can also do these on your knees if you’re looking to isolate your triceps more:

The Side-to-Side Push-up

If you are trying to work your way up to a one-handed push-up, a great place to start is by building up your shoulder/chest/and tricep to collectively support more and more of your body weight. Here’s what I mean:

Get into the classic push-up position and move your hands farther apart. Now, lower yourself down towards one arm only – you should feel like you’re supporting a lot of your weight. To complete the rep, slide horizontally over to the other arm, and push up.

The farther apart your hands, the higher percentage of your bodyweight will be supported by that side of your chest/shoulder and arm (thus getting harder)! Think of this like a Level 3 movement on the way up to Level 10: one-handed push-ups.

The Plyometric Push-up

An explosive and powerful body is a healthy body.

And building explosive strength (power) helps with every other kind of strength! A plyometric movement recruits muscles to fire very quickly and rapidly, creating a ton of force in a little bit of time.
Thus, power!

Get into a classic push-up position, lower yourself to the bottom of the movement, and then EXPLODE up by forcefully pushing your hands off the ground. If you push hard enough, you should launch yourself up in the air.

Boom. See here:

Most people can’t start off doing regular plyometric push-ups. A great variation is to do them on your knees. You can even elevate your hands if necessary to make the exercise a level easier.

The Divebomber Push-up

A fun push-up name for an incredibly challenging push-up variation. If you’re working your way up to handstand push-ups (see the next variation!), this is a great place to start. Be warned: these are brutally difficult

Get yourself into a downward dog (shameless Nerd Fitness Yoga plug here!), and then move your head towards your hands. The rest of your body should follow. As you finish descending, push up through to a cobra yoga pose.  You’ll REALLY feel these in your shoulders and triceps, as your head moves towards your hands.

To complete the rep, reverse the process back to the start.

As you develop strength here in your shoulders and triceps (which are emphasized more than your chest in this movement), you’ll get closer and closer to being able to pull off the mother of all push-ups: the handstand push up.

The Handstand Push-up

Oof. That’s the sound of me falling on my head as I tried to learn how to do a proper handstand push over the past few years! Here on Nerd Fitness we’ve already written an extensive article on how to do a handstand, and we’ve covered push-ups, so we might as well combine the two, right?

Before you work on handstand push-ups, you can start by working your way up by doing Pike Push-Ups, which turns a push-up into a pretty difficult shoulder and tricep exercise! Once you’ve mastered that movement, you can work your way up to the handstand push-up.

Kick up against a wall, and without flailing your elbows way out to the side (which can wreak havoc on your shoulders and elbow joints), slowly lower yourself down until your head touches the ground softly. Then raise yourself back up.

If this is too challenging for you, consider just working on the negative portion: lowering yourself as slowly as possible, and then kicking back up into another handstand and repeat the process.

The Nerd Fitness push-up Challenge

The most important part of using bodyweight exercises for strength training: consistently and progressively increasing the difficulty.

Not only that, but on days when you are training your upper body (or any day when you are doing a full bodyweight routine, mixing in push-ups at the end of a workout is a a challenging way to close things out.

Remember – we all have to start somewhere, but we have to start. Doing a crappy push-up is better than doing no push-up.

So I challenge you:

Complete 30 push-ups TODAY.

I don’t care which variation you do. I don’t care if you do one every 30 minutes for the next 15 hours, or if you do all 30 at once.

But I want you to do 30 push-ups today.

And then leave a comment letting us know which type you did and how it went.

We’ll select one person at random to give away a free membership to the Nerd Fitness Academy, where most of the videos in today’s article came from. The Academy has workout plans, diet advice, and a leveling system where you earn experience points when you complete quests.

So, drop and give me 30!

-Steve

photo source: themofojt: Stormtrooper Pushups

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Q: I am a teen and need help with making washing dishes a more fun experience for me since I have to do them every day. It especially gets boring after doing them for awhile, so please, anything helps!

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Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

Note: Charles is here on a weekly basis to help you cut through the B.S. and get to the bottom of the biggest questions in health and training. Post your questions directly to Charles in the comments below this article.

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In case you haven’t heard, avocados taste great. And whether you use them to make guacamole or the ever-popular avocado toast, they also make a great snack. Which is why, today, I want to look deeper into avocado’s bag of tricks and show you what else this fruit can do — beyond getting smashed into a creamy spread.

Almost all of these bites are raw and don’t require cooking or heat (hooray!), which means they are perfect summer dishes to make on a warm evening or to transport to a potluck (since they don’t need refrigeration). But do note: It is best practice to make any avocado dish the day you plan to eat it, as the avocado will turn brown with exposure to air. But a squeeze of lime juice or any of these tricks will help keep those snacks green.

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Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

Note: Charles is here on a weekly basis to help you cut through the B.S. and get to the bottom of the biggest questions in health and training. Post your questions directly to Charles in the comments below this article.

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So far, the refrigerator and specialty appliances like sous vide machines have been the biggest targets for smart home technology in the kitchen.

Now you can add your toaster oven to the list of appliances that can connect with your smartphone.

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Way back in 2008, I revealed the foundation underpinning the Primal Blueprint: the 10 Primal Laws. These behaviors and environmental influences comprised the daily lives of our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years and continue to shape our collective genomes today. Even if you haven’t read the book, definitive guide, or seen the laws before, they should look pretty familiar. Most everything I write about on this blog and in my books uses them as touchstone. Much changes, but everything stays the same:

1. Eat lots of animals, insects, and plants.
2. Move around a lot at a slow pace.
3. Lift heavy things.
4. Run really fast once in awhile.
5. Get lots of sleep.
6. Play.
7. Get some sunlight every day.
8. Avoid trauma.
9. Avoid poisonous things.
10. Use your mind.

If you follow those 10 foundational laws, you’ll be setting yourself up for a healthy, vibrant life. But what else is there? What were the honorable mentions that didn’t quite make the cut? In no particular order, here are several additional lifestyle behaviors that are central to my life and were a big part of our ancestors’:

1. Hang out with dogs.

Sorry, cat people. I love cats, and they can certainly provide companionship and free vermin extermination, but we simply don’t share as extensive an evolutionary history with cats as we do with dogs. That’s probably why dogs can judge a person’s emotional state from their facial expression, notice when you’re smiling, and perceive whether we’re happy or disgusted. When you gaze into your dog’s eyes, you’re both getting hit with oxytocin. That’s how deep the bond runs. I don’t know about you, but I’d be careful about severing that bond, or never having it at all. It seems to be intrinsic and essential.

Plus, on the purely utilitarian tip, dog ownership is linked to increased physical activity (dog’s gotta walk!).

Owning a dog isn’t for everyone. You need the time and compulsion to exercise them, feed them, and love them. But the cool thing about a dog is that they have a nearly limitless capacity to love. If your best friend has a dog, chances are that dog loves and respects you. So if you’re not a dog owner yourself, find a way to spend time with them. Volunteer at a shelter. Be a foster parent to dogs in need of permanent homes. Or just find a cool dog park and go hang out every once in awhile.

2. Gaze at the stars whenever you can.

Go camping on a clear night away from urban light pollution, look upward, and be amazed. Now realize that for hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory, that’s what we saw every time we looked up at the sky at night. Entire galaxies. Impossible numbers of stars. Constellations so distinct that you finally understand what those ancient Greeks were talking about. That’s the backdrop of ancestral chill-out time. That, the company we kept, and the fire flickering before us were the nighttime entertainment.

I don’t pretend to star gaze as often as I’d like. Malibu is remoter than you might think, but our proximity to one of the world’s most sprawling metropolises reduces visibility. For most, stargazing means something entirely different in LA County. But when I get to do it, when I’m camping with the family or on a snowboarding trip or anywhere at all that allows unfettered visual access to the stars, I take advantage. And I come away feeling humbled. How can a person maintain a large unwieldy ego in the presence of such immensity and eternity?

3. Go frequently to a green place.

I’ve extolled the extensive virtues of green spaces, particularly in the context of city living. It’s become quite clear than spending time in nature isn’t optional, it’s essential. Simply being, let alone living, near green space has a number of physiological and psychological benefits:

• It reduces stress.
• It improves immune function.
• It lowers blood sugar.

Check the post linked above for 13 more proven benefits. Overall, nature is simply relaxing, beautiful, and a great place to exercise. Trails just ask to be run upon, trees silently implore you to climb them, and beaches are always requesting that people sprint all over them. Plus, it’s where we come from. Nature is the human constant. It’s our “normal.” Cities, towering skyscrapers, walls, fences, concrete covering everything within five miles? That’s the aberration. Going for a hike in the forest is going home.

Side note: By “green space,” I mean anything where nature pervades: parks, forests, marshes, swamps, beaches, deserts, gardens. It needn’t actually be green.

4. Consort with natural water.

As I’ve written before, humans have an interesting connection to water. Sure, we need to drink it, and thirst’ll kill us before hunger. Sure, lots of delicious goodies reside in water, and the ever-important long chain omega-3 fats that may have facilitated rapid brain expansion are found almost exclusively in water-dwelling creatures like fish and shellfish. But it goes way deeper than that. Emerging evidence confirms our deep connection to the deep blue, finding that “blue space” improves well-being, reduces anxiety and depression, and can even improve resistance to cancer and other degenerative diseases (PDF).

So find a river, lake, or pond (preferably one not frequented by incontinent waterfowl) and hop in. Go to the beach and take a dip. You don’t even have get wet. Kayaking, standup paddling, surfing (just don’t fall!), or any other type of self-propelled water vehicle are valid ways to visit the water. Pools are great (especially if they’re salt water; I use mine frequently) and certainly convenient, but there’s something about swimming in clean, natural water that can’t be beat.

I’ll also tack on the importance of consuming mineral water. It’s likely that early humans got a significant amount of essential minerals from the water they drank. My favorite is Gerolsteiner, out of Germany. Tons of calcium and magnesium and a perfect amount of carbonation. Just check the label for mineral content; some “mineral waters” have shockingly low levels.

5. Direct your gaze toward distant objects and sights.

We spend so much of our time these days huddled over a desk or smartphone, staring into a screen 8-12 inches from our faces, for hours upon hours on end. It’s objectively terrible for our posture (unless we take pains to constantly remind ourselves to sit and stand correctly) and I’d argue that along with lack of sun exposure it contributes to the degeneration of our eyesight.

Plus, as with the star gazing, looking far off into the distance realigns what actually matters. Every time I spend an hour watching the sun dip down below the waves, often with Carrie and/or Buddha (my lab) and Shanti (my goldendoodle), I am refreshed. It’s not scientific, and there are certainly confounding variables (the beach, the wife, the dogs), but man if every little thing I was worrying so much about didn’t seem smaller and less important after watching a ball of galactic fire turn the sky crimson from 93 million miles away.

6. Consume stories.

It doesn’t really matter what form you consume: movies, television, books, comics, podcasts, public radio. What’s important — and, I think, essential to being human — is the consumption of stories, tales, yarns, legends, myths, and literature. There’s a reason why stories resonate with us, why the best way to change minds or hearts is to tell them a story. That’s how we passed the time for thousands of years before TV, radio, or even the written word. That’s why politicians tell stories in speeches (because sticking to facts and statistics will only reveal their ineptitude and corruption). It’s why anecdotes, even if they come from anonymous commenters on Internet message boards, are often more convincing than objective scientific studies. It’s why we’re liable to binge watch TV shows as our life crumbles around us.

Stories are how humans relay experiences, convey lessons, entertain friends, make important points, and explain otherwise confusing concepts. If you can’t tell good ones — it takes a gift, in my experience — listening (or reading/watching/etc) is just as valid. Not everyone is a writer or crier or storyteller. And that’s okay. That’s human.

7. Sit around a fire.

This’ll be one of those dreaded “just-so stories” upon which the skeptics like to claim the entirety of ancestral health rests. So what?

As long as humans have controlled fire, they’ve sat around it at night. For warmth and illumination or to cook. Or for entertainment and to ward off insects and animals. Many a long comfortable silence was spent staring into the dancing flames. And sure enough, modern research confirms that campfires induce the relaxation response, biasing us toward the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering blood pressure, and making us more social with our companions.

Side note: Fireplaces should work, too.

8. Make yourself useful.

This means cultivating a skill, a quality, or a craft that others find useful. It could be cooking (people need to eat), or writing (people need to read and learn), or massage (people have stiff/sore tissues), or skateboarding (people need to be amazed), or fixing cars (people’s cars need to run), or carpentry (people need roofs over their heads). It can be literally anything fitting the criteria. Learn to do something that others would or do find useful.

Are these essential Primal laws? For me, they are. For you, perhaps not. But I’m confident adhering to most of these Laws would benefit your lives, too. Campfires? Skill development? Walks in the forest? Refreshing swims in the ocean? A fluffy friendly dog? What’s not to love?

I’m incredibly curious to hear your feedback. Do any of these honorable mentions deserve full Primal Law status? Which do not?

That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading!

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Zeroll Ice Cream Scoop

• $19.95

• Williams-Sonoma

Have ice cream — will scoop. But with what? The king of all ice cream scoops, according to many, many cooks, is the classic Zeroll scoop.

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Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

I am always somewhat envious of my friend George, a weightlifter at my gym, Cincinnati Strength and Conditioning. George is 25 years old and he waltzes into the box, changes his clothes, and before I can finish rolling my quads, he is already warming up with a 185lb snatch. Young, flexible, and seemingly invincible.

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Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

I am always somewhat envious of my friend George, a weightlifter at my gym, Cincinnati Strength and Conditioning. George is 25 years old and he waltzes into the box, changes his clothes, and before I can finish rolling my quads, he is already warming up with a 185lb snatch. Young, flexible, and seemingly invincible.

read more