Pro Athlete Training - Basic Pushups

Donna Wilkinson: We are going to go into our upper body strengthening program. Now, a lot of folks at home have something like a step, a chair or a bench, so we have this toy with us. A lot of other folks might have a basketball, a soccer ball or something, we have got a couple of balls, these are actually medicine balls. If you have a medicine ball that will work as well, and we also have a few very light weights. Now, if you dont have light weights at your home, if have a soda container, hopefully if you dont soda, but if youve got juice, if youve got canned vegetables or things like that, that can work as well. So, what we are going to do is start out with one of the most basic exercises, very, very underrated by most folks and that is a basic pushup. Now, for women the biggest thing with pushups is they like to do them from their knees and the biggest reason why is because their core strength is not strong. Has more to do with core strength than with your upper body strengths.

So, we are going start out with just a good set of pushups. Now, I like to do pushups everyday and we are going to do different variations of pushups, depending upon how advance you are. So, you have multiple ways to doing them to really get a benefit.

We are going to start with the basic pushup. Getting down, keeping your body nice and tight. We are just going to get nice ten pushups here coming in, going all the way down, keeping that butt and that back nice and tight, body in alignment. Start to feel in your shoulders and chest a little bit. Now, what Id like to do is move to different segments of this.

Now, we are going to hit the triceps and shoulders a little bit more, doing what we call triangle pushups. In triangle pushups, you want to put your hand placement on the floor and kind of get your chest right over your hands. So, you are going to form a nice little triangle here, get your chest up over it and as you go down you are coming right into the triangle, really forcing yourself to work through your triceps. Again, keeping your body as tight as you can, you dont want your hips to sag. Pushing all the way out, so thats if you are little more advanced and really want to get some work into your triceps out of your pushup workout.