Daily Pushups | Increase Your Upper Body Strength With Pushups

Pushups for Uppr Body Strength

Increase Your Upper Body Strength With Pushups

• Overview
• Pros and Cons of Doing Pushups Daily
• Challenge Yourself
• Overcoming Bad Posture and Avoiding Injury

Overview
The pushup is a quite popular exercise that has tremendous benefits. 

It is a really great exercise that suits any fitness goal; whether you're on a fat loss diet, trying to build upper body strength or add on pecs and triceps size. 

Pushups can be done literally anywhere. You can do them at the gym, at home or even outdoors at public parks or beaches. 

People love this exercise as it gives pretty fast results especially those related to strength. 

So, those who are struggling with increasing their bench press, doing pushps frequently can absolutely solve the problem. 

Pros and Cons of Doing Pushups Daily

Doing pushups daily can improve your upper body strength noticeably in no time. 

This exercise targets more than just one muscle group, and that itself makes it a better deal. 

Building more strength while developing upper body muscles; isn't that a perfect exercise choice?

Pushups develop pectural muscles as well as triceps and shoulders. That's what everybody knows, and look for. 

However, a lot more can be done through this exercise; the serratus anterior, core and glutes are also targeted with the pushups if performed with proper form. 

Despite the fact that pushups are strenght builders, they can sometimes stop giving the results you want. 

This happens when you keep doing them in a certain way without challenging yourself. 

Like any other exercise, you can reach a plateau if you don't add variation and create challenges within the pushup exercise. 

In some cases, injury can happen due to poor form, not taking time for recovery when required, and not balancing it with proper posterior workouts.

Most of the time, you see guys who prioritize training chest and front delts get rounded shoulders (Gorilla poster). 

When you incorporate too much push exercises, you are strengthening (tightening) your pectural muscles and tendons as well as the anterior rotator cuff (Subscapularis) both of which pull your shoulders to the front. 

As the shoulders are pulled forward, the already weak posterior rotator cuff muscles (Supraspenatus, infraspunatus and teres minor) are stretched out and made even weaker. 

Why this posture is bad is because it creates less room for the supraspinatus (rotator cuff)  to move freely; forcing it to be pitched between the humerus and the acromion as the arm is elevated. This results in a shoulder impingement. 

Challenge Yourself

In order to keep increasing your strength, you need to always keep challenging yourself, either by increasing reps, sets or adding different varieties you aren't used to. 

Doing the same pattern of pushups for a period of time makes your body adapt to the amount of stress generated by the exercise. 

To avoid that, start doing more reps per set and don't stop at the first sign of failure; try to take your set beyond failure. 

If you want to get the most out of it, when your can hardly add any rep, rest for 5 seconds and add more 2 or 3 reps and keep doing that until you experience a new level of failure. 

You ucan also add more challenging varieties like the diamond pushups, the cobra pushups,  pushups with your feet on a bench,  etc. 

Overcoming Bad Posture and Avoiding Injury

The best way to avoid injury is by working on the correct upright poster, which involves an erect spine, and shoulders sitting in a nice neutral position. 

This can be achieved by doing enough back workouts in general and your upper back in particular (Lower traps, rhomboids and posterior rotator cuff) 

The deadlift is the best exercise to work your deep posterior chain muscles; those muscles directly attached to the spine to keep it upright (Erector spinae) 

To work your rhomoids, you need to incorporate row exercises like cable rows and Yates rows. 

For the lower traps, howerver, you should incorporates Y raises, plate raises (until the plate is over your head) and facepulls with an underhand grip.

This version of the facepull is also a great exercise for the posterior rotator cuff. 

More good exercises for these muscles involve any external movements of the arm; tuck your elbows to your torso while externally rotating your arm. 

You can also do the same movement while your elbow is at shoulder level (You can do these with a light dumbbel or just with your arms)