 Hello everybody, I'm Lance Coyke and today we're discussing how to do your first push-up So if maybe you're thinking there is no like The the scenario that I have in my mind is I have clients who come in and I talk to them And I say can you do a push-up and then they start to laugh because they're like Probably not or if I can it's not very good Well, so this is this one's for you So the idea is you've got to get that push-up motion In ways that are a little less loaded So if a push-up is too hard oftentimes you're gonna see somebody's back sagging like this because they don't have the abdominal control To keep themselves supported You'll see really flared elbows and shrugging shoulders because the Stabilizing muscles of the shoulder joint and of the arms are not strong enough to hold up the entire body weight So we got to find a way to train with Sub-bodyweight levels now. There's a couple different ways to go about this And I think you should do them all first one is just do General training so if you want to do a push-up you don't just have to do push-ups you just got to get fitter So you can do One of my favorites to start people out on is a grab dumbbells and then you lay back and you do a floor press It's like a bench press, but on the floor Just like this just make sure that you have pristine quality Reps so when I come down my elbows are about 45 degrees from my sides. I'm not letting myself flare out like this I'm not letting my shoulders shrug up like this because that's not gonna help me build the Stabilization that I need here to do a push-up That's you know side sidebar That's the big difference between a floor press or bench press kind of thing and a push-up You have a little bit more stability that is required from your midsection in the push-up Which is actually why if I had to pick one I'd go with a push-up Second idea here, so I got you know general upper-body strength, but don't neglect your rowing So if maybe I have my hand on a bench And I bent over that bench and I have a dumbbell in my hand. I can just row up like this General strength is good for you lower-body exercises deadlift squats Split squats walking lunges all sorts of stuff, right all of that stuff will be good because it ties into Can I get this nervous system drive to? Produce strength right so our strength is not so much dependent on How our muscles are but it's how well our nervous system can turn on and can time itself and We can talk about that some other time newbie gains are generally Attributed to the nervous system not so much the musculoskeletal system You don't put on a huge amount of muscle in your first six weeks of training But you do put on a lot of strength and it's because the nervous system adapts So general training even like bench press stuff that will be good for you Just getting that strength pattern and then the the other main idea is I've got to find a way to train the push-up Motion where my arms are a little bit more free than maybe the bench press and my shoulder blades have to move around a lot more I Gotta train that at sub body weight and we kind of alluded to that earlier now one of my favorite ways to do that is to just elevate the hands so if I Think about it this way Would it be harder to do a push-up in a handstand or as a normal push-up? Well, it's a handstand because more of your body weight is going into your upper body So we can do the opposite so instead of going into handstand kind of position We can make you a little bit more upright and now you know I can use my couch as a means of elevating my push-up that way I can get really good high-quality reps train those stabilizer muscles And and get many many reps I can get you know a set of 10 reps if I incline myself as Opposed to maybe almost one crappy rep from the ground, right? So we train this this good technique good range of motion. I'm trying to be repetitive here So general strength lower body included bench press included Elevate the push-up this couch is prop depending on where you're starting. It's probably not high enough So that that angle change is not that big from the ground You might need something a little bit more like waist height maybe And and that kind of leads me into the next point You want to do these things because you want to get reps in you don't want to just do sets of one All day every day You want to be able to build some of that endurance because that endurance will support you in getting good Technique holding that position while you're getting tired Because if you do your first rep It's probably gonna be pretty slow and you're gonna want to hang on to your technique throughout that So general strength we talked about inclining this third major major point. I want to talk about is You have to look at your diet and your sleep because sometimes It's let's just say it's easier to do push-ups if you're not overweight Right because I have just less weight to push That principle applies to chin-ups as well and even more so so You don't it's not just about working out It's not just about doing more workouts and that's not about working harder in the gym all the time Sometimes you need to be really particular about the foods you're eating and you need to go to bed on time because That will keep your hormones regulated Okay, so general strength talked about inclining the push-up and we talked about losing some weight perhaps maybe Now the fourth thing I've talked a lot about good technique I've talked a lot about stabilizer muscles and I think those are necessary to get you to a point But at some point you have to you have to become an animal, right? You have to just push A lot of people I've seen I have one client in particular. I'm thinking about push-ups are just a mental challenge for some people It's this hurdle that Oftentimes people get stuck thinking I am not supposed to be a person who can do push-ups and they they just They don't they if they do one and they kind of slow down They just give up and they just fall back to the ground When you do something that's really really challenging and when you do a lift that's really really challenging you will slow down That is totally normal. Okay if you if you do them all like this It might feel like it's supposed to be like it's supposed to be that way But that just means it's too light to do for one rep and you got to do more reps And if you do it, you know if I do a set of 50 my last rep should look pretty slow because my muscles are getting tired I'm recruiting everything I could possibly get To get that that last little bit of strength that I want. So you need a little bit of that Effort mentality. I'm trying really hard not to swear Okay, so we talked about general strength even lower body even bench pressing We talked about inclining your push-ups to get that get used to that range of motion get some of the technique in there You can also do a you can modify it by coming from your knees Which most people know what I don't like about that is it doesn't challenge your abs the same way as Having your legs straight like this So it doesn't translate as well to doing a full Push-up because you need to be able to coordinate this stuff with your arm movements That was something I forgot to mention. So general strength this thing perhaps lose some weight and Be an animal now two different types of scenarios, right? You got one person who's never really worked out in their life Well, you got two people who've never really worked out in their lives one of them looks like a stick and the other one It looks more a little rounder. Okay You got two different Scenarios here you got two different ways to approach this So if you're the stick type person you probably need to start eating a little bit more And you need to work really hard in the gym that last little point about that effort mentality being more of an animal In a gym that's really gonna pertain to you because you've got to find a way to overcome that Urgent feeling of slowing down and of quitting during reps You've got to stick out the long reps You've got to push yourself to the point where you do need to stick them out Right, you need to get to a point where you're slowing down because otherwise You're just not trying hard enough and you're not going to build the strength that you need to get that first push-up Other scenario you're gonna want to focus more on the other 23 hours of the day. It's not so much Necessarily about working out though. It can be though. Maybe you need to find something that Motivates you what is the reason that you want to do this push-up? What is the reason that you want to work out? Why do you want to be healthy? What happened? How is your family doing? How is your past? This this will require a little bit of introspection maybe a little bit of psychological counseling sometimes But consider why you're working out work out hard definitely But you have to keep that mind that vision of the future in mind Throughout the rest of the day, you can't just forget it You can't just say I did my one hour of hard work now I can forget about everything else because everything else is much more important than the working out you've got to Get comfortable cooking or you've got to hire a chef or you've got to get those groceries delivered to your home Or you've got to say hey, it's seven o'clock. I'm not gonna work anymore Do you know whatever the boundary may be you need to draw that line? Okay? So I hope those are helpful. I hope you fit into one of those scenarios Those are the common ones. I I feel like we've probably taken Covered 99% of the people out here out there with those two scenarios If not, feel free to leave a comment below and maybe I'll make another video about it I Hope it helps if it doesn't help if there's stuff that's unclear if it does help leave a comment below