If you want to test your pushup credentials, practice makes perfect. Hand release push-ups are one of the best bodyweight exercises to test your upper body strength and pushing power.
To perform a hand-release pushup, lower your chest to the ground, keep your hips and thighs lifted and moving, release your hands, place your hands close to your body, and press upwards again. Simple push-up variations increase pushing endurance and are a lot of fun to try.
Here’s what happened when I added this exercise to my routine for a week, and why I like this move better than the standard push-up.
How to do hand release push ups
I’ve seen hand release pushups taught in several ways, including lowering your entire body, including your chest, abdomen, and thighs, to the floor. I’ve also seen trainers teach clients to lift their legs and hands, similar to the Superman exercise, but not this variation.
You need to maintain tension throughout your body without letting your body fall to the ground. Instead, focus on lowering your chest and keeping everything else firm.
how:
- Start in push-up position
- Make sure your shoulders are stacked over your wrists and your hips are in line with your shoulders.
- Tighten your stomach, buttocks, and quadriceps to increase total body tone
- Bend your elbows and lower your chest to the floor, lifting your hips and quads, straightening your knees, squeezing your glutes, and tucking your toes.
- Lift your hands slightly off the floor and place them on the floor near your body so that your forearms are vertical.
- Push off the ground and return to the starting position.
I did 60 hand release push-ups every day for a week – here’s what happened.
I’ll explain what happened.
I felt that the tension in my chest had improved.
When you do push-ups with your hands released, you push your weight up off the floor, improving the work of your pectoral muscles and increasing your ability to generate force. While you may not want to build pecs to rival Tall’s right away, push-up variations can help build a stronger chest, and doing push-ups with your hands free will strengthen your arms and anterior deltoids (front of your shoulders). The strength of will increase. Too.
You can get promising momentum from this movement by lifting from a bodyweight position on each rep. However, some trainers teach the movement to lower your entire body to the floor, but I don’t. By doing so, some people may not be able to maintain tension in their torso or legs and fall to the floor. Instead, the most common (and most effective for me) method is to lift your hips and thighs and keep your legs straight so that only your chest touches the floor. This will help maintain a strong and straight posture.
enjoying
I regularly program push-ups into my workout routine, so it was logical to add hand-release push-ups and aim for higher reps. I broke the fitness challenge rules by sticking to 60 repetitions, alternating them with air squats, and setting a 10-minute time limit each day. This format kept things interesting rather than sticking to one movement, and gave me an easy full-body workout that allowed me to fit snack workouts into my day.
shape, shape, shape
To protect your joints and maintain optimal pectoral muscle contraction, you must continue to rotate your shoulders downward with great force. Position your hands so that your forearms are nearly vertical and bring your hands close to your ribcage. From here, the neck should be neutral and the body should form a straight line from head to toe without dropping from the hips. I like to do my warm-up repetitions in front of a mirror to observe myself.
At times, I approached the challenge with a humble attitude, using my knees to perform reps when my form started to fail. If done correctly, over time, released push-ups will develop strength in your shoulders, arms, chest, and core, helping to improve your relative strength. Relative strength refers to how strong you are relative to your body size, not how much you can do. bench. Gymnasts are a great example of an athlete with a high level of relative strength.
This past week I learned that I need to check in with my body more often and never rush to the finish line. The hands-off method helps the exerciser focus on all stages of the movement rather than just performing the movement.
verdict
By doing push-ups with my hands off each day, I was able to adjust my form and work on the bodyweight exercises I already enjoy. It’s worth remembering that we don’t encourage others to try their hand at fitness unless they already have solid form and are confident in their exercise and scaling options. Remember that these challenges are short-term efforts, so focus on the recovery and strength you need.
But if you want to work on more explosive pushing power and strengthen the muscles used in shoulder-pressing exercises like overhead presses, jerks, and push presses, hand-release push-ups are an effective upper-body tool. Between each rep, you can recommit to the next effort, giving you more focus instead of just practicing each phase of the pushup.
They always say I should do more of what I love, so I’m incorporating this into my workout program more often.
