New Video: Keeping the Pushup Challenging

Archive post from 1/23/23

The humble pushup continues to be one of the best exercises to develop upper body pushing strength and the muscles of the chest, shoulders, and triceps for rowers of all ages, types, and levels. 

The horizontal push movement and these muscles are important for rowers to train for their “anti-rowing” ability. Without some form of strength training, even just a full-body land warm-up, rowers will underdevelop the upper body pushing movement and muscles due to lack of use in the sport. Over time, this imbalance can result in significant weakness, shoulder discomfort, and injury. Strength training exists to train both the performance-specific and non-specific movements and muscles to improve performance and reduce risk of injury.

A main benefit of the pushup versus other horizontal pushing exercises is the free movement of the shoulder blades. In a bench press exercise, the shoulders are pinned together and pressed against the bench for maximum strength and stability as the athlete moves the load of the barbell or dumbbells through space. In a pushup, the shoulders move freely around the ribcage as the athlete moves the body through space. This may make little difference in strict development of muscle size, but it makes a world of difference in carryover to athletic pursuits. This keeps the pushup firmly in my list of valuable exercises for all rowers.

I recommend that female rowers be able to do 10 pushups from the floor with good technique (20 for male rowers) before adding load with horizontal pushing exercises such as dumbbell and barbell bench press variations. Most rowers I coach (even the GRP) cannot start with hands on the floor for 8+ reps with good technique and tempo, so we elevate the hands to make this possible and then gradually decrease hand height from there.

Rowers who can achieve the from-the-floor benchmark can still continue to keep the pushup challenging with more advanced exercise variations and creative set-and-rep designs.

My new video gets all of this in one link, from elevated hands to challenging variations of tempo training, the ladder pushup, cluster set pushups, adding load with a weighted vest or resistance band, and the TRX or gymnastics rings pushup.

I’ve also made heavy updates to my “Upper Body Training for Rowing” Complete Guide with this video along with my bodyweight row and chin-up progression and variation videos. If it’s been a while since you’ve read that one, take a look and please let me know any questions.