The push-up is a wonderful, very common and extremely complete exercise. You work your arms and upper body, mostly the pec muscle, the stabilizers muscles of the shoulder blades, the core is engaged to hold the position and avoid the midsection to collapse, and the glutes are engaged and the legs are too when they are close together.
If the pushup is done incorrectly, and seems “easy”, then it is most likely being poorly executed. And not just that… when slacking in performing the push-up you run the risk of hurting yourself.
The push up is strength, power, grace and control.
There are many ways and positions we can choose for this exercise: Wide stance at the arms, narrow, high or low, legs wide or together, one leg or two legs. The tempo and the range of motion play an important part in making this movement easier or extremely difficult and demanding.
The different positions target different needs: You work certain muscles more than others. All choices are good if executed with a specific purpose.
In this video I will show you how the push-up is mostly executed in Pilates.
I hope you enjoyed today’s video. Please post on your instagram profile pictures of you doing the exercises, and tag @ilariaCavagna.