To increase the volume of your chest without having to leave the house, I'm going to teach you how to do arm push-ups. When we look at our most unconscious side, the chest has always been seen as a muscle that demonstrates power. If you remember monkeys when they go to fight, they inflate their chests and even beat them to show how strong and powerful they are.
It is no surprise that this muscle is strongly related to self-esteem and self-confidence. You'll need two things that I'm sure you have: yourself and a floor. Are you kidding me, sheriff?
It is an exercise that, in addition to working the chest very well, works the anterior part of the shoulder and works the triceps. We can even say that he has some work done on his entire erector spinae and abdominal muscles, and we can even adjust the weight to make him heavier or lighter to suit his level of conditioning. - I'm already tired!
We're here on the floor, I want you to kneel down to position your hand, because one of the mistakes is leaving your hand too closed. Look at how my elbow flexes too much, and this makes the demands on both the triceps and my elbow, the joint, greater than they should be. Its distance will basically be so you can keep that elbow when your chest is on the floor at more or less 90°, and then we have an interesting load distribution, both for the chest and triceps.
Now, still talking about the position of the hands, a mistake that can happen is one hand being higher than the other. You will notice that one arm is higher, the other lower. It's even strange to do it this way.
Place your hand on the floor, remember the distance we made, always place it so that you notice that your hands are parallel. If you have a floor with a design, it makes it easier. Here, we have an ideal distribution of weight on both hands, interesting work on both sides.
Still talking about hand position , I'm going to teach you in a way that requires less of the shoulder joint: some people will place their hands exactly at shoulder height. When you leave your arm in the same line as your shoulder, you bring the structures of your joint closer together, and this, in the long or medium term, can cause problems. What I like to do: instead of placing your hand up there at shoulder height, you will place your thumb at more or less armpit height, or even a little lower.
Here, I have a great exercise with great comfort for my shoulder. Ultimately , we want to work muscles and preserve joints. The 4th mistake in arm flexion concerns the position of the feet, and here we have an intensity adjustment, look how interesting.
I positioned my hand. If I leave my foot supported, I have the full weight of my body to do the exercise. If it's that heavy, I can rest my knee on the floor, and I reduce both the body weight and the mechanics of the exercise, and this will make it lighter for me.
Initially, try with your foot on the ground. If you do, I don't know, less than 10 repetitions, you can support your knee. You will do it up to a level of intensity, calm down, I'll talk about it in this video.
When it comes to your foot, which position is best for you? If you leave your feet together here, you will notice that it becomes heavier in the sense that you have to exert more force to stabilize your body with your hands. Now, if you place your feet further apart, it's not as usual, but it can bring more comfort.
Here, there is no right or wrong, but what you feel best doing, simple as that. And of course, this also applies to the knee. If you want to leave your knee further apart to give you more comfort at the beginning, that's cool, but I recommend that after a while, if you progress, leave it together, because you're going to have to work harder on your entire body to stabilize everything.
Let's go to the 5th mistake now, which is doing the arm push-up as if you were in Cirque du Soleil. This will not add to your muscle development, but will only create an impact on your joints. Pay attention to the impact this generates on my shoulder and my wrist especially.
I come down here. . .
What a horrible thing! And those who do this do it in a more exhibitionist way because you won't see any athlete with interesting muscle volume doing this thing. Lalá, did you give something similar to Breno during chest training?
We jumped, and then he did some braking work, but he had a very well studied strategy. It was part of a group in training. When we talk about maximized hypertrophy, we bring up the idea of varying the stimuli as much as possible, which is something I mention a lot about Muscle 60D, I can tell you about it in a moment.
It was very strategic there , and I didn't want to, and so, I didn't ask him to clap, and I ran the risk of him feeling discomfort in his joints, but we're talking about a high-level athlete, looking for maximum hypertrophy, so it was worth running this risk, something I don't do with Muscle students. The proposal there is to take the stimulus variability proposal, with as much safety as possible. If you want to get to know us and be our student, the link is below, take a look.
Let's move on to the 6th mistake, which is the most common of all: getting down, supporting your belly and getting up, when the person doesn't do it that way. The thigh doesn't even come off the floor. If I told you that supporting your foot and lifting your body is heavier, leaving your knee is lighter, imagine if I left my belly.
The exercise becomes much lighter. What's the idea? It's about resting your chest on the floor.
Look how the position of my body changes. Look how my hips become higher, and my entire body rises. Then you will have much more intense work on your chest.
The 7th mistake, let's talk about the hip. If you leave it in one position, you will support the weight on your spine, that's not the idea. We put this weight on the abdominal muscles, and you may ask "Lalá, but does arm flexion work the abdomen?
" Yes, and it doesn't work very little. If you keep your hips too high and lifted, your weight will rest on your spine. Look what I'm going to do with him now.
I left it stabilized, further inside in a more neutral position, and for that I already press on the abdomen. By keeping it in this position, I already have healthier movement for my entire body and I gain abdominal work. The 8th error in arm flexion concerns the range of movement.
The greater the range of movement, the better the muscle growth result. The proposal to explore as much of this range of movement as possible. The very common mistake is that people don't go all the way down and then go up.
Do you notice that there is a large space between my chest and the floor? This causes less muscle work. The proposal is for me to go down until I touch this chest to the floor.
This way, I stretch my muscles as much as possible, and we get better use of the exercise, generating more results. When I go up, same thing, I'll go up all the way, but leaving my elbow slightly flexed. This way I can keep my muscles tense, which is very important.
I go down until my chest touches the floor, and I go up to that point. What does a perfect push-up look like? Initially, leave your hands at an interesting distance to achieve this 90° elbow angle, you will pay attention to your hands not being misaligned, and your thumb at the height of your armpit.
The position of the foot can be further away or more closed, which is cool. If it's heavy, you can support your knee and it's okay. The hips are not meant to move upwards, the entire spine will remain erect.
You will go up, lower your chest until it touches the floor and go up to the end. By keeping the movement like this, you're doing it perfectly, and here's a tip so you can get even more hypertrophy results. When going down, go down at a more controlled speed than the one you go up.
Go down controlled, and go up. The eccentric phase, when the muscle is stretching, generates more stimulus for hypertrophy, so let's optimize it. Now, you need to know how many sets to do, how many times to do per week, that you just learned the exercise.
In this video, I give you exactly an entire workout using only arm flexion, and the most interesting thing is that there are even some variations of this exercise, and rest assured that you will be doing this at home, you need a space like you saw in the video. Click there.
