If you're like me and have been doing pushups off and on because you've just been getting bored of them, you probably want to know some variations you can do to a regular pushup to change it up. I've mentioned some things like inclines, declines, finger pushups, etc... but I didn't mention a lot about hand placement, what to do with your feet or much about repetition.
So to make sense of hand placement, I want to tell you something I read about because I was curious about how much weight I was pushing when I did a pushup. I found a bunch of sites saying the same thing about pushups: the weight you're pushing is at your hips. That's because when you're doing pushups your center of gravity is there. So when your hands are directly under your shoulders you're probably pushing 45-65% of your bodyweight. While if your hands are by your waist, you're more likely pushing 60-80% of your body weight. So over all, the closer your hands are to your waist or hips, the more weight you're pushing.
At first that seemed like way too much weight! I mean, 100 pounds is about 62% of my body weight! I can't bench press 100 pounds 68 times without rest. Then I looked into bench press a little. Turns out the grip and movement of a bench press isolates the chest more than a pushup. A pushup uses your chest, your triceps, and some shoulder muscles. Still, 100 pounds seemed like too much. So I went to our bathroom, took our scale, and put my hands on it, directly below my shoulders: 98 pounds when in the up position. I was surprised, so I then tried it at my waist: 135 pounds in the up position. That's about 84% of my body weight!
So to sum this part of the post I'd like to say that if you want a more challenging pushup, move your hand closer from your to hips. The opposite for making it easier, though, going past your shoulders will probably make it hard because doing that engages weaker muscles.
Another thing I'd like to mention about hand placement is how to isolate different muscles. I only really know how to isolate two muscles groups in a normal pushup: the triceps, and the chest. To isolate your triceps more, put your hands close together. The diamond pushup is a great example of that because that's about as close as your hands get when doing a pushup. Now what's your guess on isolating the chest? Probably putting your hands out wide... Which is true! I've done ultra wide pushups, they are harder than bench pressing. I could only do about 15-30 of those. The problem with those is you greatly limit your range of motion. So if you want balanced pushing muscles you probably want to mix wide pushups, close pushups, and shoulder width pushups.
So to some up that part of the post, I'd say wide=chest, near=triceps. Do both.
Now, what on earth do you do with your feet when you're doing a pushup? You have options. The usual thing to do is to keep them close together and keep them still... but what if you want something more challenging? Well, one thing you could do is stack your feet. Stacking feet makes it a bit harder on your core. Make sure you switch them every 5 or so pushups to keep everything even and balanced.
Something more fun than stacking is to bring your knee up even with your waist or hip when you go do. It will have to go off to the side so you won't bump your knee. On your way up, bring your foot back to your other foot. Switch sides every time. I really like this one, it works on the core, balance, hip flexers, and puts more weight on to your arms, and less on your feet.
Another foot variation is to have your feet wide. This one doesn't do much for me, but it's good for practicing the one arm pushup.
If you want a real challenge, run while you're doing pushups. You're staying still, but when you're in the up position, you're bringing your knees to your chest... one at a time, unless you're really hardcore, then do both.
That's not all. When you're in the down position, you should be bringing your knees to the same level as your hips. Doing this for only 1 minute will make you want to stop.
There are tons (as in tons) of variations you can do with pushups, but I'm not going to list them all...
So now how many reps do you do? That depends on your max. Lets say you can only do 0-10. Then I recommend going to fail, then do girl pushups, core exercise, then some arms work, and to finish: cardio.
Now, let's say you can do 10-30. You don't really want to go to fail, then just stop. Maybe do sets of 5 or 10. Then do a total of double your max. So if you can do 10, do something like 4 sets of 5 reps. How about if you can do 50-75? You probably really want to get to 100 if you're at this point. That's where I am. I can't really give good advice, because I haven't reached 100 before. But I'd recommend sets of like 50-70% of your max, and do a total of about 125-150. There are hard core workouts that are like 250 pushups everyday for 10 days, then rest 3 days and test yourself to really boost your pushup number, but doing this too often will overtrain your pushing muscles, making you lose muscle. I wouldn't recommend this more than once every 3-6 months. I'm going to try it out next month to see if it actually works. So I'll let you know how it goes!
So sum this part up, I'd say sets are better than maxing out. This is not always true with working out. It all depends on the exercise and your goal.
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