The Benefits of Pushups

Many people underestimate the true benefits of simply doing pushups. This simple yet effective exercise offers the benefits to weight lifting, cardiovascular, and stretching all in one exercise. Not only does it help develop muscles that other people see, it helps work your stabilizer muscles enabling you to have strength in everyday life. Making pushups the most widely recognized all around chest workout.

Pushups work many parts of the body, including chest, triceps, biceps, abdominal, and deltoids. Best of all, it does not require any extra weights or machines, only a floor. More importantly there are many different styles of pushups to do that work different parts of different muscles, still without machinery. Some of these include normal, diamond, fingertip, knuckles, clap, wide, incline, decline and many more.

To make the exercise more difficult and thus get a better workout there are a variety of things you can do. The incline and decline style as mentioned before are a great way. You would need something along the lines of a chair to perform this exercise. Simply get into pushup form but have your hands on the flat of the chair for incline, same thing with decline only put your feet where your hands would go. You could also add weight to your torso with a backpack of books or something similar.

Don't forget to sleep and eat! Doing pushups will stress your muscles, making them weaker. Sleep, rest and nutrition will allow your muscles to recover and heal after you stress them. Don't just eat taco bell and McDonalds, make sure to eat quality food and water, otherwise you are not doing your body any favors. When your body recovers, it builds the muscles you stressed back stronger so that they will be better able to handle the same level of exertion. So, sleep and eat.

However, bodyweight drills such as pushups are also great for active recovery workouts to help recovery from intense weight training workouts and for use as "finishers" at the end of your weight training workouts. Regardless, just like any other form of exercise, body weight drills have limitations. One of the main limitations is that you are stuck with your own body weight, so unless you pack on pounds and add extra outside weight, it is hard to increase strength and are mainly stuck to endurance. Endurance is one of the reasons the military uses pushups to much. It's not to get buff, but to be able to continually carry that fifty pounds of gear for miles.