How do I do a pushup?

Okay, melbs, here's my guide to working pushups into your fitness routine. All this stuff is based on personal experience and stuff I've picked up over the years, but I'm not a professional fitness coach or anything like that.

I was going to have a combined fitness post, but this was taking a while so I decided to post the pushup bit here. Situps will follow at a later date.

1. Kneeling Push-Ups

If you haven't done a lot of strength training, you might struggle to do a regular pushup right off the bat, so you might want to start with kneeling pushups. If you find these too easy, jump straight to the regular pushups.

 

2. Planks

As you're working up to doing regular pushups, you can also try to strengthen your "core" muscles by doing planks. The object of these is to hold yourself in the given position for as long as you can. Make sure your body is straight and don't bend or sag at the hips. The sideways type planks (2nd version) are good for doing while you're watching telly. 

Once you can do a minute or two in these plank position, have a go at this one.

And once you can do that for a minute or two, you're probably ready to try ...

 

3. Regular Pushups

All of the rules of kneeling pushups apply, only now, instead of bending at the knees, you have to keep your whole body rigid.

And once that starts to get too easy, you can increase the difficulty by increasing the elevation of your feet.

Eventually you might find yourself doing full hand-stand pushups!

Hope this helps you with your fitness.