Almost everyone remembers hating the pushup section of your high school physical fitness test. Even if you are able to bang out 40 pushups without breaking a sweat, the slow monotonous sound of the physical fitness test telling you to go, “Down. … Up … Down … Up,” ruins all motivation to outperform your peers. Why now, after all your high school trauma, are you reading about how pushups are an essential part of your workout routine; because they are a solid multi-muscle movement that can be performed virtually anywhere.

Why Pushups Are Essential To Any Workout Routine

When choosing what kind of workout routine you want to do a lot of people just think of the big three: Squats, Deadlifts, and Bench. These three are, of course, perfect workouts that hit all the big muscle groups that you want to grow; but people often forget that a burn out set at the end of a workout is pretty valuable. As mentioned in this article, burn out sets are not about seeing how much you can rep out of a particular exercise. It is about increasing the difficulty of your workout by fatiguing your main muscles and forcing your body to use your secondary muscles to a greater degree.

Now of course you can do a burn out set in practically any exercise. So why are we claiming that pushups are essential to your workout? Well, we have three reasons:

Benefits of pushups

Multiple Muscle Groups

• Pushups use a large variety of primary and secondary muscles. As further explained in this article, pushups target your chest, back, shoulders, triceps, and even your core! This heavy-hitting combination makes pushups a very good burnout set because it targets multiple areas on your body. By the time you are done with this burnout, your body will feel a nice, satisfying, even pump.

Easy to Increase Difficulty

• Pushups can be made more difficult by simply adding weight to your back. Most of us do not own a weighted vest to wear around the gym. For us, in order to add more weight to bodyweight workouts, we need to physically attach a plate or dumbbell to ourselves by a belt or chain. For a pushup it is fairly easy to increase the level of difficulty. If you are at the gym, simply place a plate of your choosing on your back and start doing pushups. If you are at home, grab a backpack, and fill it with items until it reaches the weight that you desire. Once you have reached that weight, slip the backpack on, and do the exercise as you normally would.

Easy to Perform

• Pushups can be performed anywhere. Say you are at a crowded gym and every bro is trying to get a couple of sets done on the bench. Trying to perform a burnout set on the bench with people staring at you to get up and leave is not a comfortable position to be in. As much as people say, “don’t let other people’s opinions bother you,” it is super demoralizing when you are struggling to do half the weight you normally whilst people are staring you down. Pushups can be performed anywhere. Whether you are at home or the gym, as long as you have a body length of floor in front of you, you can perform a pushup.

Conclusion

Pushups are a great exercise. They work out multiple muscle groups in your body and can be performed virtually anywhere. The thing that pushups do better than most workouts is that they act as great burnout sets. By doing sets to failure at the end of your workout you are promoting growth throughout your body. Lastly, after training your body to failure, it is important to remember that recovery is king. Check out our article on Protein Powder and the Health benefits it has on your active body!

Health Benefits of Protein Powder

Images provided by:

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash