FORM CORRECTION – The Pushup
Happy Monday Modig. Hope everyone enjoyed a few days off…and if you had the chance to do Thursday’s WOD (the Filthy Fifty), there’s a good chance you needed it! Without question, one of the most important elements to improvement in CrossFit is the ability to perform the exercises correctly. Doing a workout as prescribed is great, but not if your form suffers as a result. Typically you’ll find that much of the movements you utilize in CrossFit serve as the baseline for others…the deadlift is a perfect example, as is the pushup. The following is a recent post by Kelly Starrett and MobilityWOD. Pushups are a common exercise, whether its during a warm-up, a WOD or as one component to a larger exercise…ie. the Burpee. Take a look at the post below and the coresponding video for tips on how to improve the form of your pushup and the other exercises it impacts.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Movement Transfer Exercise: The Push-up & the Slingshot
Hey MWodies,
Today’s mission is to sort out some of the very common problems we see in the pushup. The problem with poor mechanics in this movement, is that they bleed into nearly every other higher demand pressing effort. As always, solving problems of poor mechanics and pain should start with the trunk and mid-line stabilization. The problem here then, is the fact that many athletes are not strong enough to perform a good pushup and keep their trunk in good braced position. Knee based pushups are are hard to perform well and typically lead to poor elbow mechanics, and poor trunk organization. The pushup is a good mid range, easily performed movement that quickly diagnosis trunk stability problems, elbow problems, shoulder load sequencing problems, and problem of torque. When performing pull ups, we regularly use stretch bands to unload the movement. Until now, we really haven’t had a good analog for the pushup. Enter Mark Bell’s Sling Shot. Straight up, Mark is a great friend of mine and while I appreciated the applications of the Sling Shot for the bench, it took me awhile to see the real application of this tool. The genius application of the Shot is training athletes to have good motor patterning in the pushup. This solves so many long term down stream problems in more advanced pressing. So many times I have to rebuild someone’s dip, muscle up, or bench from the basic pushup position. The pushup is the core movement transfer exercise for every other pressing movement.
[youtube id=’NZGBjWRwEPo’ width=’600′ height=’400′ /]
Kstar
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
(Source: MobilityWOD)