The human body was built for pushing and pulling.
If you think about any of the day-to-day tasks you perform you are likely pushing or pulling.
Think about opening and closing a door, you are pushing it or pulling it.
Push and pull splits have become really popular with strength training.
But to give your body a complete workout you need to hit your legs as well.
But those are the 3 easiest ways to break up a training program.
So if you were to split your training up over the week you could do 6 days.
Push one day, pull the next day, and legs the following. repeat this twice and then have a rest day.
And you’ve training your whole body twice a week.
Pretty simple to break it up right.
Push exercises also go by press sometimes as well.
You get exercises like a push-up and that also gets called press-up in parts of the world.
But at the end of the day, it’s the same exercise.
But that’s enough beating around the bush!
Let’s have a look at the 11 best press exercises.
And I have 7 more for you to come.
What a bargain!
Our back muscles are responsible for most of our pulling actions.
And you can almost say the same about the muscles on the front of our body all being push muscles.
Your chest is the major muscle in most pushing exercises, your shoulders, and your triceps are the other major pushing muscles.
And honestly, all these muscles are easy to hit with body weight exercises.
It’s easy enough to do push days as home workouts but pull days can be a bit harder.
People don’t always rate bodyweight workouts but it really easy to get great muscle activation when you do simple calisthenic movements with good form.
The best chest exercises you can be doing are.
The best shoulder exercises you can be doing are.
The best tricep exercises you can be doing are.
Let’s break this all down further, while our body is designed for pushing and pulling. We can do both of these things vertically and horizontally.
A pull-up would be a vertical pull while a row would be a horizontal row.
So let’s have a look at how to split up our pushes into vertical and horizontal.
So pretty much our chest exercises are horizontal pushes while our shoulder exercises are vertical.
Triceps fit into both. So when you decide to do a push day, make sure you get a mix of both vertical and horizontal.
Most of the exercises we’ve looked at have been compound exercises as well.
This is one of the smartest ways to train.
Compound exercises use more than one joint and in turn more muscles groups.
Compound exercises are great for giving the smaller muscles are chance to lift heavy weight.
The best way to program a push workout is by doing a mix of both vertical and horizontal pushes.
And with any workout, it’s a good idea to start off with compound exercises.
So if you have one start off with the barbell before moving into the other free weights like dumbbells or kettlebells.
That being said you can easily get a push workout down with a resistance band.
Resistance bands are my favorite way to train.
I take them with me everywhere, and as a personal trainer, most of my clients are now doing their sessions with bands as well.
So you can see just how great they are download your FREE copy of my EBook Train wherever the f*ck you want!
I give you a full rundown on how to structure a full-body workout with bands and even give you a sample push pull legs program!
Doing a push day at home is easy.
Push-ups, dips, pike pushups can be done anywhere!
And it’s not too difficult to train your entire body either.
But let’s get back to pushing muscles.
Push-ups really are a great strength exercise, it has multiple exercise variations, you can do them at different angles to target more muscle groups as well!
Just by lifting one foot off the floor, it’s going to test your core stability.
One-arm push-ups are another way to get more out of push-ups.
Sure they can be quite intimidating but they also might not be as far out of reach as you think.
Try set up with your feet much wider than shoulder width.
The wider the better and keep your right arm under the center of your chest.
Keep your left arm ready as you lower yourself down.
If you can push back up yet that’s fine, doing slow controlled negative reps is a great way to build up the strength for the full exercise.
Check out this video that shows you all my tips for getting more out of push-ups!
Training push and pull on the same day is fine. Training them both every single day is not.
Your muscles need to rest.
If you’ve done a full-body, or upper body day you should probably have a rest day the next day.
That being said training push and pull back to back in the same workout is a great way to burn calories and build muscle.
I love training set supers of a push muscle followed by a pull movement. The combination of them fatigues you so much faster!