Your first pressup is an important fitness milestone. It’s one of the keys to mastering your bodyweight and building upper body strength. It’s one of the most common goals my clients have, and I’ve helped a number of people build their pressup strength. You can learn more about their successes with my testimonials.
I’ve helped a large number of people build up to their first pressup. Thanks to this, I have developed a check list of prerequisites for building pressup strength. This isn’t as simple as “get strong at pushing”, although that is certainly a large part of the equation that we can tackle in various ways. There are other components that often get neglected, which we’ll cover below. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Strong Wrists
The pressup requires you to load the wrists with 50-70% of your bodyweight. This can be uncomfortable, especially if you’re just getting started with strength training. It’s not just about load, either; it’s also about range. When you’re working towards your first pressup, you’ll need to load the wrists in extension – when your hand is pushing up and back towards your elbow. All of this means that you might struggle if your wrist is limited in strength or mobility.
Another element is that the wrists may just not be accustomed to holding that much weight. If you have a non-manual job, then getting to the gym might be the first time in the day that your wrists actually bear any load. You might need to spend extra time preparing the wrists in the warm up.
If this sounds like a lot to tackle, don’t worry. I use one exercise sequence in the warmup to tackle mobility and preparedness, and strength will be addressed in other sections of this post. You can find the warmup drill below.
Wrist Warmup for Your First Pressup
Core Strength
When performing pushups, your core muscles form a bridge between the two points of contact (your feet and hands). That makes the core – particularly the abdominal muscles – an important tool in transferring force as you push yourself up.
Admittedly, the role of core strength is sometimes overemphasised in pushup strength. When someone begins to arch their back in a pressup, this is often blamed on a weakness of the abs. This seems to make sense, because when the same fault occurs in a plank, it’s often caused by fatigue in the abs. However, the limiting factor in a pushup is almost never the abs – it’s your pressing strength. In many pressing exercises, we arch the back to find a mechanical advantage as we get tired. This is more likely to be the cause when arching your back in pushups, too.
This is all a very long-winded way of trying to add nuance to the suggestion that we need core strength for pushups. Despite all of that, a stronger core will still assist in getting that first pressup. At the very least, you’ve eliminated a weak core as an obstacle to contend with.
Core Exercises to Get Your First Pressup
I am a huge fan of using floor exercises to build the pressup. There are only so many negative pushups you can do before burning out, so these allow you to “train around” the problem whist practicing a similar position.
Remember when I mentioned wrist strengthening earlier? Well these exercises will load and strengthen the wrists, too. You can find a breakdown of my top floor exercises here.
Pressing Strength
This is probably a no-brainer, but definitely worth discussing. If you look on social media for exercises to help you get your first pressup, you’ll likely see a lot of videos of people doing negative pressups, elevated pressups, and band-assisted pressups. These are all great, but there is such a thing as flogging a dead horse.
As this article suggests, pressups cause you to load several areas at the same time. This means that pressup variations may leave a little something to be desired when it comes to maxing out your pressing strength. For this reason, and also for novelty and enjoyment, you should supplement your pushup-specific work with some more traditional pressing exercises.
Pressing Exercises for Your First Pushup
The bench press is a good all-round pressing strength builder. Whether performing it with a barbell or dumbells, it provides a stable base and allows your body to rest slightly more than the pushup does. This allows you to focus on strengthening the chest, shoulders, and triceps.
Triceps isolation exercises are also useful. While they may not be the most pressup-adjacent exercises on this list, they allow you to build strength whilst giving the chest and shoulders a break. This could make them a nice, low-fatigue option to supplement your other work (although the triceps themselves will take a hit!)
Summary
As with any list of solutions to a fitness problem, it’s tempting to try everything at once. This is not always the best way to get results! Try taking three things on this list, and work on them for one programme (approx. 10-15 weeks). Then, assess what has helped and what hasn’t. From that assessment, you may choose to keep certain exercises whilst exchanging others for something new. There’s enough here that you could work on your pressups for a year and still keep progressing.
I’ve helped lots of clients get their first pushups, and even add weight to them. I can help you too! Be sure to get in touch with me below. I provide personal training in-person in Liverpool Street, and online.