One-handed pushups/planks

[Korosia]

Hi all,

For the last little while I've been working on my press-ups. I'm your typical weak/scrawny nerd, but I've seen some great progess since I've made it a proper habit; yesterday I managed 5 one-handed knee push ups. (woop!)

My arms coped fairly fine with them, but I found my lower back/core wasn't strong enough to keep me from falling over after 5 reps. What's the best way to go about training them?

The two solutions I can think of immediatly are:

1) Grease The Groove on one-handed push-ups. So do, say, two on every hour. This hopefully should build my back muscles to be able to support my body a bit more. The only downside to this is that my schedual is a bit random, so it would be very easy to miss them out.

2) Planks. I had a look at the Beast Skills progression for one-handed push-ups (which I hadn't seen until now) and it recomends doing a plank progression: normal plank -> one-arm raised plank -> one-arm one-leg raised plank. How long should I be able to do it for before moving to the next level? As I side note, I don't really like planks, but I guess I could put up for them if it meant being able to do one-handed press-ups.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions would be welcome!

[Lachy]

Planks are great for your core, I whole heartedly recommend them.

Also, you're working the front of your chest, you need to work the back too to balance it out. The strength from one will help with the other. Try doing some body weight rows, to strengthen your back. You can do them from a table edge if you can't find a bar or something.

[161803398874989]

Yeah, core strength is very important. So do the planks and they probably have the best carryover. You could also try doing incline one-arm pushups.

Good luck with your one-armers! You can do it, because if I can go from 5 pushups to 2 one-arm pushups, you sure as hell can!

[rocksupreme]

We have a couple of tutorials on our site about building core strength for push-ups by developing the "hollow body" in the plank.

http://www.goldmedalbodies.com/push-up-basics-master-part-1/

http://www.goldmedalbodies.com/push-up-basics-master-part-2-hollow-body-plank/

After working that with two hands, you'll probably see good carryover to the one-hand push-up as well.

The major difference is that one-arm work will introduce some torque, so you'll need to build rotational stability as well. The good news is that you'll probably get plenty of that just by practicing the one-arm push-ups.