Pushups

[Mrcleen]

So should push ups with my feet in a kitchen chair be easier than normal push ups? They seem easier. I just busted out 10 no sweat and I weigh 250...

[jimmie65]

Actually, they should be harder.

[Evicious]

They should be harder. Some people will perform elevated push ups and forget that the idea is to "push up"; they will instead bend their arms and perform many little bounces in quick succession. Tips to avoid this:

 

1. Do not elevate your feet to such an angle that you must bend your head and neck backwards to avoid smearing your face on the floor when you are in the lowered position.

2. Continue to focus on getting your triceps parallell to the floor. Lower the elevation of your feet if Tip 1 becomes evident.

3. Do not perform elevated push ups quickly: this modification puts a greater amount of strain on your deltoids - that is, your shoulder rotator cuffs. Increasing the angle of your elevation, the speed and number of reps you perform slowly will prevent you from inflicting some very nasty strains on yourself.

[Mrcleen]

Hmmmm... I'll try again tomorrow. I think I was keeping my body straight and going down til my nose touched the floor. Maybe the wife will video for me.

[Raincloak]

In terms of physics, the idea of pushups is to make your body a lever.  Your hands are one end of the lever, and your feet are the other.  Or to put it another way, you change the difficulty by changing your center of gravity.  When the center of gravity is far below your arms, push-ups are easy.  The higher your feet get, the further up your center of gravity is, and the greater the force exerted on your arms, and the harder the pushups.

 

That's why wall pushups (hands way above feet) are easy, pushups with your hands on table/bench (hands somewhat above feet) are less easy, pushups on a flat surface (feet and hands at same level) are hard, and pushups with elevated feet (feet above hands) are very hard.  If you did a handstand with your feet vertical above your head, every push-up you did from that position would lift the full weight of your body, which would be very very difficult (as hard as it could get without putting on weights or moving to a planet with heavier gravity).

 

But the lever principle works best if the lever is straight.  So yeah, check your form.

[Waldo]

That's why wall pushups (hands way above feet) are easy, pushups with your hands on table/bench (hands somewhat above feet) are less easy, pushups on a flat surface (feet and hands at same level) are hard, and pushups with elevated feet (feet above hands) are very hard.  If you did a handstand with your feet vertical above your head, every push-up you did from that position would lift the full weight of your body, which would be very very difficult (as hard as it could get without putting on weights or moving to a planet with heavier gravity).

 

No.  You have covered on up to the hardest of the feet supported variants (though missing a couple harder variants).  You can remove feet support as well. 

 

Dips are a pushup in a different plane, with no feet support.  The basic tricep dip is the easiest dip variant.  Tilt forward to make a chest dip and the exercise a little harder.

 

Unsupported handstand pushups are tougher than wall handstand pushups.  Elevating your hands on a handstand pushup (to increase the ROM, hands to shoulders) makes them significantly more difficult.

 

Bar dips are more of a pushup than a dip.  Unlike a tricep dip, your upper body is nearly perpendicular to the plane of motion, with the hands behind the shoulders for balance.  Full ROM bar dips, bar to chest, are very hard, harder than a handstand pushup.

 

And then there is the planche pushup family; pushups done with the body parallel to the ground while handbalancing.  A fully laid out smooth planche pushup is one of the most difficult movements the body can perform, most people are not genetically gifted enough to ever be able to perform one, just never can build the relative strength necessary.

 

In the feet supported pushup variations though you missed pseudo planche pushups and pseudo maltese pushups.  In a pseudo planche pushup, you do a pushup with your hands closer to your waist, to decrease the leverage of your shoulder joint and increase the load on your hands.  A pseudo maltese pushup is the same thing, except with your arms at a 45 degree angle away from your body.