Pushups, pushups, pushups.
Yep lots of that will help.
Don’t forget row, row, row your bands, bells or bodyweight on the TRX.
That is even more important.
But the most important element of all is technique.
With crappy technique, you’ll be limited to how strong you can get and expose yourself to a higher risk of injury.
If you get injured, you can’t train and then strength will go down instead of up.
Part of proper technique is being able to get your body into position to do the exercise correctly.
Many of us need more mobility work in the shoulders and pecs to be able to get into the right position.
Due to sitting at a desk with a hunched posture or even hours in the car driving, shortens the pecs, neck flexors, front of your shoulders, hip flexors and quads and makes it hard to get into the right position.
That’s why we do so much in our warmups. We know what’s going in your body and want to help you reverse that.
You should spend a few minutes every day doing a basic pec stretch. This alone will do wonders for improving your technique and thus giving you some free strength.
While you’re at it, stretch your quads and hip flexors too.
The other side of this is rows.
Rows strengthen the muscles on the other side of the body helping to pull you back into good posture.
I’m sure you’ve heard me go on and on about good posture while training, but it’s so important.
So put as much effort into your rows as possible.
Don’t rush the movement.
Pull your chest the whole way through so it sticks way out.
Pull your shoulder blades back and down trying not to shrug your way through the movement.
If you can’t do it perfectly, use a lighter weight.
With rows, a change of hand position can make the exercise much easier or harder, so there is plenty of room for progressions.
Even with a lighter weight, if you turn your palm so it faces the floor your elbows will flare out to the sides and your upper back has to work harder to pull you through.
If you turn your palms up, your lats will do the work for you and they’re a bigger muscle making the same movement feel much easier.
Let’s go back to pushups.
Pushups are a simple yet complex movement.
While the thought is to just push up from the floor, doing so with a straight body is much harder than it seems.
Most of the time the shoulders, chest and triceps are strong enough to push you up, but your abs and glutes are not strong enough to stabilize you through the movement.
Thus you get a sagging lower back and sometimes feel pain in the area.
The trick is to squeeze your abs and glutes as hard as possible while pushing up or lowering yourself down.
Keeping this amount of tension is very hard for beginners but gets easier with mucho practica.
We’ve all had plenty of practice squeezing our abs while we pull our belly in tight.
Many beginners won’t even know how to squeeze their butt muscles and keep them tight.
It takes plenty of work to get the mind to body connection working properly.
With practice you’ll have the control to make your butt cheeks flex one at a time so they’re doing their own little dance.
This same principle applies with all muscles in the body.
Practice flexing or squeezing them and the mind to body connection will improve and you’ll be able to utilize your muscles much better.
No we aren’t going to practice flexing in any routine I put together, but it does help massively for building the mind-body connection.
Save your flexing for in front of the mirror when you get home.
The other side to strength is recovery and nutrition.
Sleep is very important in the recovery process.
If you don’t get enough, your body and mind won’t recover properly for the next time you work, train or play.
Get to bed by 1030 and aim for 8 hours sleep, more when you can get it.
Nutrition for strength is pretty simple too.
If fat loss is your goal then we approach things slightly different to maintaining body weight or body building.
Firstly, eat a serve of protein with each main meal.
That’s 2-3 times a day if possible.
A serve of protein is one palm for women and two palms for men per meal and comes from meat, fish, eggs or protein powder.
Secondary sources of protein are lentils, nuts and seeds but you’ll also find plenty in silverbeet.
These secondary sources usually have more carbohydrates or fat than protein and as such are not as beneficial for protein intake as above.
Secondly, eat plenty of cruciferous vegetables with your meals. Simply put, eat a ton of leafy greens and season them with Celtic or Himalayan salt.
One fist size serve for women and two for men is your serving size.
Thirdly, eat a little good fat from avocado,
coconut or olive oil, nuts and seeds.
Too little can halt progress and slow your thinking capacity down, and too much can prevent you from dropping fat.
One thumb size portion for women and two for men.
Lastly, eat your starchy carbs only after your heaviest strength training sessions.
This is a little advanced for some people but it works really well once you have a handle on it.
Have your starch only 3-4 times a week after your hardest training sessions.
If you need more starchy carbs in your diet, have a small serve with lunch and/or in the evening as well as after training.
If you train in the evening you should have a slightly larger portion than other nights.
A serve for women is one cupped hand and two cupped hands for men.
And that’s how you get strong in your upper body.
I haven’t spoken about reps or sets or rest as this stuff isn’t as important. Our programs take care of that.
Just remember,
do your reps with perfect form.
When your form fails, stop the exercise or ask us for an easier version.
You don’t have to keep pushing hard every workout to build strength fast.
Often less is more.
As you get stronger, increase the weight you use and start with fewer reps in perfect form.
Build your reps over the weeks, then increase the weight some more.
Simple if you are consistent with all the ingredients.
Now practice your flexing and go train smarter, not always harder.
