Exercise of the Month: Push ups

The Fine Art of one of the Simplest Movements

I was doing a workout of the week series, which admittedly took a great deal of my overall bandwidth to organize, so I put it on hiatus in order to focus on more personal musings on my fitness journey.

Instead of returning to that series, I’ve decided to begin a new series. Rather than workouts of the week, I’ll be focusing on particular exercises each month, hence the name “Exercise of the Month.” I actually wrote about some specific exercises way back in the beginnings of my Substack days (see: “The Burpee: A Royal Exercise Routine”), but now this will be a more consistent feature. In addition to covering the technical physical aspects behind a certain exercise, I’ll also discuss them in an artistic context.

I figured I’d start with push ups, because they’re such a versatile and effective exercise for building strength, endurance, mobility and stability. I highly recommend that all beginners learn the push up with proper form and technique. If you’re not there yet, don’t fret, there’s a lot of modifications to try that will build up your strength and confidence. I personally find this tutorial from Healthline to be a universally good one, because they cover all the bases in terms of the different modifications and the progression to do them in order to achieve that first push up.

Once you've reached an intermediate to advanced level of bodyweight exercises, normal push ups (i.e. strict push ups) become routine. In order to continue to build muscular hypertrophy (i.e. making gains) doing push ups, I recommend three things: