I’ve always been good at doing push ups.
Getting back into exercising in 2020, I was a bit nervous that I’d be rusty. And I was…But when it came to doing push ups, it was like I never skipped a beat. A push up just feels good. I love how it warms my triceps, shoulders, chest and heart. Lately, I’ve been trying to take a more mindful approach to working out, so that I am not just doing rote exercises and falling into a banal training routine.
To get into a more meditative state of mind and body, I have been focusing on my breathing when doing cardio and strength training. Breathwork helps me perform an exercise better (by feeding my muscles the proper doses of oxygen), and allows me to go into a trancelike state where I feel powerful and blissful. There are right and wrong ways to breathe while working out. When doing push ups the key is to inhale through your nose as you lower to the floor, and exhale nasally when you’re pushing yourself back up. Sounds simple, yeah? But you’d be surprised how many people (myself formerly included!) either don’t do the proper breathing cycle or hold their breath when performing a strenuous exercise.
Often we’re told to breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth (i.e. oronasal breathing), but nasal breathing has been determined in studies (see: Dallam, 2020) to have a greater effect on athletic performance. I can vouch for this. I’ve tried both types of breathing while performing cardio and strength exercises. Not only does nasal breathing seem to fill me up with more oxygen, but it helps clear my mind, which means that I am able to focus on rising above the fact that what I am doing is often very taxing on my body. And the push up is indeed a very arduous exercise!
A push up involves both concentric and eccentric contractions. Eccentric contractions happen when you are lowering your chest to the floor. At that point, the muscles are contracting and actually lengthening. During the eccentric phase, you’re working with gravity. Concentric contractions occur when rising back up into the starting plank position. In this case, the muscle actually shortens when it contracts. You’re working against gravity to get back up.
There’s actually a variation of the push up called an eccentric push up, where you slowly lower yourself to the floor with a count of three to five seconds on the way down. This slow and controlled movement helps develop the strength and conditioning needed to really master working against gravity. Therefore, it makes doing any type of push up more impactful. Controlling both the eccentric contraction and breathwork is a really great way to build mental and physical fortitude.
When doing push ups, I am really enabling myself to focus on two main things: my breathing and the awareness of my body pushing and pulling with and against gravity. Doing this, I can actually feel each and every fiber of my muscles working, and it is an amazing sensation. Animalistic and spiritual thoughts and impulses rush through me as I perform my push ups. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been taken over by a force of nature that I can’t fathom, but I know that there’s an outside element pushing my mind and my body beyond what I’d perceive its limits to be. I just go with the flow, keeping my focus on inhaling and exhaling and the multisensory experience that my workouts entail.
Before I got into visual art, and long before I got into fitness, I was an aspiring musician. I was even fairly close to making it into the music industry with a pop/rock/folk band I played bass in. We had some good hype and were about to do a showcase, but then everything that could have gone wrong did. Our incredible singer got vocal cord nodules and had to take a hiatus, effectively ending the band. Nevertheless, studying music as well as visual art has given me lifelong skills and a frame of mind for thinking outside of the box. You have to be flexible and spontaneous in order to thrive in a creative practice. A musician learns how to keep tempo, support their bandmates, follow the chord charts/notation and, perhaps most importantly, be able to improvise. Miles Davis once remarked that, “It's not the note you play that's the wrong note, it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” Similarly, a visual artist knows how to turn mistakes or missteps into masterpieces, or to quote Bob Ross, “happy little accidents” become opportunities to shift the course. And often a change in gear can be more invigorating than what you had initially planned for.
Nowadays, I get to incorporate the skills I’ve built as a musician and artist into my fitness training. You know the saying “you’ve got to learn the rules before you break them”? Well that’s been my experience with all three disciplines. I have studied and trained in music, art and fitness on a formal level, developing proper form and technique before deviating on my own path. I treat exercise like an art, and I improvise like a musician when performing fundamental exercises like burpees, squats and push ups.
Push ups are really great for riffing because of their concentric and eccentric nature. There are ample ways of adding an extra movement or form of resistance while pressing down and pushing back up. I like to add push ups to a lot of my cardio and weight training movements to make them more dynamic. There’s a real choreographic element to the push up.
I also like to do push ups on different surfaces and in a variety of settings. For example, doing push ups while going up and down a set of stairs, balancing on tree stumps in the woods or working with and against the grains of sand on the beach. Each surface evokes a different sensation, which lends to the mindfulness aspect of fitness because I am attuned to a wealth of sensory experiences. For example, feeling the texture of the wood and the rings of the tree stump pressing into my palm lines inspires an embodied experience of being one with nature. This gives me a greater appreciation of living in the moment and connecting with my immediate surroundings. I feel sturdy and strong, and it’s actually as if I am tree-like. It brings to mind that one day my body will be reincorporated into the Earth and facilitate the nurturing of trees, as is the cycle of life. And of course the sounds and sights of nature are far more desirable and energizing than the stodgy gym aesthetics and the banal music pumping through their stereo system.
I mentioned having animalistic urges during my workout sessions, and there are certain types of push ups that make me feel like a beast more than others. The donkey kick push up is one of those varieties. The dynamic concentric motion of kicking my legs into the air has actually inspired me to do my best interpretive braying sound (be sure to turn on your speakers when watching the video clip below).
Sometimes I embody an animal, and other times I have to be flexible with my exercises, in order to coexist with my animal friends. I’ve realized that it is nearly impossible to train at home without your rascally puppy dog getting involved somehow. The decline pike push up actually makes for a nice drawbridge that my pup can go through. I found this out by happenstance while both Palbert and I were enjoying some fun in the sun.
For me, exercising is a balance of play and challenging myself to go the limits, while exhibiting a mindful awareness of what my body is sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment. This type of transcendent engagement is what compels me to be committed to a daily fitness routine. With a mindful approach to working out, no one exercise is the same no matter how many sets and reps I do. The true meaning of a “full body workout” is doing exercises in a process that conditions the physical, cognitive and emotional aspects of ourselves.
References, Notes, Suggested Reading:
Dallam, George & Kies, Bethany. (2020). The Effect of Nasal Breathing Versus Oral and Oronasal Breathing During Exercise: A Review. Journal of Sports Research. 7. 10.18488/journal.90.2020.71.1.10.