If you’ve ever watched someone do pushups, maybe you’ve been a nerdy enough CrossFitter or movement person to wonder if their elbows should stay in close to the body, or if it is okay for the elbows to bow out.
The answer is, as always, complex. However, I have found, over the years, that if I coach students to keep their elbows in close, they tend to experience less shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain. That’s good, right? The downside is that this style of pushup tends to be harder than if you let your elbows wing out. In addition, people with bigger wrists don’t tend to get much pain if they let their elbows wing out.
So what’s the answer? I recommend everyone try to keep the elbows close to their torsos when doing pushups. If flaring elbows hurts smaller wristed folks right away, I suspect that the habit may eat away eventually at folks with bigger wrists.
Another piece to add that will return some of the power to your pushup when you keep your elbows close is to externally rotate your hands into the ground while going both up and down in the movement. If you’re familiar with this concept from the squat (where you externally rotate your feet into the ground) just transfer it right over to the pushup and see if it helps. My experience of adding the twist is that you get a substantial boost in power.
Crossfit Hillsdale Blogposts
Push Up Technique
All the Equipment
There are so many fitness toys out there… medicine balls, kettle bells, barbells, rowing machines, jump ropes. Why? Why not simply do push ups, pull ups, and outdoor obstacle courses?
It’s an excellent question. Given our mission to support the everyday activities of life, what are we doing with these pieces of equipment that don’t appear in daily life? Shouldn’t we be deadlifting garden rocks, sled pushing garbage cans, and doing farmer’s carries with toddlers? Maybe.
Turns out the purpose of idealized equipment is so we can have durable equipment that allows us to overload our capacity. We want to be able to move more weight in the gym than we’ll ever have to lift in our daily lives – thus making our bodies resistant to injury.
Plus, barbells and medicine balls store a heck of a lot easier than bags of garden waste.
Standard Stable versus Novelty Movements
One of the methodologies of CrossFit is to select movements that are generally applicable to everyday movement. In other words, we want to get strong and competent in ways that are functional for our lives. Most people have to take out the garbage once a week, so we want to be able to lift heavy things. Most folks have to carry groceries, so we want to be able to carry heavy things.
A result of this is there is a standard stable of CrossFit movements. After about 6 months, you’ve probably seen them all.
Another methodology of CrossFit is to challenge students with new movements and games. Thus, we have novelty movements. The standard movements make you strong in a broad way. The novelty movements challenge us to see if that general physicality is paying off. It helps us answer the question: does this stuff work?
Don’t Forget the Ankles
When you’re trying to throw a ball (or any object) fast, it’s important to use the explosive power of all your major joints. The trouble is you have to open those joints in the right order. In short, it’s not enough to generate power, you need coordination.
So it is with the Olympic lifts. In fact, the Olympic lifts are sort of like throwing a ball… except you’re throwing it straight up and then getting underneath it, so maybe it’s a big stretch to compare the two, but it is not a big stretch to say you need power and coordination.
One joint that is easy to forget, especially during warm-up drills, is the ankles. The bar is light and it’s just a warm up, so who cares, right? Wrong. The purpose of the warm-up drills is to burn in the correct motor pattern, not to casually and consistently do things incorrectly.
The fix is easy. Make sure you’re opening your hips, your knees, AND your ankles during your lifts – even during your warm-ups.
Yeah, but less Seriously
We are, for better or worse, stuck inside these mortal bodies. Given that, it makes sense to put some effort into maintaining a decent state of physicality so that you can have some fun during your brief sojourn on planet earth.
So yeah, physical fitness is serious business. It is, in the end, the only business we have. If your physical fitness reaches zero… then you’re no more. Given all that, we use CrossFit as a methodology to do out best while also realizing that if you take anything too seriously, especially things that are serious, you ruin it… and if you treat everything as a joke, you also ruin everything.
CrossFit is hard. Put some comedy in your seriousness and some seriousness in your comedy. You’ll last longer, or at least die smiling.