Make Pain Your Friend…. The Pushup
By Aaron McIntosh, competition Karate fighter.

If you ever considered the pushup to be an innocuous activity well this article should shattered that perception.

Let's start with the basic pushup. Here are a few suggestions to make things a little bit more interesting:

- Instead of starting with extend arms and dropping down, start with your body almost touching the ground and power up, then straight back to start position.

- Move your hands together so that your index fingers and thumbs touch and form a diamond.

- Take your arms out wide and point your hands out.

- You can always add a clap between pushups.

- Do your pushups in stages. Start with arms extended and then go half way down, hold, pushup, hold with arms extended, go all the way down but don't touch and hold then push all the way up. That is one set. If that is too easy you can add more stages to the middle.

- Use only one hand.

- Incline your legs or go into a handstand.

- Place one foot on top of the other.

So you have done all those and are looking to spice it up a bit, well it is time to change the hand position.

These are some other hand positions that I use: palm heal (shotei), knife edge (shuto), ridge hand (haito), closed fist with the thumb side down (tettsui), knuckles (seiken), finger tips, back of the wrist (koken), finger knuckle and back of the knuckle - using one knuckle (uraken).

All of these should be done on a hard surface though for starters you might want to try them on something a bit softer.

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