The Ultimate Guide To Desk Push-Ups
Your desk is the perfect place to do push-ups. Its height makes it easier than a floor push-up and has more benefits for your core than a knee push-up. A desk push-up is an excellent warm-up for more challenging exercises and if you do enough repetitions it is quite the challenge itself.
There are hundreds of different push-up variations that can help you build a rock-solid core along with your chest and arms. You can even think of a push-up as a moving plank because that’s exactly what it is. In order to do a proper push-up, you must maintain the same tension and posture as a plank throughout the entire movement. If you had to choose only one upper-body exercise to do for the rest of your life, it would be the push-up.
Unfortunately, people generally do push-ups incorrectly, and I think that’s because people like 90-degree angles. We use them to design everything from tables to rooms to books because we find symmetry attractive—especially T-shapes. I think that fascination is why you see so many people pressing incorrectly.
In the gym, you often see people doing push-ups and flaring their elbows out to a 90-degree angle. It’s nuts because those mechanics aren’t based on anything anatomical or efficient. People just assume that exercises should look neat and orderly.
The thing is, you are not a table. Your anatomy is structurally sound from all sorts of different angles. When new clients have trouble protecting their shoulders during a push-up, I usually walk a little too close to them and ask them to push me back. I’ve yet to see a client who hasn’t immediately adopted perfect pushing form, and I don’t think that’s because of my body odor. It is because good pushing mechanics are natural.
If you don’t have a friend (or enemy) to practice pushing away, you can always lie on the floor face down and attempt a push-up. Or imagine you are trying to push the floor away from you. Without fail, people adopt the perfect press position.
There really isn’t much more to a desk push-up than proper pushing mechanics and maintaining a plan throughout the movement, to illustrate how easy this is to do at work, I made a little video:
Go ahead and give them a try!
