I have a military history class in school (11th grade) and the teacher wants to do some different simulations of the agoge (spartan training) and we were talking about how many push ups I could do… I’m the morbidly obese one lol… and I could do 19… I could do 25 before but haven’t done any push ups in a month but I also didn’t warm up or anything so maybe i could do more…
anyway to the point! He is a former marine and he did 20 and said he could do 20 more… guess he wanted to beat me lol but the problem is he doesn’t fully extend his elbows and then drop below or to a 90 degree angle. He does what I consider half a push up. He says a traditional military push up just needs to break the body plane.
What do you think? fully extended elbows then go below 90 degree angle or a “military pushup”
There are alot of different ways to do a pushup. I agree alot of ppl do pushups kind of funny, military pushups aren’t even necessarily regulation, their pull ups are pretty lame too.
I dunno, tehre are alot of ways to do a push up man.
Personally i think either a hands at the sides of your chest, up and down is a passable pushup as long as your back is straight and their is full extension.
But also you can spread your hands out wide and place them higher and that is also a pushup.
This is the Army standard definition. You must go to 90 degrees or below. I used to go all the way down and all the way up just to be sure. That first PT test was a shock when the grader said “stop, go to your knees.” (Which meant I failed to do any correct pushups and he had to instruct me how to do them.) Every once in a while you might get a grader who counts the head bobs, but I never used to. The standard is the standard.
In order for a pushup to count by Army standards, your body must be in a generally straight line from head to toe throughout the whole movement. Your hands can be placed as wide or as narrow as you would like, but in order for the pushup to count you must lower your body until your upper back is at or below the level of you upper arms. In other words as long as you can draw a level line from 1 elbow to the other the elboy is legal.
elbows IN rubbing against lats
sternum, nose (or chin), and thighs hit the ground on every rep slight pause at bottom come back up all the way till elbows extend FULLY.
i hate that half ass-y pushups shit.
when you correct people you’ll be surprised how many drop down from like 40 pushups to 10.
A Press up is from full extension to chest touching the floor, if they don’t go all the way down or up, don’t count it. We had a fitness test where I got 62 full reps in a minute, I was beat by guys going half way down and a few inches back up, and they were counted, I had the bigger chest though.
[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
ahzaz wrote:
Full extended to 90.
This is the Army standard definition. You must go to 90 degrees or below. I used to go all the way down and all the way up just to be sure. That first PT test was a shock when the grader said “stop, go to your knees.” (Which meant I failed to do any correct pushups and he had to instruct me how to do them.) Every once in a while you might get a grader who counts the head bobs, but I never used to. The standard is the standard.
Maybe the Marine Corps has a different standard.
DB[/quote]
Amazing how many soldiers are supposed to know how to do a push-up and yet…I’ve definitely still no-go’ed people that have been in the Army long enough that they should know better!
elbows IN rubbing against lats
sternum, nose (or chin), and thighs hit the ground on every rep slight pause at bottom come back up all the way till elbows extend FULLY.
[/quote]
Absolutely correct.
This is how my dad taught me as a boy, and I’ve never done them any other way. Nothing more satisfying than a good set of pushups (well, maybe a good set of squats).
what counts as a “correct” push up is just an arbitrary decision. there’s nothing that makes one way of doing push ups inherently more “correct” then another.
what is objective is the fact that varying ways of doing push ups correspond to varying degrees of difficulty. Obviously, the more range of motion the more difficult the push up, etc… which way and which level of difficulty you want depends on the context…
instead of crying about how he didn’t do them right, you need only employ the “screw unto others” technique. i.e., when your teacher does more push ups then you by doing an easier variant, do then next time use the same easier variant and beat the teacher…
ps. you could only do 19? do you weight train? whether you practice push up or not, anyone with significant upper body strength should be able to do a lot of push ups. (i think even dave tait said this in an article or two about bench strength)
When I would go for a PT test, the Sgt. counting the push-ups would ball up his fist, and put it under my chest. When the chest hits the fist, count one push up.
I remember actually failing the push-up portion of my 3rd or 4th PT test because of the confusion about what counts exactly as a push-up. I had to do at least 42 in two minutes, I counted at least 50, the Sgt. only counted 35 of them. He didn’t use the fist method, he just eyeballed it. I think he purposely miscounted, jsut to seem like he was being “tough” or whatever.
There is no “standard” way to perform a push up however, this is how we were instructed to do push-ups in USMC boot camp:
Back flat and body in a straight line
Feet together on your toes
Palms down, slightly wider than shoulder width, fingers pointed straight ahead
Head up and chin out (don’t look at the deck)
If your chest touches the ground when your elbows come to 90 deg it is because it is so massive.
For anyone who still doesn’t believe that there are pushup standards, I give you the following verbatim excerpt from the U.S. Army Physical Fitness Test instructions (I assume it’s all in caps because the soldier reading them always seems to be yelling):
“THE PUSH-UP EVENT MEASURES THE ENDURANCE OF THE CHEST, SHOULDER, AND TRICEPS MUSCLES. ON THE COMMAND ‘GET SET,’ ASSUME THE FRONT-LEANING REST POSITION BY PLACING YOUR HANDS WHERE THEY ARE COMFORTABLE FOR YOU. YOUR FEET MAY BE TOGETHER OR UP TO 12 INCHES APART. WHEN VIEWED FROM THE SIDE, YOUR BODY SHOULD FORM A GENERALLY STRAIGHT LINE FROM YOUR SHOULDERS TO YOUR ANKLES. ON THE COMMAND ‘GO,’ BEGIN THE PUSH-UP BY BENDING YOUR ELBOWS AND LOWERING YOUR ENTIRE BODY AS A SINGLE UNIT UNTIL YOUR UPPER ARMS ARE AT LEAST PARALLEL TO THE GROUND. THEN, RETURN TO THE STARTING POSITION BY RAISING YOUR ENTIRE BODY UNTIL YOUR ARMS ARE FULLY EXTENDED. YOUR BODY MUST REMAIN RIGID IN A GENERALLY STRAIGHT LINE AND MOVE AS A UNIT WHILE PERFORMING EACH REPETITION. AT THE END OF EACH REPETITION, THE SCORER WILL STATE THE NUMBER OF REPETITIONS YOU HAVE COMPLETED CORRECTLY. IF YOU FAIL TO KEEP YOUR BODY GENERALLY STRAIGHT, TO LOWER YOUR WHOLE BODY UNTIL YOUR UPPER ARMS ARE AT LEAST PARALLEL TO THE GROUND, OR TO EXTEND YOUR ARMS COMPLETELY, THAT REPETITION WILL NOT COUNT, AND THE SCORER WILL REPEAT THE NUMBER OF THE LAST CORRECTLY PERFORMED REPETITION. IF YOU FAIL TO PERFORM THE FIRST TEN PUSH-UPS CORRECTLY, THE SCORER WILL TELL YOU TO GO TO YOUR KNEES AND WILL EXPLAIN TO YOU WHAT YOUR MISTAKES ARE. YOU WILL THEN BE SENT TO THE END OF THE LINE TO BE RETESTED. AFTER THE FIRST 10 PUSH-UPS HAVE BEEN PERFORMED AND COUNTED, HOWEVER, NO RESTARTS ARE ALLOWED. THE TEST WILL CONTINUE, AND ANY INCORRECTLY PERFORMED PUSH-UPS WILL NOT BE COUNTED. AN ALTERED, FRONT-LEANING REST POSITION IS THE ONLY AUTHORIZED REST POSITION. THAT IS, YOU MAY SAG IN THE MIDDLE OR FLEX YOUR BACK. WHEN FLEXING YOUR BACK, YOU MAY BEND YOUR KNEES, BUT NOT TO SUCH AN EXTENT THAT YOU ARE SUPPORTING MOST OF YOUR BODY WEIGHT WITH YOUR LEGS. IF THIS OCCURS, YOUR PERFORMANCE WILL BE TERMINATED. YOU MUST RETURN TO, AND PAUSE IN, THE CORRECT STARTING POSITION BEFORE CONTINUING. IF YOU REST ON THE GROUND OR RAISE EITHER HAND OR FOOT FROM THE GROUND, YOUR PERFORMANCE WILL BE TERMINATED. YOU MAY REPOSITION YOUR HANDS AND/OR FEET DURING THE EVENT AS LONG AS THEY REMAIN IN CONTACT WITH THE GROUND AT ALL TIMES. CORRECT PERFORMANCE IS IMPORTANT. YOU WILL HAVE TWO MINUTES IN WHICH TO DO AS MANY PUSH-UPS AS YOU CAN. WATCH THIS DEMONSTRATION.”
Whether or not the grader counts a pushup may be completely separate from the standard. Some are hard-asses and some are pussycats. My own belief was why take the chance? Go below parallel and leave no doubt. I always maxed pushups with time to spare, once I got the hang of it.
We do not have a standard push-up in the Marine Corps because we use Pull-ups for our physical fitness test. Although we do perform push-ups ALL the time. We basically follow the same guide lines the army uses. But in the end whoever leads PT or w/e Drill Instructor or Plt Sgt is in charge is going to choose what we do and how we do. Anyone here deal with the dreaded spiderman pushup w/ their hands on their canteens? hahaha
