Guns - Fully Loaded

I love Lost.  One thing about it is that whenever Evangaline Lilly comes on, I am always amazed by her arms.  Look at the definition!  I want that!  And I'm going to try and get that.  

A year ago, Brian got a set of perfect pushups and began religiously doing sets of push ups every other day.  After a month or so of curiosity, I tried to do one.  In private cause even though I love that man, there are still some things a girl should do in private – push ups being one of them.  It’s a good thing I did it in private because I fell flat on my face and couldn’t even do one.  But a few weeks later, I tried again but did the modified push up (i.e. the girly way on my knees).  Brian helped me develop a plan of how many to do per set and we began doing it together.  After a month, I noticed a huge difference in my arms and even he commented on how much difference the push ups were making. 

After a while, I gathered enough confidence to try and regular pushup and was surprised to see that I was able to do 5.  Going from not even 1 pushup to 5 was a HUGE accomplishment for me.   Now I do 3 sets of pushups - regular, wide, and narrow.  Within each set, I do reps of 14, 8, and 6.  However, it took me a while to build up to these reps and I still struggle with it so I think I've reached my max pushup point.  When I first started with the girly pushups, I still did 3 sets but with reps of only 6, 4, and 2.  Doing pushups every other day will definitely build up your strength that will allow you to do more reps.  


Here's my technique for pushups the way that Brian has trained me on.


The most important parts when doing your pushup is to look forward so that you don't strain your neck.  Also, keep your body in a straight line.  If your butt is too low, bring that puppy up.  If your butt is too high, then you'll strain your back.  It works best if someone is there watching your form when you first start off so that you can start training properly without hurting or straining your muscles.  The pictures are of me doing a regular pushup but the advise is the same for knee pushups.

You should keep going down until your chest grazes the ground.  For girls with a bigger chest, this is ANOTHER reason for me to be jealous of you because it means you don't have to go down as low  :P

Start with girly pushups if you're just starting up, do pushups every other day, and be diligent.  I would suggest Googling the number of reps you should do because everyone is different.