Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome back to Pilates Students' Manual, helping you get the most out of your Pilates classes. I'm Olivia. Remember, you get the latest updates about everything I'm working on by joining the community at BuyMeACoffee.com/OliviaPodcasts and on Instagram at@PilatesStudentsManual.

The Book is now available for purchase as both an EPUB and PDF at shop.OliviaBioni.com. You can also buy it as a Kindle version on Amazon or convert that EPUB and PDF from me by visiting amazon.com/sendtoKindle. In honor of March Matness, which is just wrapping up, I thought I'd shine a spotlight on the last exercise of the Pilates mat repertoire today, and that is the pushup. Joseph Pilates did not invent the pushup, but I love how he's incorporated it at the very end of his mat exercise series. Imagine this, you're almost done with your Mat Pilates class. You've done the hundred, you've rolled up, you've rolled over, you've side bended and twisted and circled and kicked, and dived, and swam, and teasered, and bridged and planked, front plank and back plank. You've got one exercise to go and it is the pushup. It is like an exclamation point on the entire class. One last push before you collapse from exhaustion. In today's episode, we'll see what Joe has to say about the pushup, what muscles are working when we do a pushup, and how we could build up our strength in order to achieve that exercise. Something absolutely excellent about any of the original mat Pilates exercises is that Joseph Pilates wrote a book called Return to Life through Contrology, which is what he called Pilates, where he describes exactly what to do in all of his exercises. Here's what he wrote for the pushup. He says, take position illustrated. There's pictures that go with it and actually if you get Return to Life, which I highly recommend that you do there him. He's the model for all of the exercises, which is kind of cool. And he was like 60 when he did it, which is even cooler. The first thing he says is to take position illustrated, which is a standing forward fold. His hands are holding onto his ankles. He says, take your arms, shoulder wide, palms extended. Try to touch the mat or floor. Then keep your feet pressed firmly on the matter floor. Proceed to walk forward on palms of hands. Keep head downward and continue walking forward until you assume the position illustrated in this pose, which is a plank. Keep body rigid and in a straight line from head to heels. Raise the weight of the body on toes and palms with arms, shoulder wide and hands pointed straight forward. Keep head and straight. Line with body. Keep body rigid. Back locked, bend arms shoulder wide at elbows with upper arms pressed firmly to body. Inhale slowly lower body until chin touches mat or floor stretch, neck straight outward as far as possible. Hips locked, abdomen drawn in, chest raised above the mat or floor. Exhale, slowly raise body slowly by pressing hands firmly against the mat or floor. And he says to do that three times, which honestly, if you're doing a good pushup, three pushups will do it. A couple points here in his version of the pushup, as we know, there's lots of ways to do every exercise. So let's talk about what Joe's doing in his version of the exercise. One thing is that. He's emphasizing elbows tight to the sides in his pushup, which is just like a Chaturanga or a yoga pushup. That's the same thing with reaching the neck forward like your chin's reaching forward. You look forward as you lower down, versus looking at the floor. That's also very much like a yoga pushup. Joe's pushup is also dynamic. It's not just in a plank, down and up, but it's starting standing in a forward fold, walking out to your pushup, and then walking yourself back to your ankles. So there is this getting into a plank and getting out of a plank via a pike, kind of like that downward facing dog shape, which is also different from how you might think of a standard pushup. You'll also see that this is a full body exercise. This isn't just an arm exercise or a back exercise. In a pushup, we're holding a plank, which means the muscles at the front of our body and the muscles on the back of our body are holding us up against tension. So let's talk about what muscles are working in this exercise. I feel like if I say everything, it's a little bit too general, but it's also not entirely wrong. So like I said, whenever we're holding a position under tension, so like in a plank, think about gravity trying to bring us down to the floor, and the fact that we're holding up our body weight against gravity means we're in that tension, which means that a lot of muscles are working to hold us in that space. Specifically our anterior spinal stabilizers, so those are the muscles on the front of our body. That's your rectus abdominis, your internal and external obliques, your transverses abdominis, sort of all of those core muscles on the front. We've also got our shoulder flexors, which are the muscles that are gonna bend our shoulder, bend us at the shoulder as we lower down. That's our deltoid, our pectoralis major, our biceps. We've got our elbow extensors, which are the muscles that straighten our arm, which is the coming up from our pushup, specifically our triceps, but we also have muscles on the back of our body working to hold us in that plank shape. Right? And those are our erector spinae. Those are the same muscles that pull us up into a swan shape, just holding us up against gravity. So they're just isometrically holding. They're not shortening or lengthening, they are just holding us up against tension. We've got our hip extensors, which are our glutes, specifically glute maximus and hamstrings. But we also have our hip flexors because again, we're holding a neutral pelvic position against tension. So the hip extensors are the muscles on the back of our hip, and then our hip flexors the muscles at the front of our hip. That's your iliopsoas and your rectus femoris. In addition to your knee, extensor, your quadriceps, they are all working to hold your hip and hold your leg in that position. And then also working our upper back muscles, our latissimus, our teres major, our pec major, uh, specifically where it attaches to our sternum. Those are also helping extension at the shoulder. As we lower down into that pushup, we're extending the shoulder as we straighten the arm, we're flexing at the shoulder. As we bend the elbow, we're flexing at the elbow as we straighten the arm, we're extending the elbow. And again, those are just the anatomical terms, which I know seem to make everything much more confusing, but it is really specific. And those are the muscles that are working here. There's another few muscles that we wanna think about. And those are also the muscles that are keeping our shoulder blades anchored on our back. Those are our scapular abductors. Right. So those are the muscles around our shoulder blade that abduct our shoulder blades. So abduction is moving away from the midline because as we bend our elbows, our shoulder blades move on our back. But to keep them anchored in place, we're using our serratus anterior and our pec minor to stabilize our scapula so that it moves in a controlled way. Because our shoulder blades move when we move our upper arm bone. And when you do a pushup, you're moving your upper arm bone. Now, as we're thinking about what a pushup looks like, and especially Joe's version of the pushup, where it's you on the mat, as with a vast majority of these mat Pilates exercises, the pushup is like pretty out there. In terms of overall challenge, we're talking a hundred percent of our own body weight a hundred percent of the time. And what I mean by that is sometimes when we're playing with other pieces of equipment, we can adjust the equipment settings. Like if you had three springs on for an exercise and it was too heavy, you could take it down to two springs. But we can't take off one of our legs. If we don't wanna support a hundred percent of our body weight on our hands, right? We can't just take off a leg and then put it back when we get stronger. So how we're gonna play with the pushup is gonna be with lever length. Sometimes I say lever length, but it's the same thing, the length of the lever and the angle that we're doing this pushup at. So you might be thinking to yourself, okay, if I wanna do a pushup and doing a pushup the way Joe is asking me to is too hard. You might immediately think of putting your knees down and doing a modified pushup. It's gonna make the pushup more achievable because lowering the knees changes the length of the lever, how much weight you're holding up. With the knees down, we only have to hold up our head to our knees instead of our head to our toes. Right? We made the amount of body that we're responsible for. A little bit less, which is a great option to make an exercise more easily done. We can also play with angles, so where our hands are relative to our feet is going to change how much load is in the shoulder and how hard our arm muscles and our back muscles have to work to hold us up under tension. A pushup with elevated hands is going to lessen the load in the shoulders. So if your hands are higher than your feet, the load in the shoulder will be less. So in Joe's version, your hands and your feet are in the same line. To make it a little bit easier, we're gonna lift our hands up. That might be if you're at a studio, if there's also, you know, reformer equipment, putting your hands on the box is gonna elevate you a little bit, doing your pushup with your hands on a counter or your hands on the wall. As we get closer to vertical, there's less load on the shoulders. The lever length stayed the same, right?'cause we're still going from our head to our toes when we're doing that pushup. But by making ourselves more vertical, by lifting our hands relative to our feet, we can make that exercise a lot more doable. I think playing with the angles in your pushup is something really important to think about because in Joe's version of the pushup, you're holding your elbows really tight to your sides, which means that you're prioritizing the work in the triceps, which is that muscle in the back of your upper arm, and because the elbows are tight to the sides, that muscle is doing more work than it would be doing. If you were letting your elbows come off of your torso a little bit, you'd be able to get a little bit more chest work into it. If you think of like a military style pushup with the elbows wide, and again, there's a thousand different versions of the pushup. Any version where your elbows are tight to the sides is gonna be more work for your triceps, which are smaller than your chest muscles, and you would need to build up some significant strength to be able to move your body weight using your triceps. If you find that your wrists bother you when you attempt a pushup or holding a plank or anything where you're bearing body weight on your hands, another exercise that can help you build wrist and forearm strength is one of my favorite exercises of all time. And that's bird dog. In bird dog, you're on hands and knees in a four point knee. Your knees are under your hips. Your hands are under your shoulders. You maintain a neutral spine and pelvis as you extend your right arm in front of you, like you're shaking someone's hand and extend your left leg behind you, with your leg, no higher than your hip. Then you return to your four point knee and alternate sides, lifting the opposite arm and leg each time. Bird dog is one of the neatest and most versatile things that you can do on the mat. You could keep reaching the hand and foot, but sliding them forward so that you stay touching the ground with your hand and foot the whole time. You could reach your arm and leg on the diagonal, sliding, or in mid air. You could add a looped resistance band to the knees or a weight in your hand. The variations for bird dog are endless. And the reason why this is such a great place to start when you're working on your pushup is that in bird dog, you are beginning to put some body weight into that standing hand. As one hand lifts, there's a hand that stays on the mat, and it is single handedly holding you up just like a plank, but with a much shorter lever. Because not only is your knee on the mat, it's also under your hip. So you're really only responsible for holding up your torso right from your head to your hip because your knee is on the ground underneath your hip. Versus a kneeling plank- if your knees are behind your hips, your knees are further away so that you're in a diagonal versus that four point knee where you're kind of looking like a little table. I love bird dog because it is a great entry level to any sort of work that you do on your hands. It lets you build up strength and it lets you scale up the exercise when it feels like-jumping headfirst into a pushup might be a little bit too much. Pushup is a challenging exercise no matter where it falls in the program, but the fact that it's the last thing that you do if you're following the classical mat Pilates order, it's just one of those things that's like, again, like the final push. You do this last thing and then you are set to jet. You're good to go. Class is over. You can lie down. Now I will say that I think that's one thing that yoga does right. You get to lie down at the end of the class because sometimes you really need that. I think the pushup is a great exercise. I think there's lots of ways to approach it. If your first thought is, oh my gosh, there's no way I can do a pushup. Try changing the incline, try changing the lever length. Try something like Bird dog just to get used to being on your hands. Whenever we start doing something new, it's always challenging, but as we learned in a really recent episode on the podcast, I think last episode on the podcast, we talked about the specific adaptation to imposed demand. So the more you try putting weight in your hands, the stronger you get, the better you get at putting weight in your hands, and maybe that pushup won't be quite so far out of reach. Happy March Matness everyone. I hope you had a great month celebrating the Pilates mat work. Huge thank you to all my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you so much for your support and for listening to the podcasts. I'm really looking forward to some coffee chats this month. I hope you have a great couple weeks and we'll talk again soon.