Building up your upper body and arm muscles need not take that much time in going to the gym and that much effort in using gym equipment. While gym workouts help a great deal, yet you could very well arrive at well-toned upper body and arm muscles with simple push up exercises at home.
By slightly varying your push up techniques, specific muscles in your chest and arms could be given proper focus in getting firmed up. The following are some of the push up variations that could be done on a regular basis in the convenience of your home setting. You may do as many reps as you can and increase along the way as you grow in upper body muscle strength.
- Close grip push up: This is the same as the standard push up with the variation of setting your hands much closer to each other on the floor with your thumbs practically touching one another. This type of push up exercises is done for the specific purpose of developing the triceps.
- In between boxes push up: Set up two strong one foot high wooden boxes that could support your weight about two to three feet apart from each other on the floor. With your shoulder part in between the boxes, do one push up with your chest going down the floor. Then with a blast of arm power, quickly push your chest up so that both of your hands land on top of the boxes. On your second blast push up from on top of the boxes, let your hands land back on the floor.
- Explosive push up: With your chest down close to the floor, make a blasting power push up so that your hands are lifted from the floor. As they land back on the same spot, go down again and explode upwards with the same motion and landing on the same position.
- Â Grasshopper motion push up: In this style of push up, you raise your one leg up as your chest goes down. Then you bring down that raised leg back to the floor as your chest goes up. Repeat the same motion by raising the other leg this time. You would be raising your legs alternately every time you go down and bring it back on the floor every time you go up.
- Crossed legs push up: On your normal push up position on the floor put your one foot over the other so that your legs are crossed. Then do the normal up and down push up with just one foot touching the floor. Change the cross legs position so that the other foot would now be on top of the other.
Push up exercise variations develop particular arms and pectoral muscles but only the close grip push up focuses in strengthening the triceps.
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